Rachel Roberts
3/11/20
Sanders, Laura "Brain Waves Common During Sleep Also Show Up In Awake Sheep." Science News. N. p., 2020. Web. 12 Mar. 2020.
In the article “Brain Waves Common During Sleep Also Show Up In Awake Sheep,” the author, Laura Sanders, discusses how sleep spindles have been found within sheep’s brains while awake. Sleep spindles are “zags” of neutral activity. Usually, “these bursts help lock new memories into the brain during sleep.” and “might be doing something similar during periods of wakefulness, the researchers speculate.” A neurobiologist at the University of Cambridge, Jenny Morton, and her colleagues studied six female merino sheep with electrodes that scanned their brains. They collected the electrical patterns for two nights and a day. They found that while the electrodes caught the spindles during the day while the sheep were awake, they looked different from the ones found at night. Morton stated that they had different densities and also the “wake” spindles were “less abundant and more localized, captured at single, unpredictable spots in the sheep’s brains.” She hypothesizes that the results of the experiment show that the “wake” spindles may help the brain handle certain kinds of information that may not be managed during the night.
Sheep and human brains are very similar. While sleeping, humans experience the same “zags” that sheep do. The “wake” spindles haven’t been found in human brains yet but, with the finding in sheep, they may have them too. If humans also have them, they would most likely be doing similar activities as the sheep. Jenny Morton also found that the spindles found within sheep as the slept were “akin to those in people during non-REM sleep.” These findings show how the similarities found between human and sheep brains allow for more learning to be conducted about the inner workings of both as scientists can use results for either to expand their knowledge. This would be especially helpful as changes in sleep spindles in humans have been linked to aging, and diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. With the knowledge gained about the spindles from sheep brains, there might be new ways to learn about these disorders.
When reading the article by Laura Sanders, there were many good aspects of her writing.
She explained the information in the article very well. I was able to understand it even though I have no previous knowledge of the topic. Also, she integrated the story of how the sheep’s brain energies were behaving in her article while also giving the main details of the research. This allowed me to get a full picture of how important this topic was and how it could affect the lives of people with diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. While Sanders did an excellent job explaining the research and the story, the article was very brief. While the article acknowledges the information is very new, there is not much said about it. I would have rathered if she spent more time explaining small details that were not necessarily important. Lastly, while her article was grammatically correct, there were several areas where it was very wordy and made me go back and read the sentence multiple times. For example, Sanders wrote, “The purpose of sleep spindles, which look like jagged bursts of electrical activity on an electroencephalogram, isn’t settled.” When writing articles for a website that is open for anybody of any career or interest to look at, it is much better to stay with more simple syntax and grammar so more people would be able to understand fully.
No comments:
Post a Comment