How The Body Regulates Its Internal Clock

One of the question that will be answer in my essay is why we sleep? Is it because of an ancient survival instinct we have? It very well could be however another explanation for why we sleep is based on the belief that sleep is for our bodies to restore what we lost in the body while we were awake. It is thought to provide the body with the rest it needs in order to repair itself. We have been able to gather information about sleep due to human and animal study and research alike. One of the things we have learned from animal research is that the animals who are deprived of sleep start to have their immune system deteriorate. We can support this claim because of the findings of the hormones that are released. One of the other positive aspects of sleep is that when we

These cycles are based on the approximately twenty-four-hour tau of humans and external factors, called zeitgebers. The sleep cycle affects multiple parts of a person’s day, including school or work, naps, eating, or driving. Research has found that there is an endogenous clock but that animals are also affected by external cues through free-running experiments. An experiment was done concerning circadian rhythms and their connection through metabolism. The researchers looked at multiple factors affecting sleep as a homeostatic process along with a circadian process (Albrecht 27). These factors included neurotransmitters, protein kinases, and metabolism, along with others. The way the body affects our behavior is apparent when looking at the habit that is

In this column, analyze the significance of your quotations. Allow the following questions to guide your responses: Why is this important? What does this reveal? Why does the author say it this way? What is the tone/mood of this passage?

“Why do we sleep?” is a very popular questions that many humans ask today. Sleep is very sufficient to the human body. If it was not important, then God would not have designed for a third of our life to be occupied by sleep. During this time period, many people are interested to know what is a good amount of sleep and what are the harmful effects to not getting enough sleep.

Circadian rhythms occur every 24 hours; an example of a circadian rhythm is the sleep-waking cycle. We are diurnal animals who are active during the daytime and asleep at night, other animals are nocturnal they are active at night but asleep during the day. The circadian rhythm depends on the interaction of physiological and psychological processes to be tuned into the sleep-waking cycle so energy is provided when needed. As diurnal humans we have a fairly stable sleep pattern with the time we go to sleep and the time we wake up, this consistency suggests an internal mechanism controls sleep, endogenous pacemaker. However, this can be overridden by external factors, exogenous zeitgebers.

The human body has a plethora of rhythms that regulate activity such as behavioral processes, physiological functions, moods, and performance. Sleep is a major action that falls into this category of

Humans have a natural rhythm of 25 hours of sleep and wakefulness, in order to reset this the brain plays an important role with the suprachiasmatic nucleus which is a cluster of neurons in the medial hypothalamus of the brain. The SCN

It is no secret that, similar to other animals, sleep is one of the most important things for a human being’s overall health. According to Watson and Breedlove, there are four main biological/neurological functions of sleep: energy conservation—the body uses less energy when it is asleep through what is called slow-wave sleep (SWS) by doing things such as reducing body temperature and slowing respiration; niche adaptation—the environmental happenings to which organisms are adapted to; body restoration—it restores materials used during awake hours; and memory consolidation—SWS and REM sleep help the brain consolidate memories from the previous day (2012).

In contrast to the previously presented evidence that sleep involves a global neuronal network and is controlled by global homeostatic systems, the main findings of this study present results that show SWA being induced in select areas of the cerebral cortex, which suggests that sleep coordination may consist of local regulation, indicating that sleep may have an effect as specific as the cellular level. Moreover, their results demonstrated that improved performance tasks after sleep can be strongly attributed to local SWA homeostasis (Figure 2), which supports the notion that SWA may play a highly influential role in synaptic consolidation and synaptic downscaling in wake-active neuronal connections (Huber et al.,

The average human spends about 25 years of their life sleeping. That is equal to one-third of a person’s life. So if sleep is vital and common among every single human, what do you know about it? What happens when we sleep (Attention Grabber)? Before the 1950s, scientists believed that the brain would just “shut off” when we would go to sleep. It wasn’t until the discovery of the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) state that scientists really looked into what happens in the brain while we are asleep. Studies have found that we go through a cycle of stages during sleep, and it is important for our health (Orientation to Topic). Today, I am going to inform you about what really happens when we sleep, and some issues that are found among it (Specific Purpose). In order to really understand this worldwide commonality, you need to know some background on sleep, the stages in the cycle, and some common disorders (Central Idea). I have taken a year long psychology course that went into depth on sleep psychology, and I have done extensive research on the topic to better grasp it (Statement of Credibility). I want to inform you on sleep so you can understand what happens when you close your eyes every night, and so you can detect any irregularities in your sleep pattern (Statement of Goodwill). First, I will give a background of why and how we know to sleep, then I will explain the stages in the sleep cycle, and finally I will tell you about some common disorders (Preview).

In life, we all encounter those night where we can’t seem to get to sleep. This can be due to insomnia or having a lot of things to do and little time to do them. During college and afterwards people will begin to deal with a lack of sleep more and more as they gain more responsibilities. I’ve always heard it’s not good to go without sleep and I agree with this thought. This was confirmed when we had a lecture on consciousness. We discussed how our sleep and wake schedule, biological clocks, bodily functions, etc., are controlled by circadian rhythms (Truelove, 2017).

The in-depth quality of the “Sleep-Wake” paper may be linked to the qualifications of its authors. All three sources were written by some level of expert within the field. Keith J. Anderson, the writer of the article “College Students try to Cheat Sleep Needs” for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has a Ph D., yet is only a counselor for Gallagher Health Center. The four authors of the Biological Rhythm Research study are all very highly specialized in this area. As workers and researchers for the Physiology Department for the Chronobiological Laboratory in Natal, Brazil, they deal with the intricacies of sleep and its effects on the human body daily. The people who wrote the “Sleep-Wake” pattern are also very well educated and conditioned to address the topic of sleep and its effect on college students. Two of these authors are professors with the Department of the Sciences of Education at an international university, while the third author works directly with the Sleep Disorders Unit inside of the

Sleep is a condition were the body & mind which is typically recurs for several hours every night in which the nervous system is relatively inactive, the eyes closed the postural muscles relax and consciousness practically suspended.

The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) serves as the biological clock for the human body. It controls the melatonin production of the body, depending of the amount of light that fall into the eye causing the sleep-wake cycle. The human body goes through 5 ultradian sleep cycles, each approximately 90 minutes long. Each cycle consist of a number of stages going up to four; that then again reverse up to the second stage. Instead of going back to stage one, the body then enters a stage of active sleep with increased blood pressure, oxygen consumption and neural firing, as well as eye movement that resembles that of a waking person, called rapid eye movement sleep (REM). The less active stages are called non rapid eye movement (NREM) or slow-wave sleep.

Circadian rhythm refers to the twenty-four-hour cycle that results in physical, mental and behavioral changes in living things. Animals and plants respond differently to the lightness and darkness depending on the circadian rhythm or the internal biological clock. The body clock works responsibly in making sure that the pattern of mental alertness of a person is enhanced. A DNA molecule is transmitted to pass the message for opening up of the RNA, and the mRNA is transformed into a protein which takes some time for the DNA to be turned into a molecule. The time of conversion is determined and kept by the body’s biological clock (Alice, 2012). If the clock fails to work the level of alertness can be affected, and this can make a person to cause traffic accidents or even cause injuries at the place of work. Also, some people can suffer from chronic diseases if the biological clock is altered with.