Continuing on from my last post about rest and distraction, the main cause of sleep is that the body and brain need to rest. Humans are just like any other creature, so they have biological needs just like other living creatures. In the human body, there are two types of sleep. There is Rapid Eye Movement (REM) and Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM). NREM occurs first and it can last for minutes or hours.
During NREM, the body and brain slow down. Body temperature lowers, muscles relax, breathing slows down and thought processes ease off. During REM, the body and brain speed up. Brain waves are similar to wakefulness.
The human body cycles between NREM and REM. Each cycle lasts about 90 minutes. In the human brain, there is a part called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS controls whether we are awake or asleep. Making sure we get the right levels of sleep is highly essential. It influences physical and mental performance greatly and a lack of sleep can reduce performance and health considerably over time. Valuing sleep and rest is highly important too but we can’t always allocate an abundance of time to this.
Our brains are an open system. It must be in order to function, and exist as we are capable of perceiving it. A person's experience is a subjective representation of the world derived from sensory inputs, primarily their own eyes and ears. The human brain interprets this sensory input and forms a conceptual model of the world around them. This is what creates our experiences. The connected nature of the mind and senses has always been amazing to me and we continue to see evidence of its feats on a daily basis.
The human brain is a complex network of neurons that fire together and wire together. These connections evolve as we experience the world, which shapes our conceptual model. Every experience creates a new memory, which in time becomes part of our conceptual model.