That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites - Why We Sleep

Episode Date: April 5, 2024

In today's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss the biological factors that explain why we sleep. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kregolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another Neuroscience Bite. This one sort of parallels the last episode, which was I talked about 21 tips to improve sleep quality. And we've talked about sleep in the past. We have an episode on sleep and we've talked about sleep a lot because, you know, I'm a big proponent of sleep, especially in terms of the brain and brain health. But a question keeps coming up. You know, I gave a talk recently about sleep to a group and that's

where the 21 tips came from, because the group really liked that. But the big thing was, you've told us about stages of sleep and EEG and sleep, which is what we covered back in season one when I talked about sleep. But people said I'd never really answered the question, why from a neuroscience perspective, do we sleep? So why do we sleep? Well, simply put from a physiological perspective first, we sleep because our body has to recover, right? Our muscles get tired, they get sore, they get used, and you need to sleep for your muscles to recover. Is the same true for your brain? Yes and no. We know that your brain begins to function more poorly if you stay awake for too long. All right. Your brain suffers. You get into

cognitive fatigue, which we talked about a while back. All right. Cognitive overload. So that's really why we sleep from a neuroscience perspective. Number one, your brain needs to recover as well. That neural circuitry needs to take a bit of time off. Neural circuits need to recharge. Energy systems within the brain need to recharge. But I mentioned this in the sleep episode and we dove into it in depth. But the other reason is this is when we learn, right? This is when memories are formed. The key phrase is consolidation, right? And that's when your memories get bound together and you either hang on to the information or you lose it. This

is why I've mentioned this before. For instance, if you consume alcohol after studying for an exam and then you try to sleep, well, this is why our memory is disrupted is because we've disrupted sleep quality. We don't spend enough time in stage two sleep, non-REM, and our memories don't form or consolidate the way they're supposed to. So why do we sleep from a neuroscience perspective? What is the answer? Number one, your brain needs to recharge just like your body does. All right, your brain cannot operate continually, processing information actively, you know, over extended periods of time. It needs a break, and that's what happens when we sleep.

Number two, this is when memory formation occurs. All right. So we sleep from a neuroscience perspective for those two key reasons, brain recovery, memory formation. All right. There's the definitive answer. Don't forget to check out the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com, links to Etsy and Patreon. If you've got ideas, thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com or at thatneurosciguy on threads and or X. And of course, thank you for listening to the podcast. Please subscribe. I hope you found that bite interesting. My name is Olive Craig Olson, and I'm that neuroscience guy. I'll see you soon.