Sleeping Heals
During an experiment, healthy adults were either given a full night’s sleep, or sleep deprived. The results of the experiment showed that your sleep cycle involves the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex of your brain. It makes sense for the amygdala to be involved, since it’s the main source for your emotions. So, if you were sleep deprived, the amygdala would be extremely active, while on the other hand, the adults who received a full sleep had normal amygdala activity. The prefrontal cortex is like the control center of your brain, which includes control over the amygdala. The prefrontal cortex of the adults who didn’t receive enough sleep, had lost control over the amygdala, so it was no longer being regulated properly, which leads to the explanation of why we get emotional after not having enough sleep.
I watched the Ted Talk to hopefully find out why I like to sleep a lot, especially after a major change happens in my life. Matt Walker, the speaker of the Ted Talk, found out from his study that when humans have bad experiences throughout their day, they are able to find peace and heal by sleeping. He also said that sleeping away those bad experiences helped us renew ourselves for the next day, and learned to help cope with our emotions. Sleeping was found to be soothing, and act as an emotional first aid to difficult experiences we’ve been through. I figured that would explain why I chose to “sleep away my problems” all the time, and it was interesting to learn about how much sleep we get has an effect on our minds and body.
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I never knew that the relationship between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex was responsible for sleep cycles.
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