Sleep. An Essay

Sleep.



“We spend one-third of our lives asleep—for an average American, that's over 26 years—yet sleep remains one of the biggest mysteries of neuroscience.” (http://bigthink.com/ideas/23035)

Why do we as humans, desire, such a hefty amount of time to be wasted idly sitting in a semi-comatose state snoring? Is it human nature or simply a desire to escape from the foul realties of our lives? As I know it, sleep can be a welcomed escape into the fantastic esthetes our sub-conscious provides juxtaposed between phantasmagorias of incomprehensible voids. Sleep (or dreams) can awaken strange desires, forgotten feelings, erotic fantasies, and also catatonic despair during nightmares . But why? Why would a creature as complex as the homo-sapiens, in all its cogent complexities require a definite period of “ off” time? If we’ve evolved to the point of creating and interpreting abstract works in art, science, math, philopshy, technology & etc... Why do we all still crave, no, need this primordial sleep? Is it in keeping with the human spirit of conquest of adversary and pushing the boundaries of nature to desire a world where sleep would be superfluous ? While There are insomniacs, speed freaks, and busy-bees who unwittingly have been on the cutting edge of sleep deprivation for some time. Many of these people were famously productive visionaries such as Margaret Thatcher, Leonardo Davinci , Abraham Lincoln, and Marilyn Monroe Among others. Is doing away with sleep a wave of the future or a wave of foolishness???!





What is the reason for sleep?



No one knows exactly why we slumber, ….but there are four main hypotheses. The first is that sleeping allows the body to repair cells damaged by metabolic byproducts called free radicals. The production of these highly reactive substances increases during the day, when metabolism is faster. Indeed, scientists have found that the expression of genes involved in fixing cells gets kicked up a notch during sleep. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that smaller animals, which tend to have higher metabolic rates (and therefore produce more free radicals), tend to sleep more. Another idea is that sleep helps replenish fuel, which is burned while awake. One possible fuel is ATP, the all-purpose energy-carrying molecule, which creates an end product called adenosine when burned. So when ATP is low, adenosine is high, which tells the body that it’s time to sleep. Sleep might also be a time for your brain to do a little housekeeping. As you learn and absorb information throughout the day, you’re constantly generating new synapses, the junctions between neurons through which brain signals travel. But your skull has limited space, so bedtime might be when superfluous synapses are cleaned out. And finally, during your daily slumber, your brain might be replaying the events of the day, reinforcing memory and learning. Thanos Siapas, associate professor of computation and neural systems, is one of several scientists who have done experiments that suggest this explanation for sleep. He and his colleagues looked at the brain activity of rats while the rodents ran through a maze and then again while they slept. The patterns were similar, suggesting the rats were reliving their day while asleep.”( Why do we sleep?)

February 3, 2011 By Marcus Woo





What are the effects of sleep deprivation?



“It will decrease the immunity of the body and weaken the resistance of various diseases. You can find that the people who suffered from sleep deprivation are easy to fall ill. Also, it can lead to memory loss and headaches, this is very serious because it may affect your work, think about the situation that if you always forget the task which your boss have told you, you may get fired. It can affect your life, your work and your study directly. What’s more, sleep deprivation will cause an autonomic disorder which is a visceral dysfunction syndrome, including the function of the circulatory system, digestive system disorder and sexual dysfunction, as a result of this disease, as you know heart disease or stomach illness. What I want to say is that the effects of the sleep deprivation are huge. Hong Kong University researchers recently found that sleep deprivation may lead to ulcers and even cancer. They carried out experiments on two groups of mice, one group of rats live in the drums for 7 days, researchers play the drums continually, so that these rats can only have an hour a day to sleep, the researchers discovered the cancer gene on the stomachwall of this group of rats.

If symptom of sleep deprivation last a long time, it will cause senile dementia, or premature aging even shorten life spans, when these happened, I have to say that your whole life has been destroyed totally. For the children, the sleep deprivation effects will affect their growing and development. In a word, sleep deprivation has great impact on all aspects of our life, so pay attention to this and prevent it early.” (http://sleepdeprivation-effects.com/)





Why do some need sleep more than others?



Columbia University neuropsychologist Yaakov Stern tells Big Think that people's abilities to perform simple tasks drops dramatically after 48 hours without sleep. But some people are affected more than others. What Stern's research hoped to answer was why some brains are better able to cope with sleeplessness than others, with the hopes of potentially minimizing our biological need for sleep.

First, Stern located a neural network, mostly in the occipital and parietal lobes of the brain, that seemed to determine whether a person coped well or poorly without sleep. Then he used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to stimulate these areas that were affected by sleep deprivation. "Our hope was that if we stimulated that area, we could improve people’s performance," he tells Big Think. "And what we found, which was surprising to me was that, first of all, the stimulation to the occipital area did help people respond a little faster compared to some other area that had nothing to do with the network. And the people who benefited most from that stimulation were the people who had showed the most reduction in the network, which is another confirmation that we were finding something interesting."

Stern's studies may suggest future ways to mitigate sleep deprivation, but they don't lead us any closer to understanding the function of sleep. Nor do they explain the nightly hallucinations we call dreams. Dreams occur mostly during REM sleep, a stage of sleep characterized by heightened brain activity. During a normal night of sleep, the brain cycles repeated back and forth between REM sleep and three stages of non-REM sleep: Stage 1, the twilight period between sleeping and waking which occurs only at the beginning of sleep; Stage 2, light sleep which accounts for 60% of night's rest; and Stage 3, deep sleep, during which most sleep disorders occur.

In her Big Think interview, Shelby Harris, the director of the behavioral sleep medicine program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, told us that we normally cycle through these stages five or six times in a night and that REM sleep (and therefore dreaming) becomes more prevalent the longer we sleep. "That’s why people tend to remember their dreams in the morning a little bit better," she explains. But what should we do with the fuzzy dream images that we do manage to hold onto? Are they really the "golden highway to the unconscious," as Freud believed? Can we learn more about ourselves by trying to interpret them?

Harris doesn't think so.” our understanding of dreams has changed dramatically in the past century. Freud and Jung believed that dreams are the way that the subconscious communicates with the conscious mind. If a person experiences anxiety or fear in a dream, analyzing the dream might help him understand why he is anxious in the first place and what he could do to mitigate that anxiety during the day. But modern theories don't place as much stock in the actual content of the dreams. Harris thinks dreams are the brain's method of sorting memories and experiences from the previous day, deciding which ones to retain and which ones to discard. “(http://bigthink.com/ideas/23035)





In closing I don’t believe I have helped unravel this enigma at all. For the most part I JUST cribbed from real smart people and attempted to answer my own lame questions. Not well I add. Not that I haven’t attempted my own sleep deprivation experiments, ( though I never referred to them as that and for the most part I would consider it partying) BTW. In my experience evading sleep; Drugs haven’t seemed to help. Well, at least not for a long period of time, lets say 100 hours...No matter how much amphetamine psychedelic , or cocaine related products ive consumed or, I eventually feel the swirling coat of desperate dark deprivation overtake me AND I seamlessly seep into that gelatinous world of unspeakable shimmering wonders of boundless delight, horror, and infinite jest(.I.E. Sleep)….

So one last quote to solidify my weak paper…. CIAo!



“In spite of our attempts to demystify the phenomenon of dreaming, human beings simply have not yet come close to answering the question “Why do we dream?” According to Jim Pagel, MD, Director of the Sleep Disorders Center of Southern Colorado, "If dreaming has an actual function, it really supports why we spend a third of our lives sleeping."( National sleep foundation online )