Ever wondered what that’s all about? One of the most astonishing aspects of our lives is that we spend a third of our time in the strange world of sleep. Newborn babies spend about twice that. It is tremendously difficult to remain awake for more than a full day-night cycle. In humans, continuous wakefulness of the nervous system results in extreme mental confusion. All mammals sleep, reptiles and birds sleep, and voluntary breathers like dolphins sleep with one brain hemisphere dormant at a time.

The fact that sleep comes with the loss of time and leaves the sleeper defenseless, suggest there is a deep importance and need for this activity. No one has really determined what the reason is but there has been a lot of scientific speculation.

The first is that sleep is restorative, saving and replenishing the body’s energy stores. However, the high neural activity during sleep suggests there is more to the story.

A second theory proposes that sleep allows the brain to run simulations of fighting, problem solving, and other key actions before testing them out in the real world.

A third theory—the one that enjoys the most evidence—is that sleep plays a critical role in learning and consolidating memories and in forgetting inconsequential details. In other words, sleep allows the brain to store away the important stuff and take out the neural trash.

Recently, the spotlight has focused on REM sleep as the most important phase for locking memories into long-term encoding. The emerging idea is that information replayed during sleep might determine which events we remember later. Sleep, in this view, is similar to a practice session for waking life. In several recent experiments, human subjects performing difficult tasks improved their scores between sessions on consecutive days, but not between sessions on the same day, implicating sleep in the learning process.

Scientist have located a spot on the skull that they can zap to induce (transcranial magnetic stimulation) the brain waves characteristic of deep, non-REM sleep. Studies have indicated that this stimulation applied at certain frequencies during sleep can improve memory. Even more intriguing, there is the possibility that if you have particularly intense slow waves, like the ones the machine induces; you may be able to do with less sleep. Electronic naps are a long way off, though. This is clearly not a machine that you can use at your house. But the future certainly holds this as a possibility for giving us more time to enjoy our waking reality.

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