TED Talk:One more reason to get a good night’s sleep - Loss of sleep is a waste!

Loss of sleep is a waste! Get rid of the day's garbage....seriously...

This is a great talk!

JR

Jeff Iliff: One more reason to get a good night’s sleep

. It's something we spend about a third of our lives doing, but do any of us really understand what it's all about?

0:19Two thousand years ago, Galen, one of the most prominent medical researchers of the ancient world,proposed that while we're awake, our brain's motive force, its juice, would flow out to all the other parts of the body, animating them but leaving the brain all dried up, and he thought that when we sleep, all this moisture that filled the rest of the body would come rushing back, rehydrating the brain and refreshing the mind. Now, that sounds completely ridiculous to us now, but Galen was simply trying to explainsomething about sleep that we all deal with every day. See, we all know based on our own experiencethat when you sleep, it clears your mind, and when you don't sleep, it leaves your mind murky. But while we know a great deal more about sleep now than when Galen was around, we still haven't understood why it is that sleep, of all of our activities, has this incredible restorative function for the mind.

1:17So today I want to tell you about some recent research that may shed new light on this question. We've found that sleep may actually be a kind of elegant design solution to some of the brain's most basic needs, a unique way that the brain meets the high demands and the narrow margins that set it apart from all the other organs of the body...
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