251–260 of 325 posts
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_natural_short_sleep
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Maybe some people just enjoy working.
Being addicted to workahol means they aren't able to enjoy other things. Your comment is like saying "maybe alcoholics just enjoy drinking".
Maybe alcoholics do enjoy drinking. But working 60 hours a week isn't going to cause brain damage and liver failure on its own. Productivity isn't a chemical or vice.
Something I thought was just an internet tale: mitochondria are close descendants of bacteria, and so taking antibiotics will potentially harm them. But turns out this is actually rooted in science ...
That's not to say there couldn't be some unrelated effect, but that's why we test medicine.
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> 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.
When I'm awake for a very long time (32hrs+) it feels like there is poison built up in my mind, then sleep clears it up/feel better. Also if you lift in the mornings you feel lack of sleep/alcohol sleep disruption.
I'm not sure how common this is, but I feel this acutely after sustained mental exertion (e.g. reading informational material for a few hours). A deep 15 minute nap takes the feeling away completely without any grogginess.
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there's this prion disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia
And there is the hereditary version: fatal familial insomnia [FFI]) stemming from a mutation in the PRNP gene.
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Do sponges sleep?
Presumably. Some jellyfish sleep[1] But do fungi and Archea sleep? My guess based on what we read is yes and no. [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-brai...
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> If you need oxygen, then you need sleep! Do plants sleep? Don't some insects, like flies, live without any sleep?
No, plants don't sleep, and neither do fungi or single celled organisms. Sleep seems to be a property specifically of animals.
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I don't mean it as an attack on GP, but no, I don't agree that this is pedantic. This happens constantly when science is popularized -- people read one article and leap to the conclusion that a problem has been revolutionized/solved/answered simply because they're reading about it -- and no, the HN audience is no better. Technophiles love a good scientific revolution story. It's very much a fundamental misunderstandi…
It might not be intended as an attack, but it does feels like one (especially that unnecesary jab at technophiles). Also I find it incredibly ironic that you are making so many assumptions about what GP meant, what HN audience understands from the article and what they will make of it just to make a point about philosophy of science and popsci.
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No, plants don't sleep, and neither do fungi or single celled organisms. Sleep seems to be a property specifically of animals.
By which criteria? They do respond to daily cycles. How do you know they do not sleep?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5120870/
4 and 5 don't seem to be exemplified by plants.
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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…
When we don’t sleep, we can lose sensory and cognitive coherence. Mild visual hallucinations begin and reality can start slipping. Sleep itself is characterized by coherent neural activity— the large number of brain regions with synchronized neural activity. The slow waves where huge numbers are all firing close together in a rhythm. Low frequency and high amplitude delta brainwaves (1-2 hertz). Complex adaptive brai…
Sleep deprivation is a well known treatment for depression [1]. Maybe you lean to the depressive side, that would explain positive effects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Treating_dep...