What is the reason behind the need to “fall” asleep rather than choosing to be asleep?
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For much of our evolutionary history humans were “dumb animals”. Our bodies are composed of many different systems that must act in concert without a coordinating intelligence. They do this via many “signals”, behaviors which other systems react to resulting in our bodily functions.
This is the case in the brain as well. Different parts of our brain are constantly in competition with each other, the net result being our behavior. This can be illustrated by considering an example of when things go wrong: With ADHD some parts of the brain are constantly coming up with ideas and things of interest, while another part of the brain is responsible for moderating those urges, ignoring what isn’t important and focusing attention on what is. Those with ADHD have low function in that part that moderates attention, which results in the seemingly paradoxical effect that stimulants help those suffering ADHD to calm down and focus. Stimulants we would expect to make someone hyperactive instead can help those with ADHD settle and stop fidgeting, all because of the interaction of those separate systems.
With sleeping you can have one system saying that you are tired and should rest, while perhaps another is telling you to eat, and another is saying you are in danger. Without some intelligence to choose a correct behavior our bodies need to form a behavior based on input from all those systems; it wouldn’t do to fall asleep while in danger!
So while we have what we feel is a cohesive intelligent mind, it exists on top of all these interacting systems without us having any direct control. Instead we must just satisfy them sufficiently to motivate the desired result.
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