The Science of Sleep

The average healthy person, over the course of their entire life, will spend a third of it sleeping, yet many people seem to not think about it. Everyone sleeps and needs it; it is probably the most essential activity in our lives. So then, what really is sleep? And how and why is it important to us?

Before you continue reading, ask yourself if you get enough sleep every night. It will be important later on.

So the 7-9 hour sleep we should be getting every night can be divided into three different parts:

- Light Sleep - Happens towards the end of sleeping

- Deep Sleep - Happens at the beginning of sleeping

- Rem Sleep - Happens at the end of each 90-minute cycle

These different types serve their own purposes and functions within the brain and body. Firstly, let's talk about Deep Sleep.

Deep Sleep - The Memory Saver

The Hippocampus is the part of your brain which is in charge of creating long-term memories and storing information. Whenever you enter a state of Deep Sleep, your hippocampus processes the newly learned information acquired during the daytime, when your brain is awake and stores them in the form of new neurons and networks in different parts of your brain.

Therefore, whether you are sleeping a bit later because of that homework due at 11:59, or staying up playing games, your brain will lack the Deep Sleep it should get every night. Missing a majority of the Deep Sleep, the hippocampus will not have enough time to transfer this new information that you acquired to the more permanent parts of your brain. This results in the inability to remember and retain this newly learned information, which might be why you constantly forget things.

Light Sleep - The Memory Cleaner

Light Sleep is like the janitor for the Hippocampus. After Deep Sleep completes its work and saves all the information it deems important and necessary, the janitor, Light Sleep, comes along and removes and forgets all the unnecessary information left in the hippocampus.

This is why waking up early is more counterproductive than most people think. The lack of Light Sleep means the majority of useless information still sticks around in your hippocampus. With a full hippocampus, it will be much more difficult to absorb new information affecting your ability to learn and study new things.

REM Sleep - The Memory Reader

Now comes REM Sleep. REM sleep is in charge of understanding the newfound information stored, thus making it crucial for the use of this information when we need it. It is also responsible for linking your recently stored information by Deep Sleep with other memories and information that was stored previously.

This is where many scientists and artists have their eureka moments during sleep. REM sleep helps them link their new ideas with previous ideas and come up with their solutions and art pieces.

Sleep is one of the most essential parts of our entire lives, and I think we should seek to understand it more and more. Especially as we live in a society where we are constantly adapting, and learning new things. Sleeping has become a large part of life that many people, including students, neglect.

While researching this topic, my perspective and views on sleep have completely changed. Something like waking up early, which I thought to be productive and great for a head start to begin the day, I now learned to be more counterproductive than helpful because of the lack of Light Sleep.

Ironically, sleeping is one of the most productive things a person could be doing, and thus, should never be overlooked.

Now back to the question at the beginning of the article. If you do not get enough sleep every night (< 7 hours), what activities are causing this, and are they really worth doing if you miss out on important parts of sleep?