Science has not yet found the exact reason why we sleep, but it is still very important. .
We spend about a third of our lives falling asleep, which remains as important as eating, drinking and breathing.
When we sleep, we consume less body energy than vigilance. Scientists have yet to find the full truth behind the need to sleep, although many studies suggest that the brain is responsible for our need to sleep. So what exactly happens in our heads during sleep?
Albrecht Forster, a neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany, says: "At night, many processes start in the brain, and they are asleep more than at any other time in our lives." When we are awake, new connections are built between neurons, and when we sleep, reconstruction and arrangement begin.
"Sleep is something like washing, cutting and arranging in the brain," Forster told the German website Specktrum. "The connections between neurons in our brains are tested and re-adjusted so that they don't consume too much energy and process information unhindered," he explains. All the rest of the proteins and neural processes will be eliminated. "
Arranging memories
Sleep also plays an important role in the redistribution of our memory and the installation of information in it, sleep reorganizes the content of our memory information and turn it into high-quality knowledge. “Most of the memories are supposed to be at hand during sleep,” Forster says. “How is this? During sleep there is an active exchange between different brain regions: To view them again and again, install them and connect them together. "
During this storage process, our memory is very weak, so new experiments may not interfere with it. "That's why we lose consciousness in our sleep," Forster says, adding that "formatting a hard drive only works if you stop giving new prompts."
An important balance
It is clear that sleep plays a key role in the functioning of the brain, ensuring that the system works best and that the brain is not out of balance. "It seems that awakening is increasingly putting the body in a physical imbalance," Forster says. Without sleep the relationship between our nerve cells is unbalanced, as is the amount of neurotransmitters, which are the neurotransmitters that are released to transmit signals between neurons.
Imbalance affects not only our thinking, but also our mood. We are emotionally disturbed because we lack the exact control that can only be achieved through sleep. The importance of sleep processes is obvious when they don't work properly. If the brain does not get rid of protein deposits, it will accumulate, overlap and kill neurons. Scientists have found such protein accumulations in the brains of people with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Sleep is the best medicine
The body also needs to sleep in order to regenerate everything in it. For example, repair and growth of cells increases at night.
A restful sleep also maintains the balance of blood sugar and our fat metabolism and restricts our appetite. Those who work regularly in night shifts are at higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Sleep also affects the strength of our immune system. When we sleep, immune cells prepare for the next day and share information about extraneous viruses, forming the basis of immune memory. When the body infects the intruder virus itself twice, the second time the immune cells respond faster and more efficiently than the first time.