Why We Don’t Know More About Sleep

The human brain is often called the most complicated thing in the universe. This is blatantly false on many levels. A human contains a brain, and other organs besides. Isn’t a human more complex than a brain? An ecosystem contains a multitude of organisms. Isn’t that more complex than a single human brain? The universe itself consists of everything in existence, so that would make the universe the most complicated thing in the universe, wouldn’t it? I understand that some people only mean that a human brain is incredibly hard to simulate, but the misuse and misunderstanding of that ‘fact’ annoys me.

Regardless, the human brain is incredibly complicated, and anything that has its roots in the brain is likewise difficult to understand. Sleep is a biological process that affects the whole body, and yet the systematic investigation of sleep has been going on for less than a century. There are obviously holes in our understanding of sleep. What many people do not seem to realize is how basic the understanding is in even the more well researched areas. It is fairly well known that sleep affects memory. How it does so is less well known, for a variety of reasons. What is memory? Today, memory is typically divided into categories, which most neurologists assume are taken care of by different sections of the brain. But to try and find the location of any category but the broadest is currently an exercise in frustration. An active human brain is so difficult to examine, even the best tools such as EEGs and imaging can only give rough pictures. Dissections of dead brains, while more thorough, reveal little, because the activity has ceased.

Despite difficulties, the field of sleep has advanced, and continues to advance. Modern imaging devices represent a huge technological leap. The funding for neurological research in general, as well as sleep research in particular, has gone up over the last several decades (although the REM research craze is still unmatched). Sleep is a rapidly expanding field of study. Today, much is still unknown. Next year, much will still be unknown, but a little bit more information will have been uncovered. And that process will continue, until, one day, people will stop asking questions about sleep that they cannot answer.

~Kaleb Johnson-Leung