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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 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
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.
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 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.