Sleep

I have had a theory for a long time that the reason we must sleep is to give our brains ,which are after all electric, the chance to cool down. When we sleep, and more specifically when we dream, different neural pathways are used thus allowing the day-time portion of our brain a change to drop a chance to cool by a significant enough amount to be watched in a CT scan.

Now I could be all wet here but the science makes sense and when I am pushing my personal sleep threshold I feel warm and flushed. You see I do have a sleep threshold, even if I claim to never sleep. To this end I have long felt it is more important to keep track of the sleep you are not getting rather than the sleep you are. Hence I track my sleep as a ratio: hours slept during the past three days over 72. Due to a good nap on Friday I am currently at 16+/72 or about .22. Well rested is around .33 (8hrs a day) for me .25 is plenty for sustained operation.

You see I have reached a point where if I get “too much sleep” I don’t feel quite right. I just don’t feel I can push myself as hard and I know I think differently. Of Course the other end of the spectrum is worse when the body is trying to shut down the mind in order to protect it… this is why 3am is a bad time to right an essay.

When I don’t sleep my eyes begin to get sore and red, I find that by taking care of this with eye drops I can squeeze in a few extra productive hours. I can also feel my digestion slow down, this is similar to what is know in physiology as the sympathetic response but is called by many people the fight or flight reflex. I don’t think it is a true sympathetic response because I don’t feel the adrenaline kick in but they might be going unnoticed by me. If the adrenaline is there then it is actually possible that I am addicted to sleep deprivation, in a smaller scale but similar way that thrill seekers can “get hooked on the rush”. If you know much about my sleep habit you understand that this addiction theory is not so far fetched.

Though I have never done drugs, I compare my description of how I feel at different levels of sleep deprivation to how other people have described being high it goes something like this. Lots of sleep means I pick up visual and audio stimuli that I probably would not have noticed “normally” yet focus is not automatic. As exhaustion approaches everything becomes funnier, reflexes slow, and mind will become increasingly more “blank”. Beyond tired is a strange hung-over period, fevered, and queasy with a headache. As tired compounds I have reached a point of hallucination, thinks that are stationary appear to be moving, natural patterns change as you try and focus on them and just closing your eyes a world of clearly definable images with no correlation to reality dance in vivid colors.

I guess the bottom line of what I am trying to say here is that our bodies need sleep or else they start to do things that are more that a little weird.