Sleep is good for you

An evolutionary perspective is often helpful. If a part of what makes us go, allows us to survive, then it continues to be a part of us. Take sleep. Sleeping well can be dangerous especially when we lie down under a tree in the forest and go to sleep. While we are snoozing a big cat with sharp teeth and claws can do us in. Sleep better be important given the down side of having our eyes closed.

Fir some time puzzled scientists have explored the value of sleep and come up with a few reliable features of our sleeping brain. Some of the science is ‘soft’ like the role of dreaming for maintaining healthy minds. That sleep product has been tied to sleep architecture. That is, all sleep is not equal and it has been shown over and over to go through cycles with different brain activity. Sleep, disturbed sleep has been associated with mental disorders (although cause and affect remain muddled).

The most reliable finding about the role of sleep in maintaining and effective mind is its role in memory consolidation. Scores of studies have shown that during sleep recent waking experiences and ‘undigested’ memories are established in a more permanent form of memory, and the term memory consolidation is used to describe that brain process.

Most recently a perhaps more important role of sleep has been discovered the mind/brain laboratory. Maiken Nedergaard (University of Rochester Medical Center in New York) and colleagues serendipitously discovered sleep’s cleansing function while studying how the brain disposes of waste products. It turns out that the brain builds up cellular junk while awake and sleep is an important brain-cleaning agent. Sleep allows the brain to push out fluid in between its cells, flushing their buildup products, such as protein pieces that form plaques (which incidentally is built up in people with Alzheimer’s disease). It is good to have a clean well functioning brain.