Why Do We Need Sleep?

Why do we need sleep?

A lot of theories have been thrown up over the years as to what we need sleep for (to keep us wandering out of our caves and being eaten by sabertooth tigers, is one of the more entertaining possibilities), but noone has yet been able to point to a specific function of the sleep state that would explain why we have it and why we need so much of it.

The effect of sleep on memory and learning

Some memory tasks are more affected be sleep deprivation than others. A recent study, for example, found that recognition memory for faces was unaffected by people being deprived of sleep for 35 hours. However, while the sleep-deprived people remembered that the faces were familiar, they did have much more difficulty remembering in which of two sets of photos the faces had appeared. In other words, their memory for the context of the faces was significantly worse. (The selective effect of sleep on contextual memory is also supported in a recent mouse study – see below)

While large doses of caffeine reduced the feelings of sleepiness and improved the ability of the sleep-deprived subjects to remember which set the face had appeared in, the level of recall was still significantly below the level of the non-sleep-deprived subjects. (For you coffee addicts, no, the caffeine didn’t help the people who were not sleep-deprived).

Interestingly, sleep deprivation increased the subjects’ belief that they were right, especially when they were wrong. In this case, whether or not they had had caffeine made no difference.

In another series of experiments, the brains of sleep-deprived and rested participants were scanned while the participants performed complex cognitive tasks. In the first experiment, the task was an arithmetic task involving working memory. Sleep-deprived participants performed worse on this task, and the fMRI scan confirmed less activity in the prefrontal cortex for these participants. In the second experiment, the task involved verbal learning. Again, those sleep-deprived performed worse, but in this case, only a little, and the prefrontal areas of the brain remained active, while parietal lobe activity actually increased. However, activity in the left temporal lobe (a language-processing area) decreased. In the third study, participants were given a "divided-attention" task, in which they completed both an arithmetic and a verbal-learning task. Again, sleep-deprived participants showed poorer performance, depressed brain activation in the left temporal region and heightened activation in prefrontal and parietal regions. There was also increased activation in areas of the brain that are involved in sustained attention and error monitoring.

Sleep deprivation mimics aging?

A report in the medical journal The Lancet, said that cutting back from the standard eight down to four hours of sleep each night produced striking changes in glucose tolerance and endocrine function that mimicked many of the hallmarks of aging.

In another study, 84 college students were trained to identify a series