Neuroscientists have made some incredible breakthroughs in the past ten years. One thing they continue to focus on is why we need to sleep. What they are discovering is fascinating. Sleep accomplishes so many things behind the scenes. One critical purpose of sleep is memory formation. The hippocampus and neocortex send signals back and forth to each other thousands of times during the REM portion of sleep. This process allows memories to stick. Another incredible discovery is that sleep enables offline communication between the conscious mind (aka neocortex), which shuts down during sleep, and the subconscious mind (limbic system and brain stem). This is important because the subconscious mind is regularly taking in sensory data that is invisible to the conscious mind. When we experience intuition, this is actually the conscious mind telling us something the subconscious mind communicated to it during the last sleep cycle.
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