Photo Credits: KOSAMBI
The Goan Network
PANAJI
Science has spoken or has at least raised reasonable doubt that the famed Goan afternoon siesta is probably making us smarter and not lazier.
Second speaker at the tenth edition of D D Kosambi Festival of Ideas Dr Shubha Tole of the department of biological sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai on Tuesday suggested that sleep indeed works 'miracles' by physiologically cleansing our brain.
"We spend a third of our life sleeping. Research on sleep has shown that sleep has the purpose of ‘cleansing’ the brain. When we sleep, the brain neurons shrink and create spaces between each other. These spaces become channels and the neurons then put out the ‘garbage’ from within themselves out into these channels. This garbage is then flushed out with cerebral fluid thereby refreshing the brain," Dr Tole explained.
She raised the slogan 'sleep to remember and sleep to forget' while stating that the training or learning process we undergo while awake is reinforced as we sleep thereby helping us perform newly acquired skill better after a snooze. "The saying that if you are stuck on a tough decision, you should sleep over it actually makes sense," she quipped.
Dr Tole also explained how drugs of abuse change the chemicals which make neurons sensitive to signals and which make neurons fire signals.
While a neuron uses bursts of electric currents within itself, it communicates with other neurons chemically. Chemical communication helps each neuron impart acquired inputs wholly and thereby fine tune the system. This is how the brain retains training.
"When one ingests drugs of abuse, they allow a neuron to buzz others long after they were signaled and by messing with circuits in this manner, drugs affect brain functioning," Dr Tole said.
Referring to the growth of a brain and of an entire mammal from a single egg, she said, "The purpose of an egg is to make more eggs."
The eminent speaker then went on to explain how the interplay of genes lays out the blueprint for an organism and stated, "Broadly, evolution carries on the blueprint in a genome and this blueprint is then executed by development. Evolution has preserved the map despite wide variety of brains. Each brain, no matter how large or small, has a few hundred areas to process specific inputs and signals."
Dr Tole, who works primarily with mice in order to understand how a brain develops and is built, said that it is the malformations in circuits of the brain result in disorders.
