We know it’s good for us and we are constantly told to get more of it, but what is so good about sleep? It turns out, quite a lot actually – sleep is beneficial to our well being, whether that be psychological, physical, medical etc and is by definition, “A condition of body and mind which typically recurs for several hours every night, in which the nervous system is inactive, the eyes closed, the postural muscles relaxed, and consciousness practically suspended.”
Insufficient sleep is deemed as a public health problem by the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the US. In order to bring it closer to home, a study conducted by the UK Sleep Council found that one third of Britons get just five to six hours of sleep a night instead of the recommended seven to eight hours. Feeling grumpy and lacking focus are common but another consequence is having an increased likelihood of forming false memories. Research has been published in Psychological Science on sleep deprivation and false memories (Frenda, 2014) and the experiment showed that sleep-deprived people who viewed photographs of a crime being committed and then read false information about the photos were more likely to report remembering the false details in the photos than were those who got a full night’s sleep. Sleep also contributes to brain development, with brain plasticity being one of the more recent explanations as to why we need to sleep. The brain plasticity theory suggests that sleep is parallel to changes in structure and organisation of the brain. Infants and young children can spend around 13 to 14 hours sleeping each day and about half of that time is spent in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, the stage in which most dreams occur. Without REM sleep, permanent plastic changes to the visual cortex do not occur and the ERK enzyme does not activate (ERK enzyme works by turning neuronal genes into proteins, which solidify the brain changes) .
Sigmund Freud famously theorised that dreams were the “royal road to the unconscious” and gave psychoanalysis as one reason to why we have dreams. Freud had little understanding of the REM and NREM sleep cycles but modern day dream research has pointed us to a number of other theories however there is yet no definitive answer as to why we have dreams. Theories include dreaming because of random impulses (Hobson & McCarley, 1977) , dreaming to organise the brain, dreaming to help to solve problems (Fiss, 1993 suggested that dreaming registers extremely subtle hints which go unnoticed when we are fully conscious during the day, hence where the phrase, “sleeping on it”, comes from) and dreaming to cope with trauma. Almost all people have several dreams each night but only 5% of those dreams are recalled through memory once we wake up. As complex as this all sounds, as there is currently no definitive answer, it is still possible that dreams are just a product of randomly firing neurons.
Sleep is essential and we all know it but with our busy lives and need to contribute to society in some way, it is easy to neglect it. As a sleep deprived teenager who is confused about the clocks changing and is currently racing against time (which could just be a man-made construct and not real) to finish piles of work, I am more than looking forward to falling asleep and seeing what weird dreams I have but to be honest, I don’t think I’ll remember any of them in the morning anyway.
annabelpsychology 