Why do humans spend a third of their time (8 hours per day) to sleep? Are we a lazy creatures? According to Christoph Nissen, a psychiatry of the University of Freiburg in Germany revealead that sleep is not just rest and not to waste time.
According to his research published in Nature Communications on Tuesday, August 23, 2016, sleep provide an opportunity to the brain to organize and precipitate memory and prevent signal saturation.
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| Scientists found that, deprived of rest, the brain’s neurons seemingly became over-connected and so muddled with electrical activity that new memories could not be properly laid down. (Picture from: http://adf.ly/1dQOBp) |
"This study shows us that sleep is a very active brain activity and not a waste of time. Sleep is needed to support good brain function," said Nissen.
Nissen's research results confirm that the hypothesis of synaptic homeostasis that put forward by Giulio Tononi, a professor of medicine and sleep from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003.
According to this hypothesis, when awakened, the human brain neural networks are full of information that must be processed. The process of making the brain a signal saturation. Sleep helps the human brain to precipitate information and organize themselves so ready to be used again for the next day.
Sleep like the brain resetting. Just in one night, we vigil and sleep-deprived, the brain will be saturate the signal and less ready to receive and send new information. As a result, staying up would make people less poor concentration, difficulty reacting quickly, as well as difficult to save the new memory.
As quoted of The Guardian on Tuesday, August 23, 2016, Nissen derive conclusions about the benefits of sleep for the brain by examining the response of 11 men and 11 women aged between 19-25 years after enough sleep and late nights.
Nissen revealed that after late nights, the object of research had lower nerve signals to move muscles as well as the response of neurons that are also lower, a sign of trouble to save memory. These results open up new opportunities to overcome depression. Instead overcome by anti-depreasan, depression can be cured by sleeping.
In response to these findings, Tononi said that the study was "elegant and powerful" as well as confirming the view that as long as this can only be proven in animals. He also emphasized, "Sleep is important. One reason is that it allows the brain to learn new things, store and organize the existing memory." *** [EKA | FROM VARIOUS SOURCES | THE GUARDIAN]
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