No one knows why we sleep.
After all the scientific advancements that we've made as a species - like the robot that can grab a wine bottle from a human and learns from it's mistakes, mapping the genome, etc. - there are still a whole host of questions that seem incredibly easy, but aren't. Sleep is just one of them.
But we sleep to rest, right? Well, yes and no. Your body can undergo the same amount of resting while watching the television as it does while sleeping. Plus, that fitful rest that you achieve during sleep is always broken up by the long periods of hyper-activity known as REM - the dreaming stage. So perhaps dreaming is important. It's been suggested that dreaming aids in long term memory storage, but studies have also shown that people who's REM is inhibited have no loss in ability for such storage. So we're back at the drawing board.
At the end of the day, we have ideas, but just don't know at all why we sleep. Plus, not sleeping will kill us - faster than not eating or not drinking water - so it must be crucial to our being. We just don't know what we achieve by doing it. I know this all sounds silly in the face of common sense. I sleep when I'm tired, and I feel refreshed. It seems easy to explain sleep. It just isn't.
Some other things we can't explain:
How did the universe begin?
How does the brain produce consciousness? (some of you may know this is one of my favorites; the brain is literally just meat; meat + electricity = who we are; crazy right?)
What causes gravity?
There are many others. Things that we experience everyday that we just do not know. Maybe cannot know. Cannot figure out. Think about how that applies to your daily life. How much you leave to chance, to faith. How much you accept without knowing. Even in a non-religious sense, the list of things we have faith about is incredible. We have no choice but to live lives of faith every time we go to sleep, drive a car, get on a plane (no one understands turbulence yet), have blood pump through our veins (turbulence, again), experience time, give birth (no one quite understands how an egg turns into a human), and the list goes on and on.
We basically, don't know much of anything.
Oh, and if you have some spare time, try to solve (prove or disprove) the Riemann Hypothesis. It has implications for prime numbers - the building blocks of all numbers since all numbers can be created by multiplying primes together - and will net you a cool million dollars if proven (or disproven). Plus, the fame and adulation of math nerds everywhere.
Who wouldn't want that?
07 September 2007
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