The dream of babies before birth is a mystery. So far, it has been learned that a baby after 7 months of gestation experiences the REM stage (rapid eye movement) that is when the sleep phase occurs. However, little is known about what happens in the previous months.
A new and relevant study by Neuroscientists of the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, in Germany and published in the CHAOS magazine, has brought us closer to the knowledge of sleeping in fetuses.
The research has been carried out with immature sheep fetuses because their gestation characteristics are very similar to those of the human being. They have been able to verify that after 106 days of gestation (a complete gestation is 150 days) they experience a sleeping state similar to that of sleep in early stages of development, weeks before a REM activity can be checked.
For obvious reasons, it is impossible to measure the brain activity of the fetus inside the uterus. What is known arises from studies conducted from the observation of eye movement, which have been able to verify that the brain of the developed embryo shows cycles every 20 to 40 minutes of REM activity. That is, babies would dream inside the mother's womb. Interesting would also be to know what they dream.
In immature sheep fetuses, shorter sleep cycles were detected that fluctuated every 5 or 10 minutes and changed slowly as the fetus grew.
What is not known for sure, but the study conducted with sheep might suggest that it also occurs in humans, is whether these sleep cycles appear spontaneously or are slow results from other forms of brain activity.
Of course, these investigations are very interesting and allow us to learn more about the mysteries of the development of sleep in humans from the first stages of life.
