Oswalds Restoration Theory of Sleep :: essays research papers

A restorative theory claims that peacefulness is used to repair the body including the brain. Oswald suggests that s downhearted wave rest is when body repair occurs and paradoxical sleep sleep is when the brain is repaired. This is supported by the fact that there is an increase in the secretion of growth horm unmatcheds during SWS. This could overly explain why brain activity levels are high during REM sleep, and similar to when awake. Stern and Morgane back up Oswolds theory close REM sleep with their activation synthesis theory. They believe, with support from research that shows that when plurality take antidepressants, their REM sleep decreases, that REM sleep is a m for synthesizing nor-adrenaline and dopamine, which are used as antidepressants. This is however, a correlation study which content it doesnt show causality. Many studies of the role of sleep are incomplete or total sleep deprivation studies which support Oswolds yield theory. One of these support ing studies was Dements. He deprived participants of REM sleep and therefore found that they increased their number of attempted REM stages from 12 to 26 over 4-7 nights. During their first uninterrupted night, participants increased their REM sleep by 10% which is known as REM rebound. This suggests the importance of REM and the supposition that the purpose of sleep is to get into REM sleep. The participants reported anxiety, irritability and bother concentrating which shows that REM sleep is needed to avoid these affects and enable brain retrieval which corresponds with Oswolds theory. Even so, Dements study has low ecological validity, it has low population validity because there were only 8 participants and they were a self-selected sample. Participants would probably have shown demand characteristics because the experiment took place in a lab. It besides has low mundane realism because people would not usually sleep in a lab and be interrupted repeatedly. This is also w rong as it caused stress. A total sleep deprivation study is even up more unethical and therefore difficult to gain participants for, but as a case study, Randy Gardner broke the world record. He suffered from paranoia and hallucinations as a result of the total sleep deprivation which again shows the importance of sleep. However it is not feasible to generalise to the whole population from one self-selected participant. Further evidence to support Oswolds theory about SWS, comes from the melodic theme that more physical exercise would lead to more SWS because the body inescapably more repair.