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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

#271

Post by tsol »

cubefox wrote: post #228
ddalex wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why ancient ancestors started sleeping I tend to believe that our ancestors didn't start sleeping, they started waking up ! the default pattern is sleep and conservation of energy, but you need to wake up to expend more energy for a short period in order to feed yourself efficiently

Yeah. Perhaps animals are the first organisms that developed the ability to be awake, not the first that developed the ability to sleep. By the way, even Cnidaria (jellyfish etc) exhibit sleep-wake cycles [1]. They don't have a brain, but they do have a nervous system. Maybe the first animal with nervous system (a common ancestor of Cnidaria and Bilateria) was the first to have a sleep-wake cycle. I don't understand…

That's actually very interesting. The most convincing explanation for also I've heard is it's just a result of living in a planet that is cold and dark half of the time. It makes sense to use that time to recharge. I wonder how much sunlight would factor in for something like a jellyfish.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#272

Post by munificent »

schmidtleonard wrote: post #114
andrewflnr wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question isn't the timing but why it happens at all. Even at night, being unaware of one's surroundings during sleep is a huge disadvantage that requires lots of effort and adaptation to work around. It needs to produce commensurate benefits, but we're not sure what they are.

Exactly! Going offline for hours every day in an adversarial world is positively nuts ! The reason can't be idiosyncratic. No gentle gradient of comparative advantage can rationalize it. It must be something severe and nigh impossible to do any other way. Furthermore, sleep is very specifically about the taking the brain offline: that's what deteriorates first in the absence of sleep and the tortured workarounds for…

> Going offline for hours every day in an adversarial world is positively nuts!

It's no more nuts than being awake given how much energy vigilance costs.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#273

Post by pedalpete »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #38

How far away are we from making this a pill? So we can stay up 18 hours a day, or something. Any estimates. Any idea what foods or current methods, to trigger the same mechanism?

You are describing slow-wave enhancement. It's what we've been working on at https://affectablesleep.com, not with the goal of letting people sleep less time, but with the goal of enhancing the restorative function of sleep without altering sleep time.

Measuring sleep by time makes about as much sense as measuring your diet based on how much time you spend chewing.

Sleep isn't about time, it's about restorative function.

There is no one diet for everyone, no one exercise regimen for everyone, why would we think sleep is any different.

We don't promote sleeping less. We're not the sleep police. We aim to ensure the sleep you get is as beneficial as possible.

Pre-sales are opening soon.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#274

Post by ge96 »

bruce343434 wrote: post #267
xnx wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it feels like there is poison built up in my mind, then sleep clears it up/feel better. 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.

How do you ensure you are asleep for 15 minutes? Do you have a smart watch that detects when you drift asleep and can start a timer then? Or are you not losing consciousness, but are you simply closing your eyes and meditating?

This is something I have considered getting into where and alarm goes off from when you actually fall asleep. For me it seems 5 hrs of sleep is the sweet spot (functional, slightly sleep deprived, but motivated)

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#275

Post by heavyset_go »

jjk166 wrote: post #140
jvanderbot wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think they meant "Modern" sleep. I think they meant "Only brief periods of highly energetic activity before returning to the usual activities were precursors to our modern consciousness/wakefulness"

That is also what I am referring to. Energetic activity is required to live and to reproduce, those are the normal activities. An active creature may have evolved a state of dormancy for various reasons, but there was never an organism in a state of pure dormancy.

Sleep isn't pure dormancy, though. Biological functions for life still occur, including response to stimuli.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#277

Post by opello »

wvbdmp wrote: post #241
SoftTalker wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some plants do change to a "night" configuration though (closing leaves or petals, etc). Not sure if you could call it sleep.

I would be surprised by any organism that can sense its environment and doesn’t change behaviour at night. The difference is pretty extreme, whether its temperature, light or just all other beings changing what they’re doing. Even if you don’t notice yourself, you’ll probably be affected by second-order effects.

The simplest example that seems like it would be an exception to your criteria would be an amoeba.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#278

Post by lazyfanatic42 »

prerok wrote: post #270
cubefox wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Across the animal kingdom sleep satisfies most, though not necessarily all, of the following criteria: (1) decreased brain arousal and its behavioral correlate, decreased responsiveness to an animal’s surroundings, which distinguishes sleep from immobile wakefulness (also known as rest); (2) electrical changes in the brain’s activity patterns relative to the waking state; (3) behavioral quiescence, often accompanie…

Across animal kingdom. And you don't think different criteria might apply to plants? I mean, look, we are just discovering how plants function as a society. They are immobile and 4 and 5 might be caused by the fact that an animal is mobile, at least for the most examples, but where not, it can at least react in some manner. Plants have a very very slow reaction time so to them 4 and 5 don't apply even in waking condi…

Would you call it sleep still, if it is so different from what we call sleep?

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#279

Post by lazyfanatic42 »

xnx wrote: post #268
bruce343434 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ensure you are asleep for 15 minutes? Do you have a smart watch that detects when you drift asleep and can start a timer then? Or are you not losing consciousness, but are you simply closing your eyes and meditating?

For these instances where I get urgently fatigued ("brain tired") in the daytime, I close my eyes and fall asleep in 1-2 minutes. I'm definitely unconscious. I don't set any alarm and naturally wake up in ~15 minutes. It's been as short as 8 minutes, or as long as 30, but probably averages around 15. "Body tired" is different and requires the normal multiple hours of sleep.

How is it I am far from capable of doing such a thing, yet you can. I am boggled.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#280

Post by Lazare »

cpncrunch wrote: post #200
emsign wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is definitely a thing. It all fits with the mitochondria theory: after physical or mental exhaustion (increased metabolic turnover provided by mitochondria) the recovery time (sleep) for ME/CFS patients is increased to such a degree that normal daily tasks gets them into a energy low they can't recover from anymore.

Except there isn't any evidence of mitochondria problems in ME/CFS, even though a lot of studies have looked at them.

I don't think that's quite right? There's been a fair amount of evidence pointing at possible issues, but there's no clear answer due to poor (or just different) study design, small sample sizes, different criteria across studies, different sample groups, etc.

So eg https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10... reviewed 19 studies, many of which did find "evidence of mitochondria problems", but concluded:

> ...it is difficult to establish the role of mitochondria in the pathomechanisms of ME/CFS/SEID due to inconsistencies across the studies. Future well-designed studies using the same ME/CFS/SEID diagnostic criteria and analysis methods are required to determine possible mitochondrial involvement in the pathomechanisms of ME/CFS/SEID. [...] There is consistent genomic research suggesting that ME/CFS/SEID is not a primary mitochondrial disorder, however, mitochondrial decline might occur due to secondary effects of other disrupted pathways. [...] As population samples were small, these results should be interpreted cautiously.

I wouldn't summarise that as "no evidence". It's more like "ME/CFS doesn't seem to be a genetic disorder causing defective mitochondria, and the mitochondria look the same, but they seem to function differently for some reason even