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Essay / Why do we sleep? - 612
“Why do we sleep? ” is a very popular question that many humans ask today. Sleep is very sufficient for the human body. If this were not important, God would not have intended for a third of our lives to be taken up by sleep. During this time, many people want to know what is a good amount of sleep and what are the harmful effects of lack of sleep. The question “why do we sleep?” » is a very difficult question to answer. One way to understand why sleep is important is to think of sleep as if it were food. Food helps us feel better and also helps the human body function properly. There are many different hypotheses about why we sleep. The first is that sleep allows the body to repair cells damaged by metabolic byproducts called free radicals. The production of these highly reactive substances increases during the day, when metabolism is faster. However, scientists have discovered that the expression of genes involved in cell attachment is kicked up a notch during sleep. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that smaller animals, which tend to have a...