Some do
it hanging upside down. Some do it for a few hours at a time. Some do it buried
under a blanket of mud.
Regardless
of their preferred mode, bats, elephants, frogs, honeybees, humans and more
have something in common: They all sleep.
In fact,
scientists have yet to find a truly sleepless creature. But is sleep really
necessary for survival? [Why Do We
Sleep?]
The
dangers of sleeplessness
Most
humans will acknowledge that sleep is absolutely necessary.
People
often struggle to function after even just one sleepless night. Poor sleep over
the long term has been linked to a host of negative
health effects, from heart disease and stroke to weight gain and
diabetes. These connections, and the fact that all animals seem to slumber,
suggest that sleep must play an essential function for animals. But what is
that function? Does sleep allow the brain to repair damage and process
information? Is it necessary for energy regulation in the body? Scientists and
thinkers as far back as the Greek
philosopher Aristotle have offered explanations for why we sleep,
and yet, the exact purpose of sleep remains an open question.
In the
1890s, Marie de Manacéïne, one of the first female physicians in Russia, was
troubled by the mystery of sleep.
"We
all love life, and we all wish to live as long as possible, but in spite of
this, we sacrifice one-third, sometimes even half of our life in sleeping,"
Manacéïne once
wrote. In her quest to figure out what exactly sleep is, she
conducted the first sleep-deprivation experiment in animals.
Using an
approach that now seems quite cruel, the physician kept puppies continuously
awake, finding that they died after a few days of sleep deprivation. Over
subsequent decades, further sleep-deprivation experiments using other animals,
like rodents and cockroaches, found similarly fatal results. However, the
underlying cause of death in these cases, and how it relates to sleep, is still
unknown.
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