A comprehensive review is presented of reported aspects and putative mechanisms of sleep-like motility rhythms throughout the animal kingdom. It is proposed that 'rapid eye movement (REM) sleep' be regarded as a s...A comprehensive review is presented of reported aspects and putative mechanisms of sleep-like motility rhythms throughout the animal kingdom. It is proposed that 'rapid eye movement (REM) sleep' be regarded as a special case of a distinct but much broader category of behavior, 'rapid body movement (RBM) sleep', defined by intrinsically- generated and apparently non-purposive movements. Such a classification completes a 2 2 matrix defined by the axes sleep versus waking and active versus quiet. Although 'paradoxical' arousal of forebrain electrical activity is restricted to warm-blooded vertebrates, we urge that juvenile or even infantile stages of development be investigated in cold-blooded animals, in view of the many reports of REM-like spontaneous motility (RBMs) in a wide range of species during sleep. The neurophysiological bases for motorically active sleep at the brainstem level and for slow-wave sleep in the forebrain appear to be remarkably similar, and to be subserved in both cases by a primitive diffuse mode of neuronal organization. Thus, the spontaneous synchronous burst discharges which are characteristics of the sleeping brain can be readily simu- lated even by highly unstructured neural network models. Neuromotor discharges during active sleep appear to reflect a hierarchy of simple relaxation oscillation mechanisms, spanning a wide range of spike-dependent relaxation times, where- as the periodic alternation of active and quiet sleep states more likely results from the entrainment of intrinsic cellular rhythms and/or from activity-dependent homeostatic changes in network excitability.展开更多
文摘A comprehensive review is presented of reported aspects and putative mechanisms of sleep-like motility rhythms throughout the animal kingdom. It is proposed that 'rapid eye movement (REM) sleep' be regarded as a special case of a distinct but much broader category of behavior, 'rapid body movement (RBM) sleep', defined by intrinsically- generated and apparently non-purposive movements. Such a classification completes a 2 2 matrix defined by the axes sleep versus waking and active versus quiet. Although 'paradoxical' arousal of forebrain electrical activity is restricted to warm-blooded vertebrates, we urge that juvenile or even infantile stages of development be investigated in cold-blooded animals, in view of the many reports of REM-like spontaneous motility (RBMs) in a wide range of species during sleep. The neurophysiological bases for motorically active sleep at the brainstem level and for slow-wave sleep in the forebrain appear to be remarkably similar, and to be subserved in both cases by a primitive diffuse mode of neuronal organization. Thus, the spontaneous synchronous burst discharges which are characteristics of the sleeping brain can be readily simu- lated even by highly unstructured neural network models. Neuromotor discharges during active sleep appear to reflect a hierarchy of simple relaxation oscillation mechanisms, spanning a wide range of spike-dependent relaxation times, where- as the periodic alternation of active and quiet sleep states more likely results from the entrainment of intrinsic cellular rhythms and/or from activity-dependent homeostatic changes in network excitability.