What if the twitches you see in a sleeping infant are not remnants of dreams but a systematic self-calibration process for the developing motor system? Developmental neuroscientist Mark Blumberg explains how REM sleep twitching may serve as the brain's sonar , pinging muscles one at a time and listening for the sensory feedback that bootstraps the body map. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. Mark Blumberg joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to present his research on the relationship between sleep, twitching, and sensorimotor development in infant rats. During active (REM) sleep, neonatal rats produce highly discrete myoclonic twitches , brief activations of individual joints occurring against a background of low muscle tone. Blumberg argues these are not random byproducts but struc ...