The Brain’s Connections Shrink During Sleep
This mass downscaling stops neurons from becoming saturated—which may be one of the reasons why sleep exists at all.
In your every waking moment, whether you mean to or not, you are absorbing new experiences, and changing your brain. Specifically, some of your neurons become more strongly connected. The sites where they meet, known as synapses, become larger and more numerous, and an electrical signal in one of the neurons more easily triggers a signal in another. This is how we learn and store memories, in the changing strengths of our synapses.
But there’s a limit to this process.
It takes a lot of energy to maintain these connections, from Johns Hopkins University.
