I see this a lot but isn’t the basic answer just that the brain needs to recharge and clean out toxins within the body?
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So this is both a really complicated question and a not too complicated question, if that makes any sense. We know that sleep has a lot of benefits, and not sleeping has a lot of detriments. We know what happens when we sleep and what happens when we don’t. We know that we need sleep to avoid these detriments and get these benefits. But we don’t know why that is. We do not know why sleeping has those benefits, why not sleeping has those detriments, and why only sleep can fix them. We understand the biological process, but not why sleep is the mechanism for those things.
In 2010 someone from National Geographic asked sleep researcher William Dement, a man known as the “father of sleep medicine,” why we need to sleep. Dr. Dement was the world’s foremost expert on sleep, he discovered and named the five stages of sleep, was the first to study the connection between rapid eye movement and dreaming, and co-created the Apnea Hypopnea Index that we still use to diagnose sleep apnea today. Dement’s response was “as far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.”
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