According to a study, it has been seen that human babies have very irregular sleeping behavior. It is found that babies twitched during sleep, which increases when they enter the second major phase of sleep, which is called quiet sleep. The functionality of the brain is very much complex as there are millions of connections in the brain which make us feel the emotion and let us do many things.
For years, researchers in Iowa have studied the twitching movements babies make during REM sleep and how these twitches help babies coordinate their body movements. In this study, scientists reported that babies from the age of three months see a sharp increase in twitches during a second important phase of sleep, called quiet sleep. "That was completely surprising and, as far as we know, unique for humans and human babies," says Mark Blumberg, Professor F. Wendell Miller and chairman of the Institute for Psychology and Neuroscience and one of the authors of the study. "We saw things that we couldn't explain based on our years of observing baby rats and the scientific literature. The researchers recorded 22 sleeping babies, ages one week to seven months, and their twitches. They paid more attention to the twitches during REM sleep. Surprisingly, the researchers noticed that the babies also moved their limbs outside of REM sleep also. "The twitches looked the same," says Greta Sokoloff, a researcher in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences in Iowa and lead author on the study. Quiet sleep gets its name because humans and other animals normally do not move during this state.
Since the researchers recorded the sleeping babies' brain waves, they were able to study the brain activity associated with the twitches, and it was not surprising that during peaceful sleep, the babies produced large brain vibrations called sleep spindles about every 10 seconds or so. Spindles provide a window into the brain's coordination with its motor system. The researchers found that the rate of sleep spindles in breastfeeding subjects increased from three months to seven months and was concentrated along the sensorimotor ligament where the cortex sensory and motor processing. These facts about sleep spindles were especially important when researchers discovered that the sleep spindles and contractions were in sync.
