The connection between sleep architecture and mental disorders such as depression and bipolar/mania now has more of a neurological foundation. During wake the brain tends to strengthen and grow new synapses which diverges from ideal normalized synaptic homeostasis; during sleep (and REM sleep in particular) the brain tends to prune synapses to restore normalized synaptic homeostasis. The synaptic sleep pruning is selective and related to longer term memory consolidation processes. Given that synapses are unsigned and how hebbian plasticity works it makes sense that it would be difficult for the brain to perform all the long term maintenance such as homeostatic normalization and consolidation while also doing active inference; so instead it’s more efficient or just necessary to break off a few different maintenance/update processes that run during sleep.
As a result the brain has to carefully balance the amount of synaptic pruning during sleep against the amount of synaptic growth during wake. Precise sleep architecture is thus both crucially important for long term brain stability and quite complex to get right; thus it seems like a most obvious failure mode and principle cause of various mental disorders.
The connection between sleep architecture and mental disorders such as depression and bipolar/mania now has more of a neurological foundation. During wake the brain tends to strengthen and grow new synapses which diverges from ideal normalized synaptic homeostasis; during sleep (and REM sleep in particular) the brain tends to prune synapses to restore normalized synaptic homeostasis. The synaptic sleep pruning is selective and related to longer term memory consolidation processes. Given that synapses are unsigned and how hebbian plasticity works it makes sense that it would be difficult for the brain to perform all the long term maintenance such as homeostatic normalization and consolidation while also doing active inference; so instead it’s more efficient or just necessary to break off a few different maintenance/update processes that run during sleep.
As a result the brain has to carefully balance the amount of synaptic pruning during sleep against the amount of synaptic growth during wake. Precise sleep architecture is thus both crucially important for long term brain stability and quite complex to get right; thus it seems like a most obvious failure mode and principle cause of various mental disorders.