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Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

science.org

41–50 of 325 posts

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#43

i wonder if it relates to that chronic laziness disease, i cant remember what its called

Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) might be what you're thinking, although I think generally it's described as chronic _fatigue_ rather than laziness.

Yes many types of long-covid and me-cfs are forms of mitochondria dysfunction

There are a few drugs far off in development that might help restore or reboot mitochondria but years if not decades away

They are also experimenting with mitochondria transplants which if work will be a powerful therapy, maybe even a cure

https://longevity.technology/news/physicist-90-joins-experim...

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered. There are layers to this, some of which are definitely not ancient mysteries. We sleep because the environment has a day-night cycle. If any task an organism must perform is better done during the day, then evolution has a very clear gradient towards only doing that thing during the day. That leads to doing other things at night, since it wo…

Not sure anybody is disagreeing with this. Yes, evolution, day night cycles. The point of this is finding the 'mechanism' which evolution came up, and now we can manipulate it to fit the modern world and stay up at night.

It's interesting that sleep is controlled by mitochondria, but sleep is clearly involved in learning, and whatever algorithm for intelligence the brain does. Do those algorithms still work if you intervene at the level of the mitochondria? Or are the mitochondria just a good way of measuring elapsed time through energy expenditure? e.g. The algorithm needs a sleep phase to run roughly every x neural firings, or performance degrades and mitochondria were available as measuring devices when nature needed a way to guess how long the wake phase had been running.

Maybe you could intervene to prevent anyone from feeling tired, but would the learning algorithm still work? That part is still a mystery.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#45
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.

sounds like legacy code

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#47
post #21

Given its role in energy transfer, does this suggest creatine might be a good supplement for improving sleep?

That's a bizarre coincidence. For the past few days I've run across a bunch of accounts of people taking more creatine than suggested (10-20g a day). They seem to all talk about how it makes them work better during sleep deprivation. So the answer seems like it helps.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#48
post #3

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…

What would happen to the main and brain with "Healthy" wakefulness promoting drugs .

Probably nothing initially.

Then over years of us and accumulated data, people will realize that they can't game a complex system that the body needs like sleep with a simple drug, and those "healthy" wakefulness drugs will either be banned or face lots of controversy.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#49

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…

I'm curious how the few famous people that do not sleep at all, what's going on in their biochemestry? I don't mean celebrities, there are a few people who became famous because they do not sleep. They hold 2 complete careers, one during the day and one at night to keep from getting bored.

Cocaine and amphetamines, for a lot of them ;)

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure anybody is disagreeing with this. Yes, evolution, day night cycles. The point of this is finding the 'mechanism' which evolution came up, and now we can manipulate it to fit the modern world and stay up at night.

It's interesting that sleep is controlled by mitochondria, but sleep is clearly involved in learning, and whatever algorithm for intelligence the brain does. Do those algorithms still work if you intervene at the level of the mitochondria? Or are the mitochondria just a good way of measuring elapsed time through energy expenditure? e.g. The algorithm needs a sleep phase to run roughly every x neural firings, or perfo…

That's a good point. Maybe we found the mechanism to stay awake, but if that doesn't also translate to normalizing everything else that happens while sleeping, then who knows. Maybe people turn into wide awake zombies after a few days.
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