Sleep.

Why do you become tired? What information does your brain makes you become tired? Is there a logical explination of why one becomes tired or is it a fundamental process of the body which wastes hours of your life until you die?

I say either one. What do you say? I say it's a premature death preparation that the body puts you through in order to prepare you for the final sleep.

I think we sleep to dream. Also the body has to renew its self. Everything in the body is replaced. Your skin for example. And your liver is a completely new liver every year.

methinks the body sleeps in order for the brain to defragment the data that our senses have acquired during our waking hours. dreams occur as a byproduct of this process, and as such, are only partially glimpsed by our conscious mind and can sometimes be stored as temporary (fleeting) memories. our body needs our brain to do this so that we may be able to process information more efficiently when we wake up.

no, you don't have to believe me but these are my thoughts regarding our need for sleep. and as stated by the previous poster, our body has to renew itself and the only time it can do this is when its not when its not being put to the strains and stresses we often encounter when we are awake.



[edit on 4-4-2007 by toreishi]

As far as I know, there is no scientific consensus about why animals sleep. It's an open question. There has, however, been quite a lot of research on the subject, some of it rather controversial. Moreover, it is a field in which theories -- some plausible, some obviously cockeyed -- abound.

All of this makes sleep (and dreaming) a very interesting subject for discussion on ATS. Congratulations to the OP for coming up with it.

However, this thread is definitely in the wrong forum.

It should be in the Science & Technology Forum.

That forum is filled almost exclusively with threads on subjects in the physical sciences (except chemistry for some reason) and technologies allied with them. There is very little life-science-related subject matter, such as the subject of this thread. That is a great shame, since some of the most interesting work in science nowadays is taking place in the life sciences.

Moderators, please move this thread. It deserves a place in the S&T forum, and the S&T forum needs more threads like it.

I agree that the purpose of sleep is to process that which the brain experiences during the waking hours but isn't available to our conscience mind to process.

The sleep process is so important to remain healthy, yet the information and undergoings aren't available to us to understand.

Without sleep we go crazy eventually.

Originally posted by interestedalways
I agree that the purpose of sleep is to process that which the brain experiences during the waking hours but isn't available to our conscience mind to process.

This is a theory -- a fairly old and respectable one -- but is there any evidence to support it?

It seems plausible when you think about human beings. We have capacious memories in which we store our experiences and, because we think about what we experience, every experience carries a lot of associated data.

But what about mice, or fish, or butterflies? They don't have such big brains or -- as far as we can tell -- such big memories. They don't do much thinking either. Do their brains really need eight hours of downtime to process their daily experiences? That doesn't sound so plausible, does it?

Maybe it's our bodies, rather than our brains, that need the rest. After all, it's our limbs that are at rest when we sleep, not our brains. Our brains keep on working, which is the reason why we have dreams.

Jerome Siegel is one of the most respected sleep researchers. Linky below to a recent article of his, worth a read:

www.npi.ucla.edu...

Numerous ideas as to why we sleep.