Sleep?

I can not even begin to count the amount of nights I have laid awake at night wondering why sleep is such a hard thing to come by, or better yet why It is even necessary. The reasons for it are obvious though. The brain needs some downtime to repair and maintain itself. The thing that gets me all interested in it is why it was evolutionarily weaves into every animal on the planet.

The cause is probably as simple as the fact that since it gets dark at night the body might as well have a resting period due to the fact that there is no way of seeing the world around them. Not until very recently when homo sapiens discovered they could harness energy and illuminate the nighttime for their own wills, no other creature was able to fully take advantage of all 24 hours of the day. Which begs the question, could we systematically reduce our sleeping periods to a fraction of what they once were?

The thing that bugs me about the whole sleep thing is that it does not seem evolutionarily prudent. I would think that any animal that decides to lay down for 8 hours un-moving and un-aware of its surroundings would have died out a long time ago. A sleeping animal would be easy pickings to any fortunate predator that may stumble upon them. Even that did not stop sleep from continuing to be a huge part of an animals cycles.

Probably the most irritating thing about sleep is that it is not an instant thing. One must almost chase it down and overtake it, or at least that is what it feels like sometimes. The brain has to wait until the heart rate and breathing are a certain reduced speed before the process can begin. It is almost painful having to wait for the body to decide it is ready for sleep when the person had decided on that fact hours beforehand.

I wonder if on planets in other systems where they are gravitationally locked into their rotation, one side of the planet always in darkness and one in light. That if those twilight zone animals require sleep or if it has even come to exist in their ecosystem. If sleep originated due to the dark nights here on earth, what would happen if on that planet it was always daytime? Would animals that were never unable to sense their surroundings have come to a point where sleep is required?

I think one of the goals of future bioengineers should be to either find a way for the brain to do the processes it does while sleeping on the fly, or at the very least reduce the required time for sleep. A world without sleep would be a much more efficient place.


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