![]() ![]() You have a peak moment of awakeness during the morning. ![]() The photo receptors in our eyes pick up on sunlight, which controls the release of melatonin and all these other neurotransmitters that dictate your energy levels throughout the day. That means every organism is responsive to a circadian rhythm that’s largely dictated by sunlight. We evolved from bacteria in the ocean that could differentiate sunlight from darkness-that’s what ended up forming the human eye. What are they, and why are they responsible for that mid-afternoon slump? Also, when you’re sleep deprived, research has shown that you’re really bad at being able to tell that you’re sleep deprived. That’s like the fish and the fish bowl phenomenon: The fish doesn’t know that he’s in the fishbowl, nonetheless that he’s in water. But is that just because how I feel has become my normal operating mode, and I could really be functioning at a higher level? ![]() I normally get around six to seven hours of sleep a night and feel fine. With no stressors or time to get up, you’ll just fall into a natural pattern, and that’s probably how much sleep you actually need. To see how much sleep you really need, my professor suggests that when you go on vacation, try to stick to your normal bedtime and then see what time you wake up. Getting half an hour less than what you need to really adds up over a week period. That’s rare, though, so by and large, people are not getting enough sleep. That being said, some people are short sleepers: You can do a test to find out if you have genetic makeup that makes you a short sleeper. What deep sleep does is all the neural processing, and what REM sleep and light sleep do is basically integrate that into your long-term personality and understanding of the world. Then during the nighttime when we sleep, we have a downregulating process where the things that didn’t really matter to your survival sink to the bottom, and the things that are most relevant to your survival rise to the top. It used to be like, “Don’t go over there-the lions live there now.” Now it’s like, “What did Barbara say to me in the office?” These excitatory connections we make during the day result in the neurons in our brains getting overall higher activation. The “ synaptic homeostasis hypothesis” is this idea that during the day, we make all these connections with the world around us. What makes sleep so essential for our wellbeing comes down to three main things: to save our energy, to help our cells recover, and to help us process and understand our environment. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.ĭaniel Gartenberg: Every organism on the planet sleeps in some fashion, to some degree-even the basic fruit fly. ![]()
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