function of sleep

[invisiblebrain]

do you belive that sleep has got a role to play in our life.

 

do you think sleep is a state of rest or do you thaink there more to it.

 

does sleep help our lives more .........

[Skye]

Can you be a little more specific?

[admiral_ju00]

do you belive that sleep has got a role to play in our life.

 

do you think sleep is a state of rest or do you thaink there more to it.

 

does sleep help our lives more .........

 

yes, absolutely.

 

rest? kind of. actually, during REM sleep, your brain is just as active as when you're awake.

 

yes, w/o sleep, you become a paranoid, unstable and a nervous, wreck

[invisiblebrain]

that was the point i wanted to bring out in the topic....

 

REM sleep is the most fascinating part of it and i belive it dominates the non-REM whcih is justa transition period.

 

so if we dont sleep for rest ,why then do we have to sleep in the first place?

[admiral_ju00]

no, but the idea is that you need the non-rem sleep to take you into the rem sleep.

 

if i recall correctly, there have been several experiments where people were simply not allowed to have rem sleep and as a result they had behavioral/concentration problems when awake.

[Crash]

Whats REM sleep?, i thought you sleept to rest your body, but not your mind

[admiral_ju00]

REM = Rapid Eye Momement cycle.

 

a typical sleep is in cycles(forgot the fine details) but more or less it goes in stages. Rem sleep is where most dreams occur - and as my above post said, it has some kind of correlation to the overall function of the brain.

 

when you hit rem stage, when you wake up, you feel refreshed and had a dream, and in sleep, your brain is just as active when you're awake, maybe more so.

 

that's why if you've ever had one of those occasions where you've only slept for 20 minutes and feel so much better/refreshed then say last night when you slept 12 hours and woke up feeling tired and moody. etc.

 

more than likely, in the above example, you've bypassed all the other stages of sleep and went directly into rem...

[invisiblebrain]

ask any teenager ,one says he had sexual arousal in the sleep.so what does that suggest?

 

does that sugget that the sleep we are in does help us to prepare ourselves for the future occaisions of sex or for that matter any of the lifes problems???

[admiral_ju00]

ask any teenager ' date='one says he had sexual arousal in the sleep.so what does that suggest?

[/quote']

 

well, the penis erections and vaginal lubrications seem to be a common thing during rem sleep

 

does that sugget that the sleep we are in does help us to prepare ourselves for the future occaisions of sex or for that matter any of the lifes problems???

 

don't know. but probably that's an overstatement.

it's not age specific or confined, rather.

[Crash]

Well with all the theorys about Dreams being connected to your life in some way, im sure that they are....but just how is weird. It could be as you said "help us to prepare ourselves for the future occaisions of sex or for that matter any of the lifes problems???

Or could just be a way of your subconcious trying to tell you soemthing...on that note my girlrfeind has had some weird dreams,(One was about another guy, in which she dated in her dream which made me worry!!)

now i really want to know what they mean????

Why dont pot smokers dream as much as non-smokers? for me when i use to smoke (rather reguarly)pot i never can remember dreaming, now i can atleast remember my dreams though..

[admiral_ju00]

Well with all the theorys about Dreams being connected to your life in some way' date=' im sure that they are....but just how is weird. It could be as you said "help us to prepare ourselves for the future occaisions of sex or for that matter any of the lifes problems???

Or could just be a way of your subconcious trying to tell you soemthing...on that note my girlrfeind has had some weird dreams,(One was about another guy, in which she dated in her dream which made me worry!!)

now i really want to know what they mean????[/quote']

 

while i no longer major in psychology, i don't know of any new developments on this, but i'm willing to take a bold step forward and say that not even the researchers currently know that that means. if anybody has any new developments on this, please feel free to share

 

on that last question, no, you probably Do NOT want to know

 

 

Why dont pot smokers dream as much as non-smokers? for me when i use to smoke (rather reguarly)pot i never can remember dreaming, now i can atleast remember my dreams though..

 

http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=56566#post56566

check the very last post

[Crash]

No im quite sure i do want to know, is it cause of the damage it does to your brain?

 

opps i missed the link....

Heres a site with a coule of ideas on what sleep is about.

Also i read that sleep kill syou quicker that water from complete withdrawl

 

http://www.thesleepsite.com/

[admiral_ju00]

No im quite sure i do want to know, is it cause of the damage it does to your brain?

 

no.

i take it you did not read my last post in that marijuana thread, did you?

 

smoking marijuana does not cause brain damage, but it slows it down. as the article or linky says, in some cases, even the heavy or prolonged use of it can be reversed.

 

the problem with marijuana smokers would be their difficulties in recalling memories or concentration, etc.

 

rem sleep is more or less in real time. meaning if you've just had a rem sleep for 20 minutes, and right at the end, someone woke you up, you can probably recall (from memories) what you've just dreamt about and be able to talk about it for up to 20 minutes.

 

but the longer the time has past since your last rem cycle, the less things you can remember from it.

