11–20 of 188 posts
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's hard to understand why anyone thinks that this mandatory downtime for all animals is just for a special reason. Why wouldn't sleeping be a catch-all window for autonomous maintenance and overall survival? Always take the most likely reason.
The way dolphins sleep with half of their brain asleep is fascinating to me. https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-do-dolphins-sleep/
Some people seem to need a lot less sleep than others with no deleterious health effects. It would be very interesting to find out why.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a mistake to use the term “hallucinate” in AI. It’s a decent metaphor but it’s best to avoid terms prone to anthropomorphism.
It was also a mistake calling it "AI".
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-...
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's hard to understand why anyone thinks that this mandatory downtime for all animals is just for a special reason. Why wouldn't sleeping be a catch-all window for autonomous maintenance and overall survival? Always take the most likely reason.
The way dolphins sleep with half of their brain asleep is fascinating to me. https://us.whales.org/whales-dolphins/how-do-dolphins-sleep/
That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way.
Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evolutionary pressure to find another way.
Relevant to this, people with a genetic mutation that adversely affects sleep end up developing dementia and dying early: https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/25001-fatal-f...
I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's hard to understand why anyone thinks that this mandatory downtime for all animals is just for a special reason. Why wouldn't sleeping be a catch-all window for autonomous maintenance and overall survival? Always take the most likely reason.
It seems that given the options of 1) staying awake and active as normal during the night and 2) using the night period to run various maintenance task but without awareness the second option apparently turned out to be the winner as far as evolution is concerned. What's interesting to me is how many animals beyond humans do it - so it's not purely tied to the human cognitive functions like higher order thinking etc.
I joined a Stanford study and had a spinal tap sample submitted for testing - in theory I am "unlikely" to develop anything for the next 20 years - but that only gets me to my late 60's :(