Saturday, May 23, 2009

ZomBee’s theory on sleep


Everyone does it.

Some do it better then others.
Some do it more then once a day.

Sleep.
It’s been around for quite some time (I knew about it when I was but a baby) and in all that time, no one has figured out WHY we sleep.
Studies have shown that the body machine itself gets the same amount of a “recharge” from 15 minutes of quiet restful repose as it does from 8 hours of quality sleep.
Then why does the body shutdown?
Why will a person go mad if sleep deprived for extended periods?

I have a theory on that… ( SHOCKING!!)
First and foremost is your senses are working every second of everyday.
Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, etc. is sucked in and staged in your brain. Peripheral vision, random thoughts, your office workers beef and bean tostada fart, elevator music, that shamwow commercial. All that stuff is sucked into the great computer residing in your skull.
There is where it sits and accumulates. Your brain stages it for current and future reference, and waits for a chance to compile it and store it away. Then when you crash for the day, your brain shuts down all physical abilities except for the core functions, (it actually releases a chemical that in essence locks down the machine.) With the machine shutdown, not only does the brain not have to worry about more information coming in but it also has additional computing power to do its job.
With the machine shut down, it can focus on compiling, storing, sorting and deleting all this information it has collected.
What happens then is the brain sorts and stuffs and moves massive files around in your mind and in doing, so, other items are moved, shifted, etc.
You know how you can see a bunny in a cloud, Jesus’ face in a piece of toast or an odd shadow taking on human features? Your mind naturally seeks out and looks for patterns in everything.
Well, you can picture what happens next. Basically your mind is sitting there minding it’s own business and along comes your brain and dumps a box full of pictures and facts and smells and whatnot into a big pile as it starts to sort through the mess. Images of your high school art class combined with information from a lecture the previous day added with a smell of perfume from the weekend and a random thought about elephants flying, All that stuff sitting in a pile being sorted and filed away.
Your mind see’s all these images and input together and immediately tries to put them together to make sense. After all there has to be a pattern in here somewhere.

Congratulations. You just created your first dream of the night.

But then again I could be wrong.

1 comment:

  1. interesting theory. i like it. :)

    sleep and dreaming are areas of cognitive science i wish to study more carefully for my doctoral thesis but somehow i couldn't find much of anything in the way of lectures from my undergrad years online -- at least not the ones i was looking for. i did find one though. i hope you enjoy it; it's a "slidecast" with audio from the lecture as well, though i've gotta warn you this was my first and only time with this professor and he was a snooze:

    http://www.slideshare.net/secret/3UTkG2q2qgiDLP

    ReplyDelete

Thrill me...dripsome brain droppings here.