Sleep Tips – Biological Implications

Transcript

So during our sleep, we have important functions and we’re all biologically programmed to get, get it. It’s not a voluntary activity. It’s mandatory animals need their sleep. Even single cell organisms sleep. And of course, more complex organisms such as ourselves, elephants only need four hours of sleep. That’s what their biological programming is, big cats in the wild, like lions and tigers, they need 16 to 20 hours of sleep. They have a different biology, but everybody needs sleep and it’s got important functions and we can’t live without it. Although we may try, when we’ve seen people be sleep deprived first, they act almost as if they’re drunk, they may lose motor function. They may not balance well walk. Well, they may slur their speech and their cognitive functions are very much affected. So again, volunteers who participate in studies get sequentially, sleep deprived, and they’re tested. We watch them do math and spelling and reading comprehension tasks, and their scores go down. The more awake they are. In fact, eventually they can hallucinate and even die. Sleep’s mandatory. We’ve got to do it. It’s a big problem today to not get enough sleep. And also there are many different sleep disorders which have finally become recognized and many treatments and evaluations, and even a specialty of medicine all about sleep because it’s that important to good health.