A good night's sleep can rock your brain and make you smart

People judge me when I say I don't like sleep, but that's the truth. I have a huge difficulty falling asleep and, honestly, I interpret sleep as a waste of time - on weekends, for example, when I don't work, I hardly wake up after 7am, and if that happens, I feel like I've lost all day.

In my case, the reason I like to wake up early is that I'm more productive in the morning. However, the issue of disliking sleep has a lot to do with anxiety and ever-fast thinking. The problem is that I may not even want to sleep, but my body has been making it increasingly clear that he does want a good night's sleep. Every day, therefore, I ask myself: why do we have to sleep? Why do we have to sleep so much?

The truth is that this question intrigues even those who work on researching the human body, this fantastic machine with so many facets to unravel. The issue of sleep, for example, has gained a recent explanation, and obviously I had to try to understand a little about it.

Sleep comes and memory stays

Sleep seems to play a key role so that the brain is not overwhelmed with the new memories we create each day. Closing the lashes is like giving our thinking organ a nice bath, and people like me who sleep poorly or have a poor sleep need to find a way to solve this problem - just thinking about it takes me away. sleep...

When mice are deprived of sleep, they end up dying within a month. The same sleep deprivation in humans is capable of causing hallucinations and seizures of epilepsy.

The fact is that sleep is important for a number of reasons, both physiological and mental, and if you are studying something new right now, even better. Sleeping well helps us cement what we learn during the day, especially what we read shortly before falling asleep - tip for those preparing for Enem and the college entrance exam, huh!

But how?

In terms of memory, it works like this: Fresh memories are stamped in our brain by strengthening the bonds between our brain cells; On the other hand, we are still unsure how memories work when we are sleeping - we know, however, that during sleep they are better consolidated.

While we sleep, our brain connections become weaker, and that is precisely one of the functions of sleep: readjusting the frequencies of brain activity so that we can more easily store new learning: “sleep is the price we pay to learn, ” he summarized. Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

To make this statement, Tononi and a team of researchers studied the brain synapses of some mice. The finding was really significant: during sleep, there was an 18% reduction in brain activity in mice.

And Quico?

Proving this helps us understand why it's so hard to focus and learn new things after a bad night's sleep - it's all our brain's fault that it is less able to encode new experiences. That is, the ideal way to learn well is to sleep before and after studying new content - which basically means that we need to sleep well every day.

The matter of sleeping well makes a lot of sense; after all, if you stay in bed for eight hours but wake up several times at night, that means your brain goes in and out of optimal wave-tuning for full rest - and getting back to that sleep state can take some time, That's why sleeping poorly is as bad as sleeping poorly.

This new finding, which demonstrates a reduction in the number of synapses during sleep, supports the idea that sleep is a process of brain clearing and solidification of memories. This may seem like little to you, but it took scientists four years to analyze the work of 7, 000 brain synapses and reach that conclusion.

All this analysis allowed experts to discover that some synapses were protected and unchanged during sleep. For Tononi, this is possibly a way for the brain to preserve the most important memories. The way for anyone like me is to bet on chamomile tea, eye masks, meditation and breathing exercises that can help you relax more easily. Let the insomniac kick, but sleep is crucial ...

* Posted on 7/21/2016