The process called synaptic pruning makes your brain shrink while you are asleep. But you don’t need to worry; it’s nothing scary. It’s a natural process, crucial for the memory and learning powers of the brain. Most of this pruning takes place in childhood. This process is your brain’s way of resetting or refreshing itself.
What Are Synapses?
Before indulging in pruning, we need to understand what prunes. Synapses are structures in the nervous system that transmit electrical and chemical signals from one neuron to another. Several synapses develop during this process called synaptogenesis. This brain development cycle is crucial for children for life learning, memory strength, and adaptation.
Synaptic Pruning:
Let me easily put synaptic pruning into words; it’s basically the cleaning of your brain. Think of your brain as an electric outlet, if too many devices are plugged into it, it can burn out. So pruning is unplugging your brain and refreshing it for the coming day.
This amazing natural process allows the brain to get efficient and absorb new complex information. The brain sheds weak synapses to make room for new and quality connections that can support complex mental functions and align the neural circuits accordingly.
Is Synaptic Pruning Beneficial or Bad?
On overall, synaptic pruning seems to be a key element of progress and expansion. Old, useless synapses have been lost throughout pruning. That, in return, allows space for new synapses to form from the encounters in which you have the following day.
So, total synaptic pruning isn’t only excellent, but crucial a critical aspect of your body’s upkeep. That is only when the procedure is not done correctly it might be seen as terrible.
When The Pruning of Synapses Goes Awry?
Although our brains may not always get it right, pruning may have a detrimental impact. Atypical pruning has been implicated as a contributing factor in the development of several severe mental diseases. The 'glitchy' pruning that occurs in late adolescence or early adulthood may contribute to the emergence of mental health issues.
Mental disease and Synaptic Pruning Are Linked
It has been shown that persons with mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, have fewer neural connections within prefrontal brain areas than those with "neuro-typical" brains, as indicated by neuroimaging. Research is still very much in its early phases; thus the link cannot be definitively established.
Schizophrenia is the most studied mental disorder in terms of glitchy pruning. When it comes to pruning, the brains of patients with schizophrenia do have a genetic variation that makes it too severe, leading to over-pruning.
Why Sound Sleep and Comfortable Bedding Are Important for Synaptic Pruning?
Well, during the day the synapses strengthen themselves when a person goes through the experiences. And when we sleep the brain shrinks to remove the weak synapses that didn’t work as much as others did.
Pruning at night is crucial to mental health so that the temporary synapses developed during daytime do not swamp or overwhelm the brain. Experiments conducted on mice say that the stronger and big synapses that do not shrink are the most important ones and have the strongest of all memories.
To keep this process efficient, one does require to sleep healthy and sound sleep. Sleeping is highly dependent on comfortable bedding solutions i.e. the mattress and pillow. Pollution and fast-paced lifestyles have made us restless and more prone to sleep diseases.
The Bottom Line
For your body to work properly and perform its natural processes we require comfortable bedding solutions that conform to our body and help fall us asleep better. A wide range of Master MoltyFoam mattresses and other accessories provide the bedding solutions of International standards to keep you all healthy and nourished.
