• Question: Why do we need to sleep?

    Asked by joe320 to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 8 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 8 Nov 2013:

      Because it’s after 9pm!

      🙂

      Well, that’s the answer that I am giving to my children when it’s bed time, but you were probably trying to get at something else. 🙂
      Id’ say this is more a question for biologists or medical researchers than for us particle physicists. But:
      – those biologists and medical researchers probably use equipment that is
      heavily based on particle physics research to answer those kinds of
      questions, for example PET scanners or MRI devices, to study the human
      brain while sleeping (or not sleeping),
      – and we do of course ask ourselves this question over and over again,
      especially when realizing that it would be much easier to finish a nice
      research paper before a conference deadline if you didn’t have to sleep.
      I am not going to google this now, but what I remember from reading science articles is that it’s not really known very well why we need sleep. Also, there are weird patterns such as bigger animals needing less sleep than smaller animals. There probably are good reasons for that, and they probably have something to do with why we need sleep at all, but it’s not really understood yet. It looks like we do need sleep to transfer new knowledge from short term memory to long term memory. (Yup, sleep is very important for being able to learn!) There are probably more reasons, but I don’t know them, and I am not sure the experts know it all either (yet!)

    • Photo: Venus Keus

      Venus Keus answered on 10 Nov 2013:

      As Kristian said, this more biologically relevant. But I read a bit about the physiology of human body and I can tell you that there are a lot of those nasty anti-oxidants (free ionized radicals that just stick to any cell) floating around in your blood, which could cause cancer, and when you sleep enough your body naturally gets rid of them.
      Apart from the fact that sleeping is an enjoyable experience and an essential part of a healthy life-style, there are lots of other benefits to sleeping enough every night. You know that defragmentation that computers need to do sometimes, your brain kind of does that to itself when you sleep. It actually works harder when you are sleeping than when you are awake. After a good night sleep you can think more efficiently. So, staying up all night working with the help of lots of coffee and coke is not as efficient as you think. You are actually better off sleeping a good 6-7 hours and working much faster afterwards.
      Plus if you are physicist you want to live long enough to get your Nobel Prize, so you need to take good care of your body 😉

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 10 Nov 2013:

      Nobody really knows! It’s one of the great unsolved mysteries. You should ask a biologist though, they know more about this kind of stuff. They’ll still say ‘I don’t know’, but they’ll do it more elegantly.

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      I am severely jet-lagged at the moment having just arrived in Japan for a conference. If anyone knows the answer to this question, I would be most grateful…..

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 11 Nov 2013:

      I believe the latest theory is that it allows your brain to rinse all the toxins away from all the thinking during the day. To me as a non-specialist that sounds quite convincing because we do know that sleep is necessary otherwise we die.

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