What is REM? REM stands for rapid eye movement. Paid eye movement is a normal stage of sleep characterized by the rapid movement of eyes. It's like your eyes having a party while you sleep! It was identified in the 1950's.
Certain neutrons in the brain stem, know as REM sleep-on cells, are particularly active during REM, and are probably responsible for it. If you don't get enough REM sleep you can develop REM sleep disorder, which is where you will act out the movements in your dreams.
Sleep aids the process by which creativity forms associative elements into new combinations that are useful or meet some requirement. This occurs in REM sleep rather than in NREM sleep. Rather than being due to memory processes, this has been attributed to changes during REM sleep in cholinergic and noradrenergic neuromodulation. During REM sleep high levels of acetylcholine in the hippocampus suppress feedback from hippocampus to the neocortex, and lower levels of acetylcholine and norepinephrine in the neocortex encourage the spread of associational activity within neocortical areas without control from the hippocampus. This is in contrast to waking consciousness, where higher levels of norepinephrine and acetylcholine inhibit recurrent connections in the neocortex. REM sleep through this process adds creativity by allowing "neocortical structures to reorganise associative hierarchies, in which information from the hippocampus would be reinterpreted in relation to previous semantic representations or nodes."
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