Why do so many organisms, like mammals, need sleep to a degree that it makes it a requirement to live like food and water, while other organisms don’t sleep at all?

Question

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

Answer 1

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.