A good night’s sleep supercharges your brain.
Neuroscientists have made some incredible breakthroughs in the past ten years. One thing they have been trying to connect the dots on is the relationship of sleep to brain function.
What they are discovering is fascinating.
Sleep accomplishes so many important things, that it is fast becoming clear sleep may be the most important thing you do with respect to your health and your success.
I’ve written previously about the importance of sleep vis-a-vis memory formation – the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex send signals back and forth to each other, thousands of times during the REM portion of sleep. Like a well choreographed dance, this process converts short-term memory to long-term memory.
Well, another incredible recent discovery is that sleep enables offline communication between the conscious mind (aka neocortex), which all but shuts down during sleep, and the subconscious mind (limbic system and brain stem).
This is important because the subconscious mind is continuously taking in sensory data, behind the scenes. This massive subconscious information accumulation is completely invisible and inaccessible by the conscious mind.
Sleep, however, opens up the doorway between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind via the longitudinal fissure, part of the corpus callosum, which separates the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
When you experience intuition, that little voice inside your head, this is actually the conscious mind sharing with you, information it received from the subconscious mind while you were sleeping.
The limbic system and brain stem, aka the subconscious mind, has been around millions of years longer than the neocortex (conscious mind). Because of this, the subconscious mind is far more evolved and, thus, far more advanced and powerful than the conscious mind. Its ability to gather information from the environment, via the five senses, is far more comprehensive than anything the conscious mind is capable of gathering.
In short, the subconscious sees things that the conscious mind can’t see.
Any information the subconscious gathers, and deems important enough to share with the conscious via intuition, will therefore be information it considers critical to your health and your success.
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Tom,
Great article! One important underlooked variable is the high number of sleep disorders in this country.
However, some of the current obstacles are the following:
1. Access to care
2. Fixed number of sleep labs causing month long backlogs
3. Only 5000 sleep docs nationwide = not nearly enough
4. Fear of sleeping in the lab
These barriers have led to 80% of sleep disorders going undiagnosed.
Itamar Medical is providing solutions with a unique technology, The WatchPAT.
See short video below, hopefully it will help some of your subscribers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqXGHHDpQas
Best,
Tanner