Why We Sleep & The Necessity of Dream Sleep
We sleep for a number of reasons; behavioral advantages, metabolic restoration, development, learning information, and for evolutionary protective reasons. Basically it boils down to two theories: physiological theory and cognitive theory. Physiologically, the sleep-wake cycle has a biological rhythm that activates various brain centers, producing activity. While asleep, usually during dark hours, we give our bodies a time to rest and recoup or rebuild to prepare for another day. It is easier for our bodies to perform and see to do things during daylight hours, therefore, we are also protecting ourselves.With the cognitive theory, dreams are a way of learning and thinking, mnemonic in nature. Dream
"That stress can make someone perform worse" is Siegel's way to explain the results of Harvard's sleep study. According to this study memory is closely linked to REM sleep. "The brain is taking information and helping us put it into a form that we can understand," Stickgold said. Robert Stickgold, a professor at the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, published research that he believes provides compelling evidence that the mind works hard during sleep. It needs more than our hours of awake time to get the job done. I'd say it is a form of house cleaning. Dreaming is believed to be instrumental in memory retention and consolidation. They had two groups of students participate and taught each of the students the same material. One group slept as normal without interruption, but the other group was not allowed any REM sleep. In conclusion, even scientists do not know what is happening while we sleep or why we sleep. Memory works two ways: to store important information and to remove trivial information. There is still too many different reasons that can be considered valid and interpretations cannot be validated. A study on the role of REM sleep and memory retention and consolidation was performed by Harvard Medical School. Top scientists, however, have extremely varying visions of what occurs during sleep.
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