[admiral_ju00]

oh yeah, the other part of your question, brain is very complicated and hard to understand - aka pandora's box.

 

it might actually be the case that we'll be able to decipher all of genome and be able to control it at will, before we can do the same for the brain. it's just That complicated.

[Crash]

Sleep must be atleast something to do with tiredness as you sleep alot better after exercise than yu do after a boring day......

And this may seem stupid or obvious, but why do you get to sleep alot better when drunk or under some sort of influence?

[admiral_ju00]

it has to to with the passage or blockage of ions at the synaptic cleft.

it kind of works like a "key and lock" or "hand and glove" thing as they say.

the molecule found is alcohol let's say looks like a triangle. when these molecules flow around in the brains, if there's a trianglular shape found at the neuron that this alcohol molecule could slide in, then it will. once it's in, it will block the passage of the other molecules that are normaly produced by the brain, then it can influence the neuronal activity/behavior, at least for a while.

 

sorry, i'm a little vague and rough on details

[admiral_ju00]

if you're more into biology, it pretty much works very similarly as in biology and gene transcription and the uses of lactose molecules, operons and active/inactive repressors that bind or not to a piece of genetic segment.

-the above is how bacteria does it

- human transcription process is a bit more complicated, but very similar

[Crash]

So the alchol with regards to the triangle bit, stops the normal functioning of the brain, and by doing this helps us fall asleep better?

[admiral_ju00]

So the alchol with regards to the triangle bit, stops the normal functioning of the brain, and by doing this helps us fall asleep better?

 

yeah, kind of. it block the reception of normaly produced and needed ions/molecules.

 

well, i don't think it helps you sleep better.

faster, yeah, but not better. otherwise there wouldn't be a hangover when you wake up.

[invisiblebrain]

oh another way

 

i like games ,some FPS ones too(wolfenstein,igi,hitman......)whwre the way is complicatd and one has to find it out .

 

it happened so many tmes to me that i couldnt go to the door and frustrated myself.

after i slept i remenber scanning through all the ways and seemed to correlate which way i had to go and most of the times i would find the door or key then.

 

same things with some math problems.

 

now what do you say?

[[Tycho?]]

oh another way

 

i like games ' date='some FPS ones too(wolfenstein,igi,hitman......)whwre the way is complicatd and one has to find it out .

 

it happened so many tmes to me that i couldnt go to the door and frustrated myself.

after i slept i remenber scanning through all the ways and seemed to correlate which way i had to go and most of the times i would find the door or key then.

 

same things with some math problems.

 

now what do you say?[/quote']

 

Good REM sleep kinda causes your brain to re-set I think, ready for another day. So at the end of the day when you feel all crapped out or whatever, you just sleep and removes all that. I know when I've been in a mad/frustrated mood and went to bed, but only to have restless sleep, I wake up with the exact same madness/frustration as when I went to bed. When usually it would be a completely different day.

 

Sleep is an orginization time for the brain I think, just cleaning stuff up so it can funtion well the next day.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Kind of like defragmenting a computer.

[invisiblebrain]

well i think it isnt just more than defrag......

 

we are preparing ourselves to face the next days problems and solve them more effieciently.so its defrag plus solving previous unsolved problems(more effieciently than others or with that of the older speed

[admiral_ju00]

Since this bears relevance to this discussion:

 

It is a common belief that we are more susceptible to infections when deprived of sleep. Consistent with this, there is increasing evidence that sleep deprivation has detrimental effects on the immune response, indicating that sleep should be considered a vital part of the immune system and that there is a reciprocal relationship between sleep and immunity. This relationship is important because, over recent decades, there has been a documented decrease in the mean duration and quality of sleep in the population. The concept that lack of sleep might be compromising immunity in the population has far-reaching public-health implications for both individuals and society.

 

Sleep-deprivation experiments in both animals and humans provide the best evidence for a crucial role of sleep in the immune response. The results of these experiments show some inconsistencies, thereby underlining the complexities of measuring the interaction between different durations of sleep deprivation and different immune components. However, in humans, general patterns emerge, indicating that sleep deprivation has detrimental effects on immune-cell number, function and cytokine production.

 

There is also emerging evidence that chronic partial sleep loss might be more detrimental to immune function than short-term total sleep loss. This is important because it is chronic partial sleep loss that burdens the current population, through shift work, pressured lifestyles, and other stresses and changes in society.

 

The final piece of evidence for a reciprocal relationship between sleep and immunity is provided by clinical situations (for example, depression or narcolepsy) in which sleep disorders are associated with changes in the immune system.

 

The effects of sleep deprivation on the immune response might have important implications for protecting the population against infection and malignancy.

 

Courtesy of Nature

[qazibasit]

there are different states of sleep which we called different brain states and we can see it with the help of EEG , i dont know of which state you are talking but defferent states have different significance for example in delta state we die for about few microseconds and our physiology is totally stopped, just like a supercomputer computer is turned off for a few seconds and this is enough to give rest to the brain and in other states the worn out cells are replaced in the body and other wear and tear is done.