The Purpose of Sleep?

Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. We would suggest that we sleep simply to save energy and load our bodies with new energy. While others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste, or that sleep simply forces animals to lie still, letting them hide from predators. But can sleep be used to forget?

A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day.

In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurones in our brains. And during our sleep our brain factory works more than ever, in silence. If you want to know more; read the full article here Carl Zimmer / New York Times.