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The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say (nytimes.com)
Over the years, scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. From a report on NYTimes: Some have argued that it's a way to save energy. Others have suggested that slumber provides an opportunity to clear away the brain's cellular waste. A pair of papers published on Thursday in the journal Science offer evidence for another notion: We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.
Is to create more fake news
In 4 years please.
It seems rather obvious that the primary reason for sleep is to conserve energy when being awake isn't very useful (at night when you can't see anything). It also makes sense that the body has then evolved to do other useful things while sleeping.
I thought that was what the weekends were for. I keep a dead tree notebook at work to write down what I did each day and remind myself what I did from the week before. Otherwise, on Monday mornings, I'll have no clue to what to do.
I thought that was the purpose of whiskey.
I suspect I am feeding a troll, but just in case you are just completely incompetent.
The article from The Guardian has the links right in the article.
Giulio Tononi
Chiara Cirelli
First link in Google
Ohio Sleep Medicine Institute
There are no Giulio Tononi or Chiara Cirelli listed as professors on UoW's websites.
They are at the UofW School of Medicine, which is someone separate from UoW's academic campus. Here are their bios: Chiara Cirelli, Giulio Tononi.
Not getting any sleep is fatal. The theory that sleep's main function is "to forget" doesn't explain that. Of course, the post didn't claim that was its sole function, but I'd say it implied it. Scientific American had an article on sleep last year which favored the garbage removal theory. It's not very smart to think that sleep has a single purpose, imho. The fact that all mammals sleep, (some only half a brain at a time) and as far as I know all birds, reptiles, amphibians, and some (not all) fish sleep. Plus some insects enter a state similar to sleep, as do roundworms. Such a broad adoption clearly indicates it has a very strong evolutionary driving/survival force behind it.
There are certainly embarrassing events in my past that I would prefer to forget, but I don't seem to be able to.
Why isn't it working for me?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I don't need sleep to forget things.
Proof that God is a hack and couldn't write a kernel that manages much more than a 48h uptime before it needs a reboot. I bet all the kids in other galaxies with cooler Gods are laughing at us.
I need more sleep.
Don't step on the baby.
Please try and write summaries that at least get somewhere close to the crux of the story, and don't just trail off mid-concept.
In 2003, Giulio Tononi and Chiara Cirelli, biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuberantly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
A nightly (for most of us) redundancy check and defrag of the ol' noodle?
I can think of at least 5 reasons for sleep off the top of my head, and several have nothing to do with the brain:
1) Eliminate unwanted memories, like this study suggested.
2) Reduce consumption during periods of low resources, enabling longer life. I.E. Consume fewer calories in winter.
3) Rest the body giving it time to repair minor every day issue without constant strain.
4) Time for the unconcious brain to do deep thinking and solve long term problems
5) To allow the body to expand all it's resources to fix major illnesses, such as Small Pox, because it literally takes EVERYTHING we got.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
FTA:
"That night, the scientists injected a chemical into the brains of some of the mice. The chemical had been shown to block neurons in dishes from pruning their synapses. The next day, the scientists put all the mice back in the chamber they had been in before. Both groups of mice spent much of the time frozen, fearfully recalling the shock. But when the researchers put the mice in a different chamber, they saw a big difference. The ordinary mice sniffed around curiously. The mice that had been prevented from pruning their brain synapses during sleep, on the other hand, froze once again. Dr. Diering thinks that the injected mice couldn’t narrow their memories down to the particular chamber where they had gotten the shock. Without nighttime pruning, their memories ended up fuzzy."
I'm far, far away from being a neurologist, so I may be totally off track here. But these results remind me of what PTSD sufferers go through, and I have to wonder if they're related. Might the emotions experienced in response to traumatic events, be so strong as to alter neurons, synapses, or brain chemistry in such a way that the synapses aren't pruned in the normal way by sleep? Or perhaps the loss of sleep that results from traumatic experiences results in something like setting the 'immutable' bit on a file?
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Rebooting flushes RAM.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
So sleep is just another form of cache cleaning?
Zombie Nation describes the harm sleep deprivation is doing to the United States. https://drive.google.com/file/...
Farnsworth: And what makes my engines truly remarkable is the afterburner, which delivers 200% fuel efficiency.
Cubert: That's especially impossible.
Farnsworth: Not at all. It's very simple.
Cubert: Then explain it.
Farnsworth: Now that's impossible! It came to me in a dream and I forgot it in another dream.
WTF am I reading? Hipster's "science" newsletter.
