ALBUFEIRA

Do bearded dragons dream?

Reptiles share sleep patterns with mammals and birds.

(Max-Planck-Gesellschaft)

 Sleeping bearded dragon

(Pogona vitticeps)

“Brain sleep appeared early in vertebrate evolution. Researchers describe the existence of REM and slow-wave sleep in the Australian dragon, with many common features with mammalian sleep: a phase characterized by low frequency/high amplitude average brain activity and rare and bursty neuronal firing (slow-wave sleep); another characterized by awake-like brain activity and rapid eye movements.”

“Behavioural sleep is ubiquitous among animals, from insects to man. In humans, sleep is also characterized by brain activity: periods of slow-wave activity are each followed by short phases of Rapid-Eye-Movement sleep (REM sleep). These electrical features of brain sleep, whose functions are not well understood, have so far been described only in mammals and birds, but not in reptiles, amphibians or fish. Yet, birds are reptiles--they are the feathered descendants of the now extinct dinosaurs. How then did brain sleep evolve? Gilles Laurent and members of his laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, describe for the first time REM and slow-wave sleep in a reptile, the Australian dragon Pogona vitticeps. This suggests that brain sleep dates back at least to the evolution of the amniotes, that is, to the beginning of the colonization of terrestrial landmass by vertebrate animals.”

[artigo mais desenvolvido na secção Science News/Science Daily/sciencedaily.com]

(texto: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft/April 28, 2016/sciencedaily.com – imagem: MPI f. Brain Research/ S. Junek/sciencedaily.com)

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”

(Shirley Jackson – in disinfo.com)