ArticleFrontiers in neuroscience2021
The Defensive Activation Theory: REM Sleep as a Mechanism to Prevent Takeover of the Visual Cortex.
Article in Frontiers in neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Sentinel Sleep Theory: Unweaving the biological function of REM sleep.Sleep medicine: X · 2026Article
- Investigating dreams by strategically presenting sounds during REM sleep to reactivate waking experiences.Neuropsychologia · 2025Article
- Sleep Deprivation and Alzheimer's Disease: A Review of the Bidirectional Interactions and Therapeutic Potential of Omega-3.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- The futuristic manifolds of REM sleep.Journal of sleep research · 2025Review
- Evaluation of the Prevalence of Sleep Disorders and Their Association with Stroke: A Hospital-Based Retrospective Study.Journal of clinical medicine · 2025Article
- Theories of consciousness from the perspective of an embedded processes view.Psychological review · 2025Review
- Article
- Quantitative-Qualitative Assessment of Dream Reports in Schizophrenia and Their Correlations with Illness Severity.Brain sciences · 2024Article
- A new perspective on positive symptoms: expression of damage or self-defence mechanism of the brain?Neurological sciences : official journal of the Italian Neurological Society and of the Italian Society of Clinical Neurophysiology · 2024Article
- Creative tempo: Spatiotemporal dynamics of the default mode network in improvisational musicians.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Mental Imagery in Dreams of Congenitally Blind People.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Visuo-spatial imagery in dreams of congenitally and early blind: a systematic review.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2023Review
- Locus coeruleus and the defensive activation theory of rapid eye movement sleep: A mechanistic perspective.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2021Review
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Regions of the brain maintain their territory with continuous activity: if activity slows or stops (e.g., because of blindness), the territory tends to be taken over by its neighbors. A surprise in recent years has been the speed of takeover, which is measurable within an hour. These findings lead us to a new hypothesis on the origin of REM sleep. We hypothesize that the circuitry underlying REM sleep serves to amplify the visual system's activity periodically throughout the night, allowing it to defend its territory against takeover from other senses. We find that measures of plasticity across 25 species of primates correlate positively with the proportion of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. We further find that plasticity and REM sleep increase in lockstep with evolutionary recency to humans. Finally, our hypothesis is consistent with the decrease in REM sleep and parallel decrease in neuroplasticity with aging.
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