My Digital Online Diary

We all know that all people need to sleep. But, what happens during sleep, and why we need to sleep at all. Some people would say to get some rest.” But, this doesn’t hold when looking at the issue from a biological point of view. True enough, over the years, scientists have determined that sleeping helps clear our mind, get rid of useless data, and consolidate important moments and experiences, but some of the most difficult questions related to the subject still remain unanswered. Now, researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) take a new approach to answering them, ScienceDaily reports.

Rather than conducting sleep studies, direct observations on sleeping test subjects, or brain scans, they are attempting to create a mathematical model that would be able to provide other investigators with accurate predictions of how changing certain external factors would influence sleep quality. Environmental, medical, or physical changes around an individual will affect his or her sleep, many experts already know.

The computer simulation is being developed by RPI mathematics professor Mark Holmes, who is working together with Lisa Rogers, one of his graduate students. They also plan to include data that would give investigators more indications of how the dynamics of the sleep-wake cycle function, and what the effects of disturbances in this cycle may be. They wanted to create a very interdisciplinary tool to understand the sleep-wake cycle. They based the model on the best and most recent biological findings developed by neurobiologists on the various phases of the cycle and built our mathematical equations from that foundation. This has created a model that is both mathematically and biologically accurate and useful to a variety of scientists.