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Mystery #1Tier 1body / sleep

Why must you spend a third of your whole life fast asleep?

You will spend around a third of your entire life asleep. That is roughly 25 years of a long life spent doing, on the face of it, absolutely nothing: lying still with your eyes shut. Evolution is ruthless about wasting time, yet it kept sleep for almost every animal on Earth. So what is really going on while you snooze?

A neatly made bed with a deep red cover in a quiet bedroom, ready for a night’s sleep.
Photo: Robert Lamb · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

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