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Consciousness
When speaking of a night’s repose, we sometimes use terms like “fast asleep” or “out cold” or “dead to the world.” However, a sleeping brain can be just as active as a wakeful one. In fact, neurologically, the primary distinction between being awake or asleep is more about what the brain is doing, rather than how busy it is. We don’t realize this, of course, because when we snooze, the part of the brain that makes us aware of the outside world and ourselves within it mostly shuts down.
Because most of our mental activity is unconscious anyway (well over 95%), waking consciousness is a relatively small slice of one’s neurological bandwidth. Meaning, in some sense, there’s a whole other “you” toiling through the night (or whenever you sleep), and that shadowy persona engages in functions vital to what the conscious self does while awake. During sleep, the brain is busy sorting, evaluating, discarding and retaining memories from your waking moments, among many other functions. It’s making decisions, finding meaning in experiences, writing the narrative of one’s life and, of course, dreaming. Thankfully, it’s also maintaining all your physiological operations.
Sleep experts like to say, “acquire by day, process by night,” meaning that waking consciousness gathers experiences and information that are later processed by sleeping consciousness. These two kinds of neurological activity (awake/acquire and asleep/process) work in tandem to create a functional modus operandi for getting along in life. Without the downtime afforded by sleep for data processing and warehousing, we remember less, learn little and undermine the intuitive and creative insights that sometimes follow a night of “sleeping on it.” Research shows that, when deprived of sufficient repose, we show marked deficits in memory, learning, judgment and overall cognitive performance, not to mention emotional well-being.
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Sleep Enhances Learning
For example, in one experiment, pianists who slept in between practice sessions demonstrated faster and more accurate learning than their counterparts who did not. Similar studies with students point to the same effect—sleep enhances learning. Something you can tell your teacher the next time you’re caught nodding off in class.
Speaking of which, many of us are chronically sleep deprived, which has a deleterious impact on work and academic performance, mood, concentration, recall, etc. When it comes to learning, we tend to regard what we do while awake as vital and what we do while asleep as secondary or irrelevant. But it just ain’t so. The information we absorb during our waking hours needs to be examined, processed, categorized, and then either discarded or stored for future use. Sleeping does that.
What’s worse, sleep deprivation is associated with increased incidence and severity of depression, anxiety and, in some, suicidal thoughts. Prolonged absence of sleep induces confusion and, in some, even psychosis. The brain is a primary regulator of emotion, so when it’s fatigued, dour moods usually follow. Many an impulsive and poor decision has been made by the blurry-eyed among us.
In the Dark
The division of labor between waking and sleeping consciousness reflects an evolutionary adaptation to living on a planet roughly divided between day and night. During daytime, our ancient ancestors used their awareness to be externally focused, engaged with the outside world and in acquisition mode. In the dark, when external focusing became more difficult, if not impossible, their brains went into internal mode, diminishing input and maximizing analytic processing.
Today, we have pushed back the darkness with lighting and technology, disrupting our sleep and downtime. Increasingly, we over-load with external input by staying awake and stuffing our brains with media, while, by sleeping less, we under-load our need for internal processing. This unbalances our brains, and our overall well-being takes the hit.
Meaning it’s prudent to adopt behaviors that support restful sleep. If you want details, do an online search for “sleep hygiene.” Weird term, but good information. So, to some extent, how we sleep determines how we function while awake. Vice versa, what we do during our waking hours impacts how well we sleep, so both these mental operating systems need to work in coordination.
As writer and theologian Frederick Buechner summarized, “Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean; not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day's chalking.”
For more, visit philipchard.com.
