A simple question that is similar to one a child may ask.. "Go to bed Tommy", "Why mom, why do I have to go to bed?", "because you need your sleep" Do we, do we need to sleep? What do we need to sleep for? I think I know the answer, and I am not just talking out my Rs, I have degrees in neuro anatomy, histology and biochemistry and have spent the last 30 years studying why I think we need to sleep. I will soon be finishing a general hypothesis on the subject and if I am right it will change many things. I am seeing here what the general consensus says and what any other scientists think.
Sleep is necessary for the Human Body to repair and clense organs and it also biochemically balances us. Without sleep for a few days we begin to see things that are not there. 7 to 10 days without sleep will kill a person. But as long as we get at least 1 hour of sleep a day we are fine. AboveAlpha
I am a biochemist and I have never heard that, you do realise that science has yet no answer to that question. I do not agree with point one, however point two and three are true and point four is not. If for example we had 3 hours REM sleep a night as usual and we missed a few nights sleep over the next few nights we would regain the lost REM sleep, if we slept for one hour and had 45 minutes REM sleep, the next night we would have 5 hours 15 minutes REM sleep if we slept long enough. It is usual for man to make up any lost REM sleep, so it appears it is the REM sleep that is needed to sustain life. Resting has little to do with sleep, we must not confuse cause and affect. - - - Updated - - - Closer than you think, so what makes us tired?
Because the brain is an organic 'computer' and need to organize the tons of information it receives each day. For that process it almost need to shut down , except the organisation of memory (REM) (it's like degrafmentation of an hard drive, to order information) No sleep would mean the information of last day is not ordered (chaotic) your mind has to compute too much information the next day, and the next day and so on. In the end your mind is overloaded with information, actually at 'war' with the chaos of information, war make the mind tired, in the end could kill you (which won't happen soon, because you can't stay awake any longer after a few days, you can't win the 'war' of tons of non-ordered information inside your mind, maximum chaos going on, makes you very tired)
That's the kind of explanation I heard quite a few times before, but it's not very convincing. Why is sleep needed to keep the brain organized? What is it that prevents us from doing all of that information processing in the background while we're still awake? If it's all about the most complex brain functions, it comes as a bit of a surprise that even some insects also enter a state resembling sleep. [video=youtube;HiLWCf2MPHQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=12&v=HiLWCf2MPHQ[/video]
For some reason our brain, which processes memory needs it. Perhaps it is the brain's way to run a scan for errors, to reboot the processor, the electro chemical process. Since without sleep the brain starts to hallucinate, this seems to be a logical opinion. Whatever causes the hallucinations obviously perhaps happens when the processes of the brain becomes incoherent, and need to be defragmented to maintain its coherence of processing. This happens in sleep for the brain waves change into other states of brain waves.
Ok I agree with all those that posted that it has to do with memory, thank you, especially if you actually had some reference from which you determined it or you have quals. I am writing a hypotheses because believe it or not, there are many papers with funny reasons behind sleep, a few for memory and a few who dispute it is for memory. To the bee guy, some non-mammalian animals do sleep of sorts and some have a sort of REM sleep. Most non-mammalian animals don't sleep but go into a torpor, a kind of sleep. Some invertebrates have a sort of REM sleep activity in parts of their brains while they are awake. All these facts actually point to sleep being memory rather then a biological refreshing etc as all animals would need that, but only animals with higher functions would need memory consolidation.
I have an anemone fish, aka clownfish. She "sleeps" every night, usually sideways, sometimes vertical, swimming all the time because of the current in the tank. I don't know if that's really "sleep", I can't get into her little brain and she doesn't have eyelids to close. She does it regularly though, in accordance with her circadian rhythm. I call it sleep. If a bee and a fish do it, or at least something resembling sleep, it seems reasonable to conclude this is a function that even primitive brains perform and is required neurologically, and that has evolved.
I knew I would find Nemo. You have him, her, um ,oh well he is the link http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/fish-sleep.html
I've read one theory which says we need to sleep so as to dream. Though I have never heard of any experiments to validate that, which we could do by waking one constantly from REM sleep. Logic would indicate it might be something like that and/or the "defragmenting" thing above, but logic alone is no real good indicator of any actual thing. Even hypothesis should be suggested by observation, not speculation. There ARE animals that do NOT sleep, and the idea that the brain has to shut down is sort of illogical too; because sleep makes an animal particularly vulnerable one would think it to be something evolution would eliminate right off. Sleep, therefore, might very well have another purpose, one not so obvious as these So what is it you think the cause might be? Surely you're not going to leave us unenlightened. Or must we read your book?
Well, it's kind of funny about Nemo. Clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites. When they are born they are all males. When they mature a dominant male becomes female, or left alone they become female (like my fish). So if that movie was true to nature, when Nemo's mother is eaten by a barracuda, his father would would turn into a female, and Nemo would turn into her mate. Reality isn't quite the story Disney portrayed. Anyway, my fish sleeps but she swims and flips around, and finds different places in the tank to sleep. I'm pretty sure she's still sleeping the whole time because she's sideways. She never swims sideways when she's awake. I've seen clownfish sleep in anemones but I don't have one for her, and she doesn't have any secure spot to wedge in. She can't just float because the current would bounce her off the walls, and she doesn't have a nest.
Sorry, we cross posted. Memory consolidation eh? How does this square with those very, very few humans who have totally eidetic memories? I've always wondered how they must think of things, how they keep it all straight, as it were. Are they human computers, and still, what "Operating System" would they use?
Some answers here are very close to my thoughts, in particular those that talk about shutting down the system while back up occurs.
"Human thinking" is a continous process of activating/and/or blocking billions of receptors per cubic millimeter per mikro second. After that "thought" has been created, those receptors have to be cleared for new processes. Some of those receptors however stay in the "blocked" or "activated" position and have to be cleared later by secondary scavengers. "Removing" an activator or blocker from a receptor however will create another impulse, known as "thought". Those can be optical, accoustical or tactile impressions or processed "thinking". If those rceptors cannot be cleared, they will be lost and Alzheimer disease or senile dementia will follow. "Secondary scavenging" however cannot be carried out during wake periods, because hallucinations of all kinds will be created. Those individuals would loose their ability to discriminate reality from imagination and become schizophrenic (because those impulses are real "thoughts" they cannot be separated from reality). All other healthy individuals, humans and animals, have sleeping periods, during which thought induction by scavenging mechanisms create "dreams" and "nightmares", in which we imperatively try to interprete some kind of "meaning", although they don't have any. Those are randomly scavenged receptors "firing" a second time without any consequence but dreaming.
Perhaps sleep is needed to optimise the electrical potential across all the synapses. During the day, the synapse optimum potential difference deteriorates due to constant use giving rise to tiredness. Hence why tiredness is typically brought on more rapidly by carrying out repetitive tasks using the same part of the brain. Pure guess here!
Yep, but it is a good guess. It seems most processors need recovery time, to keep it operating coherently. Coherence seems mandatory for life to evolve and sustain itself. When one is tired, not only is the body tired, but we feel it in consciousness too.
