The power of sleep

How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Scientists recommend a solid eight hours of sleep every night. However, as everyone knows, you can get by with much less sleep if needed. Or can you? Research on sleep has uncovered some pretty amazing (and likely frightening) facts about sleep and the lack of it. The Power of Sleep Sleep is far more powerful than most realize. A part of your brain called the hippocampus is responsible for your memory of learned things. During sleep, the cells in your hippocampus essentially hit the save button and then reset to take in more memories. The magic amount of sleep required for the maximum saving and resetting of your memory is eight hours. Any less and the ability to process new data greatly decreases. An experiment had a large group of people sleep eight hours and another group was deprived of some sleep. Both groups were hooked up to MRI machines to measure activity in their hippocampus. Those who had less than eight hours of sleep had up to a 40% drop in memory-forming brain activity. It looks like cramming for that test is not as effective as you think because your brain cannot process the data. No Back Up Plan Your body is a powerhouse and it requires a reset every day in order to function properly. Sleep is not unique to humans. Every animal sleeps and they have forever. Remember, humans are animals–a fact that is often forgotten. What is also often forgotten is that most animals have been on Earth sleeping for a lot longer than our existence. What is unique to humans is our constant desire to cut short our sleep period. No other animal does so much to disrupt its sleep than the human animals. […]

Click here to view full article