Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/439

Cerebral anemia may be merely a concomitant of sleep, but it has frequently been held to be its immediate cause, the cells having previously been fatigued and suffered a lowering of functional capacity which has made them increasingly susceptible to depressing influences. This is the basis of Howell's theory. He has suggested that the exhaustion of the vaso-motor center is what induces sleep. We know that this center is in tonic activity, sending out impulses which hold the blood-vessels in a state of constriction greater than is natural for them. This tonic activity can only mean constant metabolism in the cells of the center. Furthermore the center is subject to the play of afferent impulses from all parts of the body. It is reflexly spurred to action by every sensory impression through eye or ear. It is called to respond in an appropriate manner to every change of posture or other muscular movement. It does not escape the effects of psychic processes, emotional states. Nothing is more natural than to suppose that the nerve cells of the center become fatigued by this unceasing activity. After the hours that we habitually number in a period of waking it responds less and less readily to the demands made upon it. It begins to lose its grip, so to speak, on the superficial and perhaps the splanchnic vessels. The blood supply to the brain tends to become less and the pressure in its arteries to be reduced. The subjective consequence is drowsiness. If it is resisted by fixing the attention or by exercise, the center rallies temporarily under the spurring, contracting the vessels and turning the tide of blood back into the brain. But the anemia soon returns, and the drowsiness becomes more compelling. When the person lies down, a flood of sensory impulses that have been pouring in from the contracting muscles is suddenly checked. The eyes are closed and the stream of visual impulses ceases. With the withdrawal of this reflex stimulation and the acquiescence of the will the center relaxes still further its hold upon the cutaneous vessels, the blood-flow in the brain becomes more reduced, and unconsciousness comes on. During sleep the vaso-motor center is responsive to stimuli from without as the plethysmographic experiments show. A sufficient stimulus produces waking, and seems to operate by turning back into the brain a sufficient quantity of blood displaced from the contracting vessels of the skin. Such a stimulus must be a strong one in the first hour or two of sleep, but later a much weaker one will answer. Several physiologists have tested the depth of sleep at different hours of the night, judging of it by the height from which a weight must be dropped that the sound of its fall shall arouse the sleeper. All have agreed that the greatest depth of sleep is reached as early as the second hour. According to one writer it becomes steadily more shallow from that time until the end. Others have observed a second, minor deep-