Why is sleep necessary to survive? This is what Harvard says

He dream it empowers the mind, restores the body, and strengthens virtually every system in the body. All experts agree that having a few healthy sleep patterns it is essential to manage different health factors, such as weight, blood pressure or the risk of type 2 diabetes. So much so that last July, the American Heart Association reviewed its recommendations to include in its list for staying healthy a proper rest.

Different studies have shown that if you don’t get enough sleep, not even one night, you may have difficulties thinking and reacting under certain circumstances. Despite its importance, scientists still do not fully understand how sleep works.

The neurobiologist at the Blavatnik Institute of the School of Harvard medicine Dragan Rogulj, has spent years trying to unravel the basic biology of sleep. In his research on sleep, he uses fruit flies and mice to explore why we need to sleep and how we disconnect from the world during sleep.

One intriguing aspect of the dream, Rogulja explains in an interview with Harvard Medicine News, is the loss of consciousness that comes with it as the outside world disappears and the inner world takes over.

In a recent article published in Cell, the neurobiologist explores how the brain disconnects from the environment during sleep. “Until now, we knew almost nothing about this. It was not clear if there is a single location in the brain where all sensory information is attenuated during sleep, or if there are several such locations.”

For example, are touch and temperature processed in the same way during sleep? Dragana Rogulja explains that Iris Titosa postdoctoral researcher in his lab, built a system that can deliver low, medium, or high vibration levels to fruit flies: “Usually when you use low intensity vibrationsvery few flies wake up, and when you use high intensity vibrations, almost all flies react.

We then did a large-scale screen to identify the genes that control how easily the flies wake up, that is, the genes that make the flies wake up very easily and the genes that allow the flies to essentially sleep for a while. earthquake,” he concludes.

Why is sleep necessary?

In 2020 in a article in Cell the researcher addressed the question of why sleep is necessary for survival: “We found that the fruit flies that slept less had a shorter life expectancy: We saw a correlation in which the more the flies slept, the faster they died. Interestingly, the mode of sleep deprivation did not matter. What mattered was the amount of sleep lost. There seemed to be a tipping point where sleep loss was associated with death, telling us that something specific might be going on in the body rather than general wasting away.”

To investigate this further, “we stained different organs in sleep-deprived flies with markers of cell damage. We discovered that in the intestine there was an increase in oxidant molecules, and the oxidation peak correlated with the inflection point where the flies started to die. We confirmed this finding in sleep-deprived mice. But when we gave sleep-deprived flies antioxidants or turned on antioxidant-producing genes in the gut, we found that the flies could survive on little or no sleep, suggesting that the gut is a really important target of sleep.”