Why do we need to sleep?
A new study has shed light on a profound connection between humans and jellyfish while illustrating the importance of one of the most fundamental human needs. According to “Discover Magazine”, researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel discovered one of the biggest reasons animals rest and sleep, courtesy of looking at jellyfish and other species without brains but with nervous systems.What they found was that sleep and rest are essential to protect neurons from DNA damage.
Neurons, or nerve cells, are the core of all animals’ nervous systems, allowing brains to communicate with the rest of the body and controlling animals like jellyfish that lack brains. The researchers found that neurons accumulate damage to their DNA during waking hours and that sleep is essential to giving those cells a chance to repair that damage and avoid long-term issues.Researchers discovered that jellyfish, zebrafish, and sea anemones all maintain schedules that include at least eight hours of sleep and rest, a cycle that closely mirrors that of humans.
“Our findings suggest that the capacity of sleep to reduce neuronal DNA damage is an ancestral trait already present in one of the simplest animals with nervous systems,” said Lior Appelbaum, the principal investigator of the Molecular Neuroscience Lab at the Faculty of Life Sciences and Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University.
Scientists have long wondered about the reason behind sleep, as it seemed to serve no basic purpose. Time spent sleeping or resting is time not spent hunting, eating, or mating, and leaves the animal vulnerable to predators. Experts previously speculated that sleep was for dreams, to provide the body time to rest and recover, or to help memory transfer in the brain.
So we do need sleep, sone seven-nine hours a night. But: are you getting enough?