Word: sleepings
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...THEORY OF SLEEP...
Perhaps that's what sleep really is--A series of repeated cycles of pruning and strengthening of neural connections that enables you to learn new tricks without forgetting old ones. Of course, none of that explains why you have to be unconscious for all the pruning and strengthening to occur. Maybe it's just easier to be asleep than awake while the work is going on. "When you fall asleep, it's like you're leaving your house and the workmen come in to renovate," suggests Terry Sejnowski, a computational neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif...
...sounds plausible enough, but that doesn't mean everyone is convinced. "It may not sound exciting, but I think sleep is essentially for rest," says Robert Vertes, a neuroscientist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. Vertes thinks most sleep scientists are overinterpreting their data because they find it so hard to believe that our brains just need to shut down for eight hours or so every night. As for what's being done during that time, the short answer, he says, is "We don't know...
Perhaps the brain just needs to restore itself. "We've all had the experience of going to bed with a problem, getting a good night's sleep and waking up in the morning, and there's a solution," says Dr. Gregory Belenky, who recently retired as head of sleep research at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md., and is now at Washington State University at Spokane. But instead of thinking that extra information processing is going on during sleep, he says it makes as much sense to suggest that depleted circuits are just being rejuvenated...
...addition to refueling the brain, sleep seems to detoxify it. Animals with a high metabolic rate, like field mice and bats, use a lot of calories and generate a lot of destructive molecules called free radicals. "The brain is particularly susceptible to this because neurons, by and large, don't regenerate," says Jerome Siegel, a neuroscientist at UCLA and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Los Angeles. Maybe sleep provides necessary downtime so that the brain can deal with all those free radicals...