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Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

science.org

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Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#22
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.

AI frenzy almost convinced me that sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day. And now this /o\

That's what I still 'believe'. Wake-sleep algorithm [1] is a good start for speculation. I think brain needs to be in a different mode to reorganize its weights and to forget unnecessary things to prevent overfitting. In this mode we happen to be unconscious. I also believe dreams are just hallucinations caused by random noise input to the system. The brain converts noise distribution to a meaningful distribution and samples from that. I have zero evidence btw, but I believe these are related.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-sleep_algorithm

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#25
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.

AI frenzy almost convinced me that sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day. And now this /o\

It's not training as much as it's discarding bad examples. Sort of.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#26
post #9
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.

It would make sense if there was a monocausal explanation of why ancient ancestors started sleeping, but then other body functions started making use of the sleeping system since it was at hand.

[deleted]

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#27
post #19
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make sense if there was a monocausal explanation of why ancient ancestors started sleeping, but then other body functions started making use of the sleeping system since it was at hand.

Hey, that's Hyrum's Law!

This is why I implemented

    private static readonly final sleep()

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#28
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.

AI frenzy almost convinced me that sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day. And now this /o\

Jesus christ, not even a biology thread is safe in the orange website.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#29
post #5

So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. The paper shows that cell‑autonomous mild uncoupling in Drosophila sleep‑inducing neurons -- via Ucp4A/Ucp4C -- keeps the flies awake by lowering mitochondrial Δp and therefore electron leak. This suggests a biochemical rationale for sleep -- which is postponed by the uncoupler. That form of pharmacological manipulation is also a very local in…

> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.

TFA also acknowledges this:

  > There could well be many other functions that have since joined in with the sleep cycle (such as memory consolidation), but the authors hypothesize that mitochondrial function is the process that underlies all of them. If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#30
post #7
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.

AI frenzy almost convinced me that sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day. And now this /o\

> sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day

Periods of sleep certainly seem to be used in that sort of way, but that is an extra use evolution found for the sleep cycle once it existed rather than the reason sleep developed in the first place.

There are a number of things that seem tied to, or at least aligned with, our wake/sleep cycle that likely didn't exist when sleep first came about.

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