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Sleep Is the Ultimate Brainwasher
sciencehabit writes "Every night since humans first evolved, we have made what might be considered a baffling, dangerous mistake. Despite the once-prevalent threat of being eaten by predators, and the loss of valuable time for gathering food, accumulating wealth, or having sex, we go to sleep. Scientists have long speculated and argued about why we devote roughly a third of our lives to sleep, but with little concrete data to support any particular theory. Now, new evidence (abstract, full text paywalled) has refreshed a long-held hypothesis: During sleep, the brain cleans itself."
During sleep, the Cerebrospinal fluid fills channels in the brain, collecting waste products. It uses a lot of energy, leading to the hypothesis that the brain can't clean up waste while also processing sensory input.
I wonder how well this accounts for the extremely variable sleeping periods of various animals? See http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chasleep.html .
So what happens when you don't sleep much? (currently running on 2.5 hours)
I used to imagine it as the brain defragmenting itself. Imagine that! A computer guy seeing biological topics through a computer-geek lens!
Humans suffer from major memory leaks and must be shut down periodically due to poor garbage collection.
And that's the reason why I sleep at work
"During sleep, the Cerebrospinal fluid fills channels in the brain"
So the "wet dream" is all in your head.......
...with a better word than "brainwashing?" Since that already means something that does not match the contents of the article.
So that's where Bill Gates got the idea about having to reboot Windows every day back when. It's really a form of cleaning the computer. It's good for the system, don't ya know.
This is why our sensory inputs (sight, hearing in particular) are mostly cut off during this time. If not periodically cut off, the "noise" starts erasing more permanent memories, causing hallaucinations, etc. (Look up effects of sleep deprivation.) It's a cybernetic quandary; the only way the brain can protect itself from erasure is to periodically stop all inputs.
It's a cybernetic quandary; the only way the brain can protect itself from erasure is to periodically stop all inputs.
Sounds like a hard drive I had once...
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Gives to time to better process and analyse the data that you collected during the day. Most of what you learn, you learn in your sleep, while unconscionably looking over the stuff that you just did not get while awake, distracted by all the other input going on.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Save for sex, most of those activities we aren't very good at in the dark. It's probably more efficient for us to save energy by sleeping, and actually act during daylight. To me, this is the most persuasive basic reason for sleep.
A higher order species that has brains that can "cleans" itself without requiring sleep would have so much evolutionary advantage that they would rapidly take over the entire planet (sort of like flowering plants). Why hasn't 3+ billion years of evolutionary produced such a species?
If you can learn to compose well-written proposals and stay relatively positive, you can always do contracting (assuming you have skills that are in demand). Take a look at Guru.com. You'll be bidding against third world countries, but you wouldn't want the sort of employer that would hire them anyway, and there are ones looking for quality over cost.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
I mean, even a short nap instantly improves how you feel, anywhere from 5-15 minutes.
And even through the day, a full sleep cycle of 90 minutes at various times instead of one huge monophasic sleep cycle more or less works the same since you naturally wake up around 100 minutes if there is activity going around you or it is bright enough. (sure has worked that way for me since, uh, 13-ish when I started doing it, now double that age with a birthday in 2 days, towards wizardhood)
And more and more they are finding this out as research is done in to split-sleep cycles, which is great, I don't want to end up with triple alzheimer's by the time I am 30 through some stealth ninja problem. Oh well, doing science, etc. I will post my findings on death.
I dunno though, the biology behind it is sound, humans naturally tend to be multi-phasic in sleep throughout early life, and many around the world still practice it (including the Spanish Siesta, one of the more known traditions based around it)
But modern society has forced this single long sleep for many reasons, such as saving on travel time / costs to keep workers in the workplace for a longer period.
Although there was actually something recently looking in to the revival of on-site homes and accommodation for staff in many places, Facebook just recently joining in on it.
Sounded pretty reasonable that the brain does some maintenance and clean-up since a lot of gunk must pile up through those trillions upon trillions of interactions that happen constantly to keep you up and about.
The brain is just like a muscle, the more and harder you use it, gotta stretch it and flex it, then give it a nice cooldown time before using it again.
My usual pattern is a 4-5 hour sleep from 5am and 100 minute nap at around 3pm-ish. Occasionally I do 3, depends what I am doing.
I also meditate too, which only really happened a few years after, which helped even more.
Never turned me in to a vegetable either, pretty high IQ (useless number) and great grades in school for the most part. (hated French)
So don't skip in your sleep, split it up if you need to. Just don't do that silly polyphasic sleep nonsense, you need at least 90 minutes a nap and at least 3 of those in a day as far as we know. Well, you can do it for limited periods, just don't do it long term, that crap builds up in your head and all it takes is the right conditions for it to become a chain reaction of hard plaque and slow death.
Shine brighter, die quicker, something about tears and rain. Don't bank on science curing things, it might not.
and all this time i thought the blood cells took waste away from the brain cells to the kidneys. I learned something new today. thanks for posting
Mid-day sweeping keeps the cobwebs out.
People get handsome grants to 'study' the mind, and regardless of the value of anything they 'discover' they need to publish papers to keep that money flowing.
Here's the REAL state of science in this field. We do not have the FAINTEST idea why many Earth creatures evolved a sleep mechanism. Showing the downsides of sleep deprivation is NOT a proof of why we have a sleep mechanism. Clearly, the brain no more needs a regular 'cool down' period than do the other organs of the body.
TRUE science is partly the concept of knowing clearly the things we do not yet understand. Betas find this aspect of scientific theory baffling.
Mechanistic attempts to understand sleep are bad science- full stop. We are conscious. We think. We give meaning to the Universe. Concepts that fit badly with the mechanisms that underpin standard scientific methods. Logically, it would be obvious to most rational people that sleep links to who and what we are, as conscious entities. The best scientists NEVER had/have an issue with this 'spiritual' dimension. Much poorer scientists think the denial of self brings scientific 'kudos' and legitimacy, and thus attempt to turn people into "logs".
Sadly, America has a long history of studying the mechanisms of things like sleep for VERY evil purposes. To find new ways of torturing Humans. To find ways to make soldiers more murderous, and less prone to fatigue. To allow the under-classes to work multiple jobs, with reduced sleep patterns (the drugs Americans have gotten over-the-counter since before the 1950s to allow them to sleep less are almost unknown in other nations).
An ordinary person, with no formal science training, could list all kinds of potential advantages of the sleep mechanism. Their POV is "top down" of course, a way of thinking that low quality scientists are VERY poor at. Crappy scientists are almost always "bottom-up only" thinkers.
1. Find a drug that accelerates this process.
2. Profit!
Yeah, skip the '?' step. What would you pay for a pill that would let you wake up after a couple of hours, feeling like you had a full night's sleep?
Remember how Defrag in Windows 98 used to move the little colored blocks around? One night I got more or less the same thing. When I was about 11, several years before Windows 95 existed, I dreamed I walked into an M/E Root Beer restaurant (apparently a fictional counterpart of A&W restaurants) and in the back room, an anthropomorphic rabbit was sorting a bunch of pieces of paper with pictures on them into various piles. I looked at a few of them, and they appeared to be my memories.
I'm still convinced that dreams are artifacts of calibration routines, and only race conditions allow you to remember them.
Faux News is.
And wish to engage in brainwashing of your own, how should sleep deprivation feature in your... um... "protocol"?
What does this imply for the idiots who figure they can just replace most or all of their sleep with Modafinil? I'm guessing there are going to be a few sad stories in the future.
"...since humans first evolved..."
What does that mean, exactly? When was the first offfspring or set of offspring born where they said "Ah! This is different. This is a human!"
And you have to either do a complete overhaul or discard the unit.
Scishow video about Sleep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwNMvUXTgDY
Quick! Throw it in the freezer!
omellete du fromage
I've run into a few people who always brag about only needing a few hours sleep every night.
I've always sort of thought they were full of waste products.
You're possibly setting yourself up for Alzheimer's. It's been known for a long time that buildup of amyloid plaques is worsened by lack of sleep and vice versa. (Sleep issues show up long before other symptoms of Alzheimer's). This provide a mechanism by showing how the plaques are regularly removed by good sleep.
For extra fun, sleep is also when myelin-repairing oligodendrocytes kick into gear. You probably won't develop MS from not sleeping, but it isn't good for your long-term health, as that function is necessary to the survival of brain cells. This impacts mood, memory, and moral judgement.
Oh, and then there's the fact that lack of sleep disrupts the ratio of leptin and ghrelin in your body, making you far hungrier when awake. This is part of the reason that lack of sleep is correlated with obesity. You also have lower testosterone (impacting your virility) & higher cortisol levels (wrecking your memory and weakening your immune system). Other hormone changes put you at higher risks of type 2 diabetes.
In short, you're killing yourself. Seek help if this isn't voluntary. Prioritize getting more sleep.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
How to explain those folks?
(Google it yourself)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The brain may clean itself while sleeping, but I hypothesize that it can do it while processing sensory input, and sleep does much more than clean the brain. BTW, the only observation we have of our "ancient" relatives is that they're dead. Who knows what they devoted their time to exactly.
... than is a dream a testing stage? Does our brain first flush our brain canals and then checks if everything went right by firing up designated memory pathways?
Sure. garbage collection. all good RTEs do it. makes a ton of sense to do it when the body can afford to spare the energy. do Vulcans sleep?
gathering food, accumulating wealth, or having sex
One of these things is not like the others. Food and sex are biological imperatives. Accumulating wealth is not essential to life and is not something that every person does. The inclusion of wealth in this list indicates that the writer of TFS is a pathologically greedy person.
In our evolutionary past, we had to specialize in order to be competitive in a particular niche. That specialization prevented our earliest forbears from being competitive in the radically changed environments of both day and night. So all the way back in the evolutionary tree to bacteria, we see a circadian rhythm. Some creatures are better adapted to night, others to day. They spend their off-cycle conserving energy and being difficult to spot. Holding still accomplishes both. So sleeping became a strong selective advantage. Since sleep is built in at a fundamental level, any later specializations have to be compatible. So brainwashing while we're asleep is a compatible and advantageous adaptation.
Insomniacs are dirty minded.
Is that contraproductive, then?
Such animals are very tasty with a nice bearnaise sauce, chianti and fava beans.
Trying to outcompete humans would be like a normal person trying to become one of the 1%. The game's already rigged, the slot's already filled.
I've been experimenting with Sleep as Android which uses your phone's accelerometer to measure your physical movements and thus your mental state during sleep, When it detects REM sleep it plays an audio loop "you are dreaming". Not managed to do anything exciting in my dreams yet but looks promising to me.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Yeah, posted almost immediately before this story, no less.
Every trollism an AC posts is prefixed, in my mind, with "A. Coward whined, in a weak and cowardly voice:"
I just heard back from Golden Bow. Vopt first appeared in January, 1986.
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