Edom G. answered • 06/07/19
Tutor
New to Wyzant
Med School Grad Specializing Medicine and Test Prep
Hey there!
You are correct. REM sleep is actually called "paradoxical" sleep because EEG's show the brain to be quite active but your muscles are paralyzed. Remember this is the stage where dreaming occurs and so the body paralyzes your muscles as a safety mechanism so that you do not injure yourself (crazy stuff!).
The brain waves are pretty much similar to those you would see if someone is awake. There are some pretty neat EEG images on google you could search for to show you a visual comparison.
Chris C.
One clarification I would like to add is that REM EEG waves don't really look that similar to awake, instead they look more like stage 1 waves, the lightest stage of sleep. Since EEG is a voltage over time graph the waves are measured in Hz or cycles per second. REM sleep per the American Academy of Sleep Medicine guidelines ranges from 2-6 Hz, which means there are 2-6 waves per second. The overall morphology of these waves is described as being sawtooth in contrast awake ranges from 8-13Hz, which means there are 8 to 13 waves per second. Whereas stage 1 ranges from 4-11 Hz or 4-11 waves per second. While Hz are all well good, what does this actually look like? Basically, REM sleep has gaps between the waves, while awake doesn't. See this link for a visual: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/EEG-pattern-of-different-sleep-stages_fig1_242343002. With stage 1 and REM being so similar you might wonder how you recognize REM sleep on an EEG trace. At the CU Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory where I work at, we don't just measure electrical signals from the brain, but also from the eyes and chin muscles. The rapid eye movements are really distinctive and stand out. Additionally, since we are paralyzed the chin electrodes record less electrical activity than the remainder of the night and we actually have really short (<.25 seconds) bursts of muscle movements that get picked up on the chin electrodes.06/14/19