After seven months growing in his mother’s womb, ahuman fetusspend most of the timesleeping. But it sounds? Studied the brain of immature sheep fetuses, neuroscientists at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany, in collaboration with themathematician Karin Schwab, have shown that these animals do dream before they are born, even weeks before rapid eyeball movement or REM appears. The conclusions could be extrapolated to the human being.
The finding was made thanks to amathematical analysis of brain activityregistered directly fromsheep fetusesfrom106 days of gestation. The results could help to understandwhat’s the point of “sleeping”, in addition to helping to identify the periods of development in which the brain is especially vulnerable and can suffer irreversible damage. In the future, Schwab intends to use the same method to find outhow noise, stress, and other environmental stimuli affectthe development of the fetus, and how it influences susceptibility to certain diseases during adult life.
The research has been published in aspecial issueof the magazineChaos, published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The number is dedicated to the dynamics of non-linear systems (systems whose behavior is not expressible as the sum of the behaviors of its components) applied to the study of neural systems, and shows through different studies how chaos can help to understand the functioning of our brain.