I also seem to recall reading that when you sleep (properly), your brain also gets flooded with cerebrospinal fluid, which cleans a type of "plaque" from between pathways in the brain. This plaque has been seen as possibly contributing to various mental/cognitive degenerative conditions
I can't find the exact thing I read previously, but here appears to be an article on it.
I forgot what I was going to say here.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Odd juxtaposition. Let's put it this way with some fake news. There once was a time when all there was was day. Then suddenly God made night. In a first stage the Day-beings spent their nights waiting, saving energy and keeping save. But in a later stage they started doing too much of some activities during the day because they could postprocess/recover/clean up during the night.So one does not exclude the other. As soon as your brain gets some spare time it can start to reschedule some things so that some bottleneck operations(which slow you down) are moved to the night stage.
The most on-topic post is by Mr AC and no one has even noticed.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The real question is, "why are we conscious?"
Thank god for that, I don't need to join the Foreign Legion after all.
Nullius in verba
"The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget" "We store new memories in these networks."
To forget is to store new memories?
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,--
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Zzzzzzz
Have gnu, will travel.
The need for "sleep" (regular periods of markedly reduced activity, distinct from mere rest) is virtually universal across the vertebrate sub-phylum at least, with a last common ancestor 500 million years ago, found in every family (though not necessarily obviously so in every species).
This extraordinary common pattern in creatures with radically different environments and life habits, persisting over such a vast stretch of evolutionary time, alone suggests there is not "one reason" for it, and indeed a lot of research has uncovered many necessary processes associated with sleep, which go hay-wire at different rates when sleep is denied. In fact going without sleep is lethal, usually killing animals faster than starvation.
Evolutionary biology offers a coherent explanation for all of these facts. Periods of inactivity to conserve energy and reduce exposure to predators is an evolutionary advantage, so a branch of evolutionary descent would tend to develop such a pattern if one did not already exist. Once a regular period of reduced activity exists biological processes that are more efficient or effective during periods of inactivity would tend to migrate in timing to coincide with it. Thus many biological processes, related or not, would in time become associated with this "sleep" period in a common pattern of convergent evolution, and the organism would become dependent on sleep periods for many unrelated biological reasons.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I think this study actually raises more questions than it answers: If we sleep to forget, than what is the purpose of drinking?
Scientific American had an article on sleep last year which favored the garbage removal theory.
Yet more evidence for this theory:
http://neurosciencenews.com/sl...
As someone who's done plenty of sleep deprivation and polyphasic sleeping, I'm about pretty sure I can actually feel the garbage being removed. It mostly happens in the first 60-90 mins of sleep. If one is woken between 30 mins and 60 mins, one's mind tends to be missing several functions. ;)
I sleep because I am sleepy. (But only if I manage to shut down the web browser.)
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
What I found with my experimentation is I feel fresh based on how many hours I had visual stimuli off; it doesn't matter if I sleep or lying staring the darkness. I can even afford some audio input/output (listen to songs or even sing/talk along - yeah may sound like a mad man). The crucial piece is my visual cortex in brain is kinda put in a lower power mode. Then even if i really sleep only a few hours say 3 or 4, I still feel fresh. The contrary is true as well. If I am busy in computer or phone and sleep late, my body demands those many hours of eyes shut -- in fact it is taking more because during the day time the diffused sunlight is making the brain ask for more rest time. So the fix I found is try to catch hold of as many dark hours (like between 1 am to 6 am) as possible [early to bed, early to rise]. Of course the early man/before light invention people used to do this normally. Basically it's how much darkness u get that matters - not sleep.
I'd always thought sleep was for helping to retain memories, not erase them.
During sleep, we are not recording nearly as much data as when awake, giving the brain the opportunity to prioritize which earlier experiences need to be retained in long-term storage.
Many theorize that during REM sleep, while dreaming, we are actually re-living various experiences gathered throughout the day. By re-examining these experiences, they have a better chance of being retained long-term.
Remembering a pretty sunset years down the road may be pleasurable, but will not help you stay alive in the physical sense.
On the other hand, remembering to immediately jump into the tree when catching scent of a predator you haven't run across in quite some time, just might save your life.
It's this latter form of experience, getting put into long-term storage partially by initial experience, partially be repetition via dreams, that helps us to enjoy more sunsets.
The former will fade, leaving just a shell of its presence, if any.
No idea what this "this" was supposed to show, because you didn't bother describing the link, and the video is down now. When will people on forums learn to describe what they link to so that others who stumble upon it years (or in this particular case, days) from now at least can follow along?
Install windows on my workstation? You crazy? Got any idea how much I paid for the damn thing?