There are fundamental reasons why people are forced to spend a third of their lives asleep, say scientists who have studied some of the ways neurons - the cells that make up our brains - work. The latter, despite the fact that it is a key achievement of evolution, is arranged in a rather specific way, requiring, in particular, significant interruptions for processing and ordering information.
These processes are the main reasons why people sleep. "In a dream, there is a certain optimization of the brain, that is, it is cleared of unnecessary neural connections, which allows, as it were, to free up space for new information," says Giulio Tononi, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, whose team of scientists under whose leadership confirmed this theory as a result of experiments on laboratory rodents.
Experiments on mice have shown that sleep reduces the number of synapses (connections between neurons) by about 20%, giving the brain almost unlimited possibilities for assimilating new information. This explains the long-known truth to all, formulated by the saying "the morning is wiser than the evening."
Kolesnikov Andrey