In very early life, sleep helps build the infrastructure of the brain, but then takes on a whole new role. A team of neuroscientists reports why sleep is vital to our health and how the brain repairs itself during sleep. Prolonged sleep deprivation can lead to serious health problems in humans and other animals. But why sleep is so vital to our health. Before this age, the brain grows very fast. During REM sleep, when vivid dreams occur, the young brain is busy building and strengthening synapses – the structures that connect neurons to each other and allow them to communicate.
We do not wake babies during REM sleep because important work is done on their brain as they sleep. However, after two and a half years, the primary purpose of sleep shifts from brain development to brain maintenance and repair, a role it retains for the rest of life .All living things naturally experience a certain amount of NEUROLOGICAL DAMAGE during waking hours and the resulting WRINKLES, including damaged genes and proteins within neurons, can accumulate and cause brain damage. Sleep helps to repair this damage and cleans the debris and removes the garbage that can lead to serious illness. This switch occurs at a very early age and looks like a water-like transition when it becomes ice.
REM sleep decreases with increasing brain size throughout development, according to scientists. While newborns spend about 50% of their REM sleep time, it decreases to about 25% by the age of 10 and continues to decrease with age. Adults over 50 spend about 15% of their time asleep in REM. The significant drop in REM sleep to about 2 and a half occurs just as the significant change in sleep function occurs. Sleep is just as important as food and it is amazing how well sleep fits the needs of our nervous system where all beings they sleep but during sleep the brains do not rest.
A chronic lack of sleep probably contributes to long-term health problems such as dementia and other cognitive disorders such as diabetes, obesity, etc. For most adults, a regular seven and a half hours of sleep a night is normal and the time we wake up does not count, he says. Poe. While children need more sleep, babies need much more, about twice as much as adults. Adults have five REM cycles during a full night of sleep and may have a few dreams in each cycle.
Good sleep {an excellent medicine} is a transition from nervous reorganization to repair and early development.
SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF LOS ANGELES {Science Advances SEPT. 2020}
