Category Kids Queries

Video games, track meets, chemistry class – your waking hours are crammed with activities and tasks that give your noggin a real workout. All that processing causes chemicals to clutter your brain. A good night’s sleep clears your head – literally. While you snooze, your brain goes into housekeeping mode, flushing the toxins and preparing itself for a busy day of math classes, socializing, and beating your brother in basketball.

One of the vital roles of sleep is to help us solidify and consolidate memories. As we go about our day, our brains take in an incredible amount of information. Rather than being directly logged and recorded, however, these facts and experiences first need to be processed and stored; and many of these steps happen while we sleep. Overnight, bits and pieces of information are transferred from more tentative, short-term memory to stronger, long-term memory—a process called “consolidation.” Researchers have also shown that after people sleep, they tend to retain information and perform better on memory tasks. Our bodies all require long periods of sleep in order to restore and rejuvenate, to grow muscle, repair tissue, and synthesize hormones.

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Credit goes to your brain stem, the autopilot for your most important automatic functions: breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate.
The brain controls some of our body activities without us having to think about them. Such examples include breathing, heartbeat, and body temperature. When we sleep or even if we faint, these activities keep working. They are all automatic. 

The brain sends out signals along nerves to the muscles of the heart, intestine, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, bladder, and other internal organs telling them when and how to move. Usually you are not aware of this unless something happens, like when you are frightened and your heartbeat and breathing become faster. 

The part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system is a network of nerves that carries these automatic signals back and forth between the brain and the different organs. This system makes sure that your normal body functions continue to run smoothly. 

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Sleep experts say we can seize control of our dreams and do all fantastical things – fly, relive favorite memories, eat a mountain of ice cream – but only after we realize we’re actually dreaming. Achieving this deep – sleep state, known as lucid dreaming, isn’t easy. Wanna be dream masters practice every night for years and still never achieve success. A variety of masks and headbands promise to help sleepers reach a lucid state by flashing tiny lights above the eyelids. Sleep researchers, meanwhile, are researching other methods of triggering dreams.

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1. Keep to asleep schedule. Set a bedtime and a wake – up time and stick to them.

2. Relax with a book before bed, but don’t keep your smartphone within reach. It’s a certified sleep stopper.

3. Don’t fall asleep with the television on.

4. Don’t eat any big meals or chug any large drinks within two hours of bedtime.

5. Getting plenty of sun exposure during the day helps you sleep at night, so spend some waking hours outside!

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Yawns don’t catch a among children younger than five a among people with emotionally dampening disorders. That leads researchers to believe contagious yawning is just another way humans reinforce social bonds between people. Humans are social and emotional animals. We tend to understand and feel the emotions of friends and even strangers. Yawning falls into that category. When we see someone yawn, we yawn.

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Everybody yaws – even unborn babies in the womb – and yet researchers aren’t quite sure why we do it. Although humans yawn more often when we’re tired or bored, scientists have ruled out sleepiness or lack of oxygen (which would cause sleepiness) as causes. Instead, they suspect yawning might help us keep a cool head. As with a super computer, the brain needs to stay cool to function properly. Each yawn pumps air into sinus cavities in the head, cooling the brain in the process. And because the brain and body are slightly warmer just before bed, we tend to yawn when we’re tired.

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