Paris Brain Institute, Sorbonne Université, Inserm, CNRS, 75013 Paris, France; Monash Centre for Consciousness & Contemplative Studies, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia.
Rev Neurol (Paris). 2023 Oct;179(7):649-657. doi: 10.1016/j.neurol.2023.08.007. Epub 2023 Aug 23.
All our lives, we alternate between wakefulness and sleep with direct consequences on our ability to interact with our environment, the dynamics and contents of our subjective experience, and our brain activity. Consequently, sleep has been extensively characterised in terms of behavioural, phenomenological, and physiological changes, the latter constituting the gold standard of sleep research. The common view is thus that sleep represents a collection of discrete states with distinct neurophysiological signatures. However, recent findings challenge such a monolithic view of sleep. Indeed, there can be sharp discrepancies in time and space in the activity displayed by different brain regions or networks, making it difficult to assign a global vigilance state to such a mosaic of contrasted dynamics. Viewing sleep as a multidimensional continuum rather than a succession of non-overlapping and mutually exclusive states could account for these local aspects of sleep. Moving away from the focus on sleep states, sleep can also be investigated through the brain processes that are present in sleep, if not necessarily specific to sleep. This focus on processes rather than states allows to see sleep for what it does rather than what it is, avoiding some of the limitations of the state perspective and providing a powerful heuristic to understand sleep. Indeed, what is sleep if not a process itself that makes up wake up every morning with a brain cleaner, leaner and less cluttered.
我们的一生都在清醒和睡眠之间交替，这直接影响到我们与环境互动的能力、主观体验的动态和内容以及大脑活动。因此，睡眠在行为、现象学和生理学变化方面得到了广泛的描述，后者构成了睡眠研究的金标准。因此，普遍观点认为睡眠代表了一系列具有不同神经生理特征的离散状态。然而，最近的发现挑战了睡眠的这种单一观点。事实上，不同大脑区域或网络的活动在时间和空间上可能存在明显的差异，使得很难将全局警觉状态分配给这种对比动态的镶嵌体。将睡眠视为多维连续体而不是不重叠和互斥的状态序列，可以解释睡眠的这些局部方面。将注意力从睡眠状态转移到睡眠过程中，如果不是专门针对睡眠的话，也可以通过存在于睡眠中的大脑过程来研究睡眠。这种关注过程而不是状态的方法，可以让我们看到睡眠的实际作用，而不是它的状态，避免了状态观点的一些局限性，并提供了一种理解睡眠的强大启发式方法。事实上，如果不是每天早上醒来时大脑更清洁、更精简、更少混乱的过程，那么睡眠又是什么呢？
