Sleep does a lot of things here and there, but has there been a thesis pin pointing the exact thing that absolutley requires sleep? Could it be that the brain, even the ones not as evolved as the human ones, can not go on for long without rest due to their bio-chemistry or something like that? Very primitive “brains” like insects and so on don’t require so much brain power like more complex organisms, maybe?
In: Biology
No-one really knows for sure why we sleep, but it’s not just mammals that sleep. The most compelling theory that I’ve heard is that sleep is when your brain is able to get rid of waste products that build up during your waking hours, however most organisms, including those that don’t have brains, have some kind of day-night cycle where they’re dormant for a period of time.
Sleep is an active process where you brain is ‘rewiring’ itself. Your brain takes the experience that you’ve accrued during the day and it makes new neural pathways, interconnects existing pathways and strengthens your most used pathways. While you are asleep your muscles are inhibited, this is to facilitate the rewiring and testing of these pathways. You dream which is essentially your brain producing test data to run through, program and test the new wiring.
We don’t know. I remember the head of sleep research from a major university said that, after spending over 20 years in the field, as far as he knows the only really solid reason people need to sleep is because they get tired.
Every animal with an actual brain sleeps to some degree. Some, like sharks, are able to sleep with one half of their brain at a time, allowing the other half to remain active while the other rests.
Once you get to animals like an insect – there is no “brain” to speak of – it’s just a little web of neurons that reacts to stimuli but there’s no central processing center – therefore nothing to go to sleep.
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