The Answer To Why We Sleep

Why We Sleep

As we’ve gone through this on-going series of blog posts about sleep, we seemed to have skipped one large dominating question. It’s time to address the elephant in the room. Why do we sleep?

Philosophers have been tackling that problem for centuries. Medical doctors and psychologists have been trying to find the answer for at least a century. If you think you’ll find a definitive answer on the blog for a clock site, you’re going to be deeply disappointed. This is not philosophy 350, psychology 220, or med school. There’s not enough room in one blog post to discuss all three of these schools of thought. Sadly, we will be neglecting the philosophical paradigms of thought connected to sleep. We beg Descartes for his forgiveness.

Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.
~Thomas Dekker

To explore why we sleep, perhaps it’s best to start with what happens when we don’t sleep. Sleep deprivation is used as a means of torture and interrogation. In order to “loosen the lips” of agents, governmental entities would deprive political prisoners and suspected spies of sleep. Although the interrogators in the past may have not known why sleep deprivation worked, they recognized that it did, indeed, work.

A few years ago, scientists from University of California, Berkeley and Harvard Medical School got together and conducted as study to see what happens to the brain when someone is sleep deprived. They used fMRI (functioning Magnetic Resonance Imaging not freaking-awesome Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans to look at brain activity in sleep deprived and non-sleep deprived human lab rats. There’s a lot of technical jargon in the study with a bunch of impossible to pronounce words.

The bottom line is that the researchers found that when the brain’s fight or flight response kicks in the thought process hits one of two places. In one place, we process things logically and recognize that our emotional response might not be the correct response. In sleep deprived people, the emotional response is sent to a more primal part of the brain and that makes us particularly rash and emotional. They concluded that sleep deprived people are not on a “level emotional playing ground” as people who got adequate sleep. This was such a profound study that other researchers are wondering if some psychiatric disorders are actually mislabeled sleep disorders.

Sleep Deprivation: not something you want to experience.

This more primal reaction and more emotional reaction might be why sleep deprivation is a tool used when trying to gain information from suspects.

Sleep provides much more than emotional checks and balances. The healing and restorative functions of sleep are very well documented in medical circles. Sleep is such an important part of our healing process that sometimes when people are very ill doctors will put them in medically induced comas. During our sleep, our immune system fights disease and without proper sleep we are more apt to get sick.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
~Robert Frost “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Harvard was at it again when they published a study in May of 2007 that linked sleep with improved memory recall and problem solving skills. They took human lab rats (which they probably called “test subjects”) and asked them to memorize a sequence of colored eggs. Shortly after that, they asked the lab rats to recall the order of the eggs and they tested the subjects again after the subjects had slept for a night. The people were able to recall the sequence more accurately after sleeping. So, all those all-nighters we pulled in college may have actually hurt us more than they helped us. On some levels it seems logical to conclude that mind processes information while we sleep with some kind of shift from short term memory to long term memory. There’s still debate on if this process is limited to sleep or if it could also be conducted in times of quiet contemplation or mediation.

Homer Sleeping

In addition to physical health and emotional stability, sleep seems to bolster our emotional health. At one time sleep problems were considered symptoms of depression, schizophrenia, and other mental illnesses. There are some researchers who are now debating a chicken and an egg debate. Which came first the sleep problems or the mental illness?

That answer may not come any time soon.

Proper sleep promotes physical health, emotional health, and possibly the prevention of mental illness. With all of these important things going on, perhaps the answer to “why do we sleep?” is quite simple.

Why do we sleep?

Because we fall apart without it.

Tags: alarm clock blog, long term memory, short term memory, Sleep, sleep deprivation, sleep deprived, sleep disorders, sleeping, sleepy, why we sleep