Sleep studies | Teen Ink

Sleep studies

March 28, 2023
By JudeH BRONZE, Cannon Falls, Minnesota
JudeH BRONZE, Cannon Falls, Minnesota
1 article 0 photos 0 comments

Why We Need More Sleep

Lying in bed lets the brain rewind and recharge. The internal gears and cogs begin their symphony all night long. The night shift begins with workers hard at work, silent but powerful. The host lies unknown to their marvels, only caught up in the phony psychedelic experiences they were led to believe. Sleep has amazing properties like this that are very important in the growth and development of the body. I think that more people need sleep. It is well overlooked, and I think that should change. It plays a huge role in mental and physical health. Sleep is a tool that, if used correctly, can advance a person's life for the better. Sleep is a state in which one can subconsciously multiply cells to grow and repair. Sleep has been studied for millennia, by philosophers to religious leaders to scientists. This will be analyzed along with the many misconceptions. The cause and effect of the misconceptions and the correct data for the best night's sleep will be researched. 


It transpires all vertebrate life; sleep is a universal phenomenon that unites the common in animals' core aspect of life, yet the properties remain a scientific conundrum. Looking back in time, one can see how the benefits of sleep have persisted. Alcmaeon of Croton was a Greek doctor and philosopher, and he was the first to analyze the similarities between the sleep world and awake life. He said, "sleep is the result of blood on the surface of the body withdrawing into the interior." His work was some of the first records of this practice and oftentimes linked it with religion or the afterlife. No reason or recent research supports his claim, but he did lay the foundation for this practice. Research gathered by Sofia Aziz at academia.edu was last updated in 2019. At the same time, this is where most of the misconceptions get themselves from old research with not the best data or tools. There is a little bit of truth to some of them, and they can still be enjoyable to learn about. But for my reasoning and finding the best results, I am going to stick to the facts.


This ties into my next point about up-to-date facts and practices. In a typical sleep experiment, known as a polysomnogram, a patient will lie in a comfortable bed with wires attached to the patient's head, loosely fit to have maximum movement and flexibility, while highly trained technicians and medical professionals take a hand at the mysteries of the widely unknown topic of sleep. They observe the patientś patterns unique to them, including the time spent in light and deep sleep stages and even oxygen levels. To measure the blood oxygen levels, the technicians will put a clip on either the earlobe or finger. Most people will get used to these factors quickly, but if someone is inspected and has obstructive sleep apnea, they may benefit from a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine. There are 5 nap periods that are recommended to the patient, often 2 hours apart from each other. Over this period of time, hundreds of pages of details will be documented after the night is over. But even with this top-notch technology, we still cannot answer the hard-to-reach questions of why and how we dream and sleep. Info set up by Alexa Fry at Sleep Foundation.org, updated March 25, 2022.

Neuroscience studies have tried to unravel this enigma, but the studies are complex and difficult to grasp even with top technology. Dreams, for example, are strange occurrences that happen while the host is asleep; they typically happen during REM sleep but can occur at any time of the night. A widely known hypothesis about dreams is that there is a survival mechanism in the sense that dreaming about a predator and how to counter it would give a person exploitable force over a nondreamer. As well, when sleeping, someone could be vulnerable, but the conscience believes that dreaming about threats balances things out. This theory is not a closed book; it raises the question of how such strange dreams occur. Oftentimes, the dream depends on the dreamer or situations they're familiar with. With dreams, a common occurrence is that most people will only remember the dream if they wake up directly after or during it. This is most likely because, after a night of sleep, it's possible to forget other information because dreams help get rid of useless information. For example, many people have said that they feel better after a dreamy sleep compared to a non-dreamy night. According to a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, "Why We Dream" was published on March 7th, 2014.

   

Lastly, nightmares and dreams, nightmares are vivid dreams that occur during REM sleep. There is a mysterious aspect of sleep that causes the host to be filled with mixed emotions throughout their night and sleep life. There have been countless misconceptions and ideas about why we have these types of dreams. Throughout any given night, we dream for an average of 90 minutes, and the length of the dream depends on how long we are asleep. While in these stages of dreams, dream analysis can be very complex. Many people have tried their hand at analyzing dreams. Sigmund Freud, the beloved father of psychoanalysis, was respected in dream interpretation. He explained that behavior stems from unconscious thoughts, and dreams are the expressers of these secret primal desires. Unfortunately, his claims have not been backed by research, and on the other hand, it's not something that can be easily tested in a lab.


Meanwhile, it's hard for just one person to grasp this tangled system of science and practices. Science needs work as much as anything else, but it can be better understood if these studies are more favorably funded and widely understood. Sleep and dreams have amazing properties that generate unique and inspiring ideas. Dreams are poetry, the internal factory that gives new ideas and gets rid of useless information. Sleep is important, from hormone release to cell reproduction; it is the fundamental source of life and protection for all vertebrate life and must be studied and protected.



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