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Bangalore-based Rashmi Vasudeva's journalism has appeared in many Indian and international publications over the past decade. A features writer with over nine years of experience heading a health and fitness supplement in a mainstream Indian newspaper, her niche areas include health, wellness, fitness, food, nutrition and Indian classical Arts.
Her articles have appeared in various publications including Mint-Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, Deccan Herald (mainstream South Indian newspaper), Smart Life (Health magazine from the Malayala Manorama Group of publications), YourStory (India's media technology platform for entrepreneurs), Avantika (a noir arts and theatre magazine), ZDF (a German public broadcasting company) and others.
In 2006, she was awarded the British Print-Chevening scholarship to pursue a short-term course in new-age journalism at the University of Westminster, U.K. With a double Masters in Globalisation and Media Studies from Aarhus Universitet (Denmark), University of Amsterdam and Swansea University in Wales, U.K., she has also dabbled in academics, travel writing and socio-cultural studies. Mother to a frisky toddler, she hums 'wheels on the bus' while working and keeps a beady eye on the aforementioned toddler's antics.
Unlocking The Mystery Of Why We Sleep
Sleep is so every day and apparently ordinary that we tend to forget how universal and enigmatic it is. Even jellyfish have been found to catch up on their sleep (more on this later). In essence, sleep is “a bout of unconsciousness”; in the Bible, Jesus refers to the first death as sleep and this is not too far off the mark. The familiarity of sleep hides the fact that it is a risky habit millions of living things voluntarily indulge in. Which begs the question why.
It is this why of sleep that researchers at the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine in Japan are trying to understand. Though sleep research is being conducted the world over and sleep labs have sprung up in the unlikeliest of places, there are not many centres which do what this institute is trying to do: study the basic biology of sleep rather than diagnosis and treatment of sleep-related problems.
The question of why living beings sleep is still something that puzzles (and frustrates) scientists. The benefits of sleep are even more mysterious. Even jellyfish, as mentioned earlier, feel ‘sleep pressure’ when sleep deprived. Researchers sprayed jets of water on jellyfish to keep them from nodding off. After this experiment, the little creatures rested longer than usual!
As one sleep biologist says, they are trying to figure out what the “physical substrate of sleepiness” is. Research into sleep pressure began more than a century ago and many discoveries have been made along the way – about how sleep pressure changes brain waves, whether a sort of ‘brain clean-up’ happens during sleep and how the body keeps track of this pressure. Nothing is yet fully explained though and the article is a fascinating romp through these riddles and reads quite like a mystery thriller.
If you are curious about why sleep scientists want an answer to why we sleep, it is because they are certain that understanding our need for sleep will open the (presently locked) doors to grasping what sleep gives us.
