subject: What Is The Value Of Sleep? [print this page] What Is The Value Of Sleep? What Is The Value Of Sleep?
Human beings spend a third of life asleep from birth, yet scientists, after decades of research, have not been able to come up with the specific reason why humans require sleep. It is however, known that after 15-17 hours the body becomes tired and needs approximately 7 9 hours sleep.
Beside the functions of cell re-generation and detoxification, the predominant theory is still, the brain demands sleep and that memory consolidation may be just one its functions.
A noted sleep researcher at Madison's University of Wisconsin, Guilio Tononi, has come up with a different theory. He thinks that the sleeping brain appears to weed out redundant, or unnecessary synapses, or connections. Tononi reveals this allows a person to remember what is important and forget what is not.
"We think what's happening during sleep is that you open the aperture of memory and are able to see the bigger picture," says senior author, Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California. He believes people figure out what they didn't truly understand when awake, "Only when you enter this wonder-world of sleep do these insights occur."
Scientists believe that sleep loss causes a person to be more careless, more emotionally fragile, less able to think and most definitely more vulnerable to infection. Laboratory experiments with animals prove that a total lack of sleep results in death.
While these figures appear to increase with age, the average duration of sleep requirements seems to be 7.58 hours for men and 7.12 hours for women.
The outcome of studies done over two continents and two decades, flies in the face of the widely-held hypothesis that it is best to sleep at least 8 hours each night. The researchers concluded that people who slept for more than 8 hours, have a greater mortality risk than those who sleep only 7 hours.
While the reason for this is still unidentified, not only do humans need sleep, but all mammals and birds sleep. Fish, reptiles and insects all experience some kind of rest.
