The other day while driving along the river on my lunch break, all hopped up on a Starbucks Quad-Grande-Vanilla-Peppermint-Soy-Latte, I was thinking about how annoying it is to have to maintain things. For instance, a car. A car needs gas all the time, oil every now and then, other fluids, lights, all kinds of crap. Boy wouldn’t it be nice if a car didn’t require all of that maintenance.

Then I started thinking about myself. This is taken for granted, but there is a lot that goes into the maintenance of oneself. A constant flurry of eating, drinking and using the bathroom, along with secondary maintenance like showers and brushing your teeth and trimming your nails. One thing that is really amazing is the frequent and neverending cycle of sleep. Sleep is required daily, and is so important that lack of sleep, even for a relatively short period (relative to the life-cycle) has immediately adverse affects. For instance, the brain seems to begin rapidly losing its ability to maintain clarity after, say, twenty-four hours, and after forty-eight hours its reasoning begins to become dangerous inadequate. Most likely the brain needs time to defragment and refresh its relations in some obscenely complex manner. I’m no neuroscientist, but even if I was, I probably still couldn’t offer up more than that. It’s clear that sleep isn’t just very important, it’s an absolute necessity.

What isn’t clear is how and why it seems to be related to the time it takes for the earth to make one complete rotation. Why does sleep typically coincide with a portion of a twenty-four hour day? If days were forty-eight hours long (the earth was twice as big, perhaps), would it only be required once a day? Would it last twice as long? Why?

Clearly there is no answer in this essay. It may just be that the human brain requires sleep every 16 hours inherently, regardless of the sun and the moon or anything else. But is it possible that the development of the brain itself was influenced by the outside environment? Namely, the sun provided a certain energy, and when that energy was not there the brain decided it should start getting things in order, so that when the sun returned, providing the energy the brain indeed learned would be back later, it would be refreshed and ready? The actual chemical makeup of the brain would certainly require sleep once a day, but if that day had been a different length, so to would the chemical makeup of the brain be different.

This is intriguing because not only does it make an odd sort of sense, it shows the organic evolution of different natural phenomena as intermingled, even when the natural phenomenon is something intangible. Like the human mind.