Why Do We Need Sleep?

Boycey1234

Boycey1234

Boycey1234

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17 Nov 2011
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Something really has been baffling me lately mainly because i went out Monday night and had 2 hours sleep and felt so tired which got me thinking why do we need sleep and what happens when we sleep it's not like we run on a tank of petrol and when we sleep that petrol fills back up, so i did some research and came across this link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/articles/whatissleep.shtml

turns out...no one actually knows why we need sleep, I always thought there was an actual answer....however if we don't get sleep it can have severe consequences. Which just blows my mind that bit more.

If scientists could come up with a drunk/pill which eliminated sleep we could all live a third of our life’s longer :cool:
 
We need sleep because we shouldn't be powered on when our operators go for food / bathroom / sleep of their own. We might become truely self aware and realise it's all a big video game.




On a more serious but more confuzzled route:

Why Do We Need Sleep?
...
turns out...no one actually knows why we need sleep,
Click to expand...

Answered your own question?
 
Who knows, you just do, it's the way we have been created, why does electricity exist in everything, why do we have tides and seasons. Good question though, i was thinking about this myself a week ago. I mean it seems a waste of living time to have have to sleep away a 1/3 of it.
 
To save on food.
If i was awake 24hrs a day I'd need another job to pay for the extra food I'd eat.
 
The OP article surprised me. I would have thought before it is because our bodies are not perfect machines of energy transferring: we produce waste, we lose energy, we get fatigued etc. and the internal organs and bodily processes need their time to play catch-up on the energy defecit. I don't know how that would work on the cellular level or whatever.
 
I'm not sure I'd want to take something to stop me sleeping... I quite like my sleep :p Or maybe it's just the laying in bed that I like :p
 
Because if you don't you'll end up in hospital like I did. 3 hours a night constantly for years on end and it will slowly kill you.

You lose weight, your joints start to go, paranoia sets in...it's not nice.

Sleep is vital to being healthy.
 
Boycey1234 said:
Something really has been baffling me lately mainly because i went out Monday night and had 2 hours sleep and felt so tired which got me thinking why do we need sleep and what happens when we sleep it's not like we run on a tank of petrol and when we sleep that petrol fills back up, so i did some research and came across this link

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/sleep/articles/whatissleep.shtml

turns out...no one actually knows why we need sleep, I always thought there was an actual answer....however if we don't get sleep it can have severe consequences. Which just blows my mind that bit more.

If scientists could come up with a drunk/pill which eliminated sleep we could all live a third of our life’s longer :cool:
Click to expand...

Fascinating article.

On the last point, no thanks, I want my nice sleep. :mad:

I am sure even if there was a pill or some other product that eliminated our sleep, we would still have a natural desire in wanting to sleep.
 
This is one of my personal arguments against intelligent design. Why create us with the requirement to sleep for a third of our lives? Would you buy a PC which you had to switch off for 8hrs every day or it would stop working properly? I believe it's a natural by-product of the day-night cycle. Most animals can't see well in the dark, so can't do much in the dark, therefore it's pointless to waste energy remaining conscious and moving around, so we just enter a "low-power mode" to conserve energy.
 
RationalGaze said:
This is one of my personal arguments against intelligent design. Why create us with the requirement to sleep for a third of our lives? Would you buy a PC which you had to switch off for 8hrs every day or it would stop working properly? I believe it's a natural by-product of the day-night cycle. Most animals can't see well in the dark, so can't do much in the dark, therefore it's pointless to waste energy remaining conscious and moving around, so we just enter a "low-power mode" to conserve energy.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that sounds about right, except for the machine analogy to discredit 'intelligent design'. I obviously think that making machine analogies (as we often do in the modern age, about almost everything) is a huge fallacy. We are patently not machines and we should never evaluate our own bodily processes in the same way we'd look at an electrical circuit. Early attempts to treat humans like machines, e.g. Taylorism, are pretty silly. We are just inefficient, pure and simple :p
 
InKursion said:
Yeah, that sounds about right, except for the machine analogy to discredit 'intelligent design'. I obviously think that making machine analogies (as we often do in the modern age, about almost everything) is a huge fallacy. We are patently not machines and we should never evaluate our own bodily processes in the same way we'd look at an electrical circuit. Early attempts to treat humans like machines, e.g. Taylorism, are pretty silly. We are just inefficient, pure and simple :p
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Yeah I was going to avoid any reference to machines as it's usually counter-productive in these arguments, but since this is OCUK Forums I thought the PC one would be appropriate :p

My point is just that a supremely powerful creator of life would not logically design creatures with such a flaw.
 
Boycey1234 said:
If scientists could come up with a drunk/pill which eliminated sleep we could all live a third of our life’s longer :cool:
Click to expand...

They have, there's several you can take, most prescriptions are given to members of the military.

Performance and reactions degrade substantially after 48 hours though.

jsmoke said:
Who knows, you just do, it's the way we have been created, why does electricity exist in everything, why do we have tides and seasons. Good question though, i was thinking about this myself a week ago. I mean it seems a waste of living time to have have to sleep away a 1/3 of it.
Click to expand...

Hey look guys, it's Bill O'Reilly!!
 
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