Wednesday, November 13, 2019
Sleep, What Is It? Essay -- essays research papers fc
     When you lay down to bed at night, close your eyes, and loose conciseness, you fall asleep. Sleep is an everyday event, every human, every animal does it on a routine basis. There are many questions concerning sleep. This paper will try to answer three of them. Why do we sleep, at what routine do we sleep, and what happens to us when we sleep. There are several theories as to why we sleep. Some believe it’s a â€Å"time out†to recuperate, remove wastes from muscles, repair cells or recover abilities lost during the day. However wastes are removed without sleep with just a couple of minutes of rest. People who don’t sleep for 48 hours don’t need 16 hours to â€Å"catch up†all they need is one good nights sleep. Some believe sleep conserves energy, once it provided safety from predators in a secluded space. However we lose consciousness which would make us vulnerable to attacks from predators. Or maybe it serves the brain because only organisms with integrated bundles of central nervous tissue sleep. There are many theories as to why we sleep but no one really seems to know. People can go several days without sleep and still perform normally. However any longer can cause irritability, hallucinations, or delusions. In animals sleep depravation leads to death, it may also hold true for people as well. In one case a man at age 52 started losing sleep. He fell deeper and deeper into an exhausted stumper or lethargic state, always feeling tired but unable to sleep. He eventually developed a lung infection and died. An autopsy showed he had lost almost all of the large neurons in two areas of the thalamus. This suggests that sleep is caused and controlled by the thalamus. Most people sleep at night, so does this mean that our sleep cycle is dependent on night and day? It doesn’t seem so. There are people who sleep during the day and studies have shown that people run on their own sleep cycles. Volunteers put in isolation(they didn’t know what time it was) went to sleep on the average 49 minutes later every cycle. So in about 11 or 12 days one would go to sleep in the morning. Whenever we change our clocks(daylight savings time) our bodies eventually readjust to the time rather than how light or dark it is outside. People who live in the extreme north or south have darkness for six month at a... ...aks. It                will take a shaking motion to wake you and you                wont be happy about it. Sleep walkers and                talkers walk and talk at this point. This process takes about 90 minutes then reverses(1-2-3-4-3-2-1). After you come back to one, instead of waking you go into REM(Rapid Eye Movement) sleep and this is were most dreaming occurs. The amount of time in REM sleep is usually random, but after REM sleep you start the process over again. Hopefully some questions about sleep you had before reading this paper are now answered. There still remains many questions about sleep. Since sleep is so connected with the mind, which is the biggest mystery in the universe humans know of sleep is difficult to understand. So it will be a long time before our questions will be answered. Bibliography Wade and Travis, Carole and Carol, Psychology, New York City, Harper Collins Publishers Inc., 1990 http://www.shuteye.com
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