Why can’t we sleep with our eyes opened?
I’m wondering… I mean, I know our eyes would dry out but there’s gotta be a bigger explanation?
I mean, why does our body feels the need to close it eyes? And can only rest with its eyes closed?
Could I trick my brain to sleep while my eyes are opened?
In: Biology
Im guessing somewhere along the lines of because it takes muscle control to keep your eyes / eyelids open and would be taking in visual information (unless wearing sleep mask), continuing to use those muscles & having that visual input would prevent you from falling asleep … maybe … 😂
There’s no benefit to it. As you mentioned, your eyes would dry out. Additionally there’s no real benefit to keeping the portions of your brain that automatically blink and processes visual data fully active while you’re asleep – one of the primary functions of sleep is to rejuvenate the brain and because of that, nonessential functions essentially need to be shut down.
Some people can, but most can’t because in order to go to sleep you need to have a limited amount of action in your prefrontal cortex. Seeing and translating from the picture to what you are seeing requires a lot of action from your prefrontal cortex. You can train yourself to relax it enough to go to sleep.
When I was a kid I had a habit of falling asleep with my eyes open. Apparently it freaked my parents out. I think I’d pretty well grown out of it by the tiem I hit 10 or so.
So it IS possible, but as others have said, not really practical from a rest perspective.
I don’t know anything about it but I had this guy my basic training flight that slept with his eyes open almost every night for the entire time I was on watch (abt two hours).
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