If I were granted a superpower of choice, my answer, hands-down, would be to function without ever having to sleep. I mentally salute Thomas Edison, who said, “Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days.” I don’t go so far as to say that “sleep is for wimps,” a la Margaret Thatcher, but I do feel that I’d be able to accomplish more, achieve more, if a portion of my day were not consumed in sleep.
Statistics show that 36 percent of a person’s life will be spent asleep—which means that if you live to be 90, then 32 years of your life will be spent sleeping. Obviously, this means that sleep is an extremely important process, one which I really ought to stop scorning as the enemy, and instead view as one of the most integral processes of daily functioning.
So why do we sleep? The crux of why lies in its information-processing and memory-consolidating abilities. Studies show that sleep-deprived individuals who try learning a new task have a very difficult time recalling that task and performing it the next day. In addition, our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is also impaired by a lack of sleep. In fact, a night’s sleep enhances that ability threefold because the synaptic connections are strengthened during sleep, while those that are less important fade away.
Proof for this theory may lie in the processes that occur in our brains while we dream. Until recently, oneirology, the scientific study of dreaming, has been an extremely difficult field because dreams are so elusive—about 95% of our dreams are forgotten within the first ten minutes of waking up. But in 1952, researchers at the University of Chicago found that there is a short period of time during a person’s sleep which correlates to a unique type of electrical activity. When people are woken up during this time frame, almost all of them say that they had just been dreaming. Furthermore, when a person is in this particular stage of sleep, his or her eyes are rapidly moving. This is where the term REM sleep (rapid eye movement), was introduced.
A study was conducted during which mice were prevented from falling into REM sleep—they had to sit atop an inverted plant pot, which was submerged in water, so that the pot became an island of sorts. When they would fall into non-REM sleep, they were able to remain situated on the pot; but as soon as their muscles relaxed and they entered REM, they fell off their pots into the water and woke up. The researchers noted that this lack of REM sleep caused a terrible loss of memory in their activities the next day.
Research has also shown that humans exhibit the same exact behavior when deprived of REM sleep. The electrical activity in a person’s brain when he is awake and learning a new task, such as a new kind of puzzle, is mimicked by the brain while that person is sleeping. This is because while we sleep, the unconscious part of our brains is busy organizing memories, strengthening the connections we will need in the future and getting rid of the excess information that would otherwise take up unnecessary space.
These electrical impulses are detected by our conscious brain, the cortex—which organizes all of the information in an effort to create cohesion. Dreams are really just a conglomeration of data that the brain tries organizing into a story while we sleep. This is why dreams are so random— naturally, they are not supposed to make sense because they are simply the results of our cortex trying to synthesize all of the ‘noise’ that’s coming from the unconscious part of the brain. Since dreaming is merely a by-product, it is not considered a primary process with a purpose. Rather, scientists view dreams as the accidental result of the more important process of consolidating information—which ties it all back to why we need sleep in the first place. The theory that the brain requires sleep to process information is manifest in the way our brains work while we dream. And therefore, as students, it’s important to keep in mind that cramming and studying for tests is only half the battle– the other half is allowing our brains to retain that information, so that our recall is not only more accessible, but our ability to solve problems and apply knowledge are also sharpened. Now that midterms are over, I’ll have the chance to test these findings for myself.