Why do humans need to spend a third of their time sleeping?

ByTony Alter

If the average daily sleeping time is 8 hours, humans will spend a third of their life in sleep. This is a calculation that if a person living to 90 years old is sleeping for 30 years of life. Why do people need sleep so much?

The Work We Do While We Sleep - The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/why-we-sleep


According to Maria Konikova's article by The New Yorker, it seems that sleep was sinful in the 18th century, and among scholars who studied sleep for a long time, it seems obviously useless It seems there is a time when it was. Alan Hobson, an American psychiatrist and a researcher of sleep, had a joke saying that "the effect of sleeping is only to awaken the sleepiness". However, as research progresses, the mystery is gradually being revealed.

REM sleep behavior disorderThen, the body will start to move as if you were actually experiencing what you dreamed of. According to the research center in Montreal, more than half of those who suffered from this behavior disorder had neurological disorder within 12 years. In addition, it is shown that sleep apnea syndrome is associated with diabetes / heart disease, which leads to cognitive impairment. Furthermore, it seems that 10% of people with chronic insomnia are suffering from depression, an increase in heart disease and high blood pressure, cognitive ability, motor deficiency, etc.

According to sleep scientists, the association with such neurological diseases is that sleep affects the cognitive function, the association with heart disease plays a role that sleep plays a role of relieving stress to the blood vessels, insomnia and The association with depression suggests that sleep is also affecting emotional aspects, respectively.

In 2000, Robert Stick Gold, who is studying sleep at Harvard University, conducted an experiment to have Tetris play for three groups a day for seven hours a day for a total of three days. Group 1 is those who have never done Tetris, and Group 2 are those who have become accustomed to Tetris. And group 3 is an amnesic patient who was damaged by temporal lobe and hippocampus, and can not form new episodic memory. However, when I confirmed what kind of dream I had during the experiment, I noticed that not only Group 1 and Group 2 but Group 3 people had dreamed of Tetris. They were in a state that they do not know "what is Tetris", so it was in a state that did not know "what kind of dream they had been seeing", but the shape of the object that appeared in that story is the form of Tetrimino I sometimes testified that Tetrimino came out in a dream up to the point of rotation to enter the gap.

In this way, it is emerging that sleep has functions related to memory, especially dreams.

ByUmberto Salvagnin

In addition, Neurobiologist Jean Born and Ulrich Wagner of Tübingen University have revealed that sleep is equipped not only with "unity of memory" but also "mechanism of memory selection". Mr. Born and others gave complicated mathematical problems to a group of people through experiments. Actually, a simple solution is shown, but many people did not notice and could not solve the problem. Participants were retested in 8 hours, but half of the group challenged sleeping, half tried without sleeping. Then, the correct rate of insomnia group has cut down 25%, while sleep group is more than twice that correct answer. Also, over 60% of people noticed easy solution.

From this, it can be thought that sleeping is processing, learning, extraction, etc of intracerebral information. If you think that you are performing various functions during sleeping, sleeping for several hours a day may be a reasonable number.

It is known that sleep disorder is present as an early symptom of dementia, and some of the genes controlling sleeping time have been found to be associated with schizophrenia. To the contrary to former perception, sleep is beneficial to the body, rather sleep deprivation is bad for the body so please take care of sleep.