Question: I think that sleeping and dreaming is very interesting. Why do you think it is important that scientists do research in to sleeping and dreaming?

Alex Reid answered on 5 Nov 2018: last edited 5 Nov 2018 9:42 pm

Hi thank you for the really interesting question. Firstly, to me, understanding the human brain is one of the biggest frontiers of science, a bit like space or the ocean. To understand ourselves we must continue to explore the brain, and understanding sleep and how it effects the mind is part of this quest.

Sleep is a bit of a mysterious behaviour, pretty much every animal on the planet does it, and when we don’t get some our well-being can deteriorate quickly. As such there are loads of interesting questions surrounding sleep: why do we dream? what are the functions of sleep? how does it help us? When we understand these questions we gain knowledge which could have a lot of different applications.

One such application is exploring the close link between sleep and mental health. If we understand sleep patterns and learn what they do we may better be able to treat problems in people that are typically accompanied by sleep disturbances such as dementia, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder. Other applications include developing recommendations and treatments for people who have disrupted sleep patterns due to shift work (such as nurses and firemen).