When you lay down to bed at night, close your eyes, and loose conciseness, you
fall asleep. Sleep is an everyday event, every human, every animal does it on a routine
basis. There are many questions concerning sleep. This paper will try to answer three of
them. Why do we sleep, at what routine do we sleep, and what happens to us when we
sleep.
There are several theories as to why we sleep. Some believe it’s a “time out” to
recuperate, remove wastes from muscles, repair cells or recover abilities lost during the
day. However wastes are removed without sleep with just a couple of minutes of rest.
People who don’t sleep for 48 hours don’t need 16 hours to “catch up” all they need is
one good nights sleep. Some believe sleep conserves energy, once it provided safety from
predators in a secluded space. However we lose consciousness which would make us
vulnerable to attacks from predators. Or maybe it serves the brain because only
organisms with integrated bundles of central nervous tissue sleep. There are many
theories as to why we sleep but no one really seems to know.
People can go several days without sleep and still perform normally. However any
longer can cause irritability, hallucinations, or delusions. In animals sleep depravation
leads to death, it may also hold true for people as well. In one case a man at age 52
started losing sleep. He fell deeper and deeper into an exhausted stumper or lethargic state, always feeling
tired but unable to sleep. He eventually developed a lung infection and died. An autopsy
showed he had lost almost all of the large neurons in two areas of the thalamus. This
suggests that sleep is caused and controlled by the thalamus.
Most people sleep at night, so does this mean that our sleep cycle is dependent on
night and day? It doesn’t seem so. There are people who sleep during the day and studies
have shown that people run on their own sleep cycles. Volunteers put in isolation(they
didn’t know what time it was) went to sleep on the average 49 minutes later every cycle.
So in about 11 or 12 days one would go to sleep in the morning. Whenever we change
our clocks(daylight savings time) our bodies eventually readjust to the time rather than
how light or dark it is outside. People who live in the extreme north or south have
darkness for six month at a...
... middle of paper ...
...aks. It
will take a shaking motion to wake you and you
wont be happy about it. Sleep walkers and
talkers walk and talk at this point.
This process takes about 90 minutes then reverses(1-2-3-4-3-2-1). After you come
back to one, instead of waking you go into REM(Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and this is
were most dreaming occurs. The amount of time in REM sleep is usually random, but
after REM sleep you start the process over again.
Hopefully some questions about sleep you had before reading this paper are now
answered. There still remains many questions about sleep. Since sleep is so connected
with the mind, which is the biggest mystery in the universe humans know of sleep is
difficult to understand. So it will be a long time before our questions will be answered.
Bibliography
Wade and Travis, Carole and Carol, Psychology, New York City, Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 1990
http://www.shuteye.com
Sleep is one of our basic needs to survive and to function in day to day operations, but not everyone needs the same amount of sleep. Some people can survive on very little sleep, i.e. five hours a night, and some people need a lot of sleep, to the extend that they are sleeping up to 10 to sometimes 15 hours a night (Nature, 2005). According to Wilson (2005) the general rule states that most people need from seven to eight hours of sleep. The deprivation of sleep in our society in continually increasing with the demands in society increasing work loads, the myth that a few hours of sleep is only necessary to function properly and that sleep is sometimes considered as killing time (Nature, 2005). Sometimes sleep deprivation is also caused by other situations like sleep disorders, i.e. sleep apnea, chronic insomnia or medical conditions such as stress (Wilson, 2005).
Another reason for the difficulty of sleep research is the pace of discovery. The field moves too fast for its own good. As a result, no comprehensive beginner’s text is available in the field of circadian rhythms. By the time...
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sleep long enough we will reach an advanced stage of sleep where our body begins
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Sleeping is a complex process that greatly affects an individual’s well-being. There exists within each person a natural body clock which allows one to operate at a 24 hour cycle. In relevance, the body clock iswhat instinctively determines the cycle of sleep and awake time of a person. This relates to sleep because the issues that affect one’s body clock has a connection ...
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Why we need sleep is an unanswered question that even scientist don’t know the exact answer too. But, they do know what will happen to you without s...
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