"yan king yin" <y.k.y@(no spam please)lycos.com> wrote in message news:<9pnkq8$jjs14 at imsp212.netvigator.com>...
> The conclusion seems to be that sleep has some special function. It
> could be recuperative, such as replenishing neurotransmitter stores.
>
First off, I should mention that I am new to this group. I am a
biology student at University of Wisconsin Whitewater. So I suppose
you can regard this as 'Hi'.
One would first jump to the conclusion that sleep has to do with
neurotransmitter replenishment. However, observation seems to
indicate that we replenish neurotransmitters during waking hours just
fine. Take the example of a person using MDMA which causes mass
release of seretonin. When the effect of the drug wears off, they
will often take another dose but find that it is ineffective. That is
because all of their seretonin has been reabsorbed into the neuron
after release and is awaiting to be brought back into the vesicles
(which is the part of reuptake that takes most of the time). This can
happen while awake, as sometimes people will take and feel the effects
of the drug more than once during a waking period. However it is a
safe guess that this process is far more active in the sleeping brain,
which accounts for hallucinogenic effects of extreme sleep
deprivation.
However, I take a different stance on sleep. This falls more in the
realm of psychology than biology and focuses on dreaming. Oftentimes
people recall certain events of the previous day appearing in various
mutations throughout a dream. Could it be possible that it has
something to do with editing long-term memory? This also goes along
with what someone had mentioned about becoming mentally slower with
lack of sleep. Perhaps the brain is becoming overtaxed with all the
data that is waiting to be edited and compressed during the dream
cycle. Of course the mental slowness could be accounted for by lack
of seretonin.