Sleep, generally referred to as human sleep, is an indispensable physiological phenomenon for human beings. Sleep accounts for nearly 1/3 of a person's life, and its quality is closely related to the health of the human body, which shows how important sleep is to every person. In a sense, the quality of sleep determines the quality of life. But why does a person need to sleep? This question has always been a problem that scientists want to solve thoroughly. Recently, according to the British magazine New Scientist, scientists have come up with several theories for the causes of sleep, ranging from superficial theories that nourish the mind to complex theories involving memory processing, all of which provide a comprehensive look at human sleep.
Everyone needs a good night's sleep after a busy day. The fact that people want to sleep is a physiological
sleep
response that is part of the neural activity of the brain and is the result of inhibition that occurs after continued excitation of nerve cells within the cerebral cortex. When inhibition prevails within the cerebral cortex, a person will sleep. In people's lives, there is work and rest; in neural activity, there is excitation and inhibition. Inhibition serves to protect nerve cells in order to re-excite them and allow people to continue working. The number of hours of sleep per day must be 11 hours for children, 10 hours for elementary school students, 8 hours for middle school students, and 7 hours for high school students.
Sleep is simultaneously a process of memory cell metabolism: aging cells feed the arrangement used by each memory message into new cells for storage. These include movement, language areas, balance bonds, and some past events and memories from daily life. They are all material, so they exist in a material way as well.
If a person is chronically sleep-deprived, which prevents memory cells from living a healthy life, they are prone to certain health problems and even diseases, such as aphasia, spasms, convulsions, or shock and fainting caused by forced sleep. It is also prone to cancer over time.
Purely from the point of view of natural science, sleep until you wake up naturally is the best, otherwise they will all lose their lives. Regular life is a good foundation, but in order to "regular" and long-term fatigue, is dangerous. Scientists suggest that those who can afford it are better off going with the flow and not compromising their health for the sake of morality.
Because, after all, for farmers, "going to bed early and getting up early is good for you" is linked to the relationship between production. If farmers don't get up early to work, herd cattle, and farm, they will go without food. If they do not have food to eat for a long time, how can they be in good health? So if one is not a farmer, or is only trying to make a living, then there is absolutely no need to torture or abuse oneself.
Yawning is the first sign that alerts us to lack of sleep. If you haven't slept for 18 hours, a human's reaction time will change from 0.25 seconds to 0.5 seconds and continue to get longer, while the average person will develop bouts of lethargy; about every 2 to 20 seconds, you will find the need to re-read what you have just read; your eyelids will become heavier and heavier; and you will begin to doze off when you reach the 20-hour mark. Studies have shown that at this point a normal person's reaction time is essentially equivalent to someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.08 - a value that would make it easy to break the law if you kept driving. You will also forget a lot of things, such as writing your name wrong or forgetting to pull the handbrake.
In the animal kingdom, sleep is as big a deal as food, water and intercourse. This is true of everyone from fruit flies to modern humans. But scientists are unable to understand exactly what sleep is for. Is it to revitalize the body? Not exactly. It's well known that muscles don't need sleep, just intermittent relaxation. Is it to keep the mind awake? Pretty much. A good night's sleep is good for the brain, but scholars are not yet in agreement about how the brain benefits from sleep.
One theory is that sleep helps enable the brain to preserve all the information humans receive while awake. And another view claims that sleep is about restoring energy. Still others propose that sleep tends to utilize some mysterious form to help us master various skills. So what exactly is sleep?
Two events occurred in the mid-1990s that drew the focus of research efforts back to the substantive purpose of sleep. Scientists at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science suggested in 1994 that scholars should focus their research on questions about faulty memory processing, and the technology for peering into the sleeping brain greatly improved at that time.
Scientists at the Weizmann Institute found that the amount of "tachycardia" sleep people get is directly related to their ability to recognize fixed patterns on a computer screen. The technique, known as procedural memory, requires repetition and practice. Memorizing facts, such as the name of the President of the United States, is declarative memory - an ability unrelated to tachycardia. "We've always had a naive understanding about memory," says neurologist Robert Stickgold of the Harvard School of Medicine.
Sleeping quietly
But somewhere along the line, it suddenly became clear to scientists where memory research was headed. Over the past few years, Stickgold, along with his colleague Matthew. Walker, together with his colleague Matthew Walker, have been studying the effects of sleep on procedural memory for motor skills at Beth Medical Center in Boston, USA. They had trainees who used their right hand type a string of numbers as fast as possible over and over again using their left hand. They found that no matter what time of day the experiment was conducted, the accuracy of the trainees improved by 60-70% after 6 minutes, whereas if the trainees were tested in the morning and retested again 12 hours later, their accuracy did not improve much. But when trainees were trained in the evening and retested after waking up, their speed increased by 15-20% and their accuracy by 30-40%. To the surprise of the experts, the trainees who improved the most spent the most time in non-velocity eye movement sleep. Other visual or perceptual training required deeper sleep or both slow-wave and REM sleep, and in some cases even closing the eyes for an hour made a big difference. And other times, a good night's sleep throughout the night is essential.
I hope I've helped clear up your confusion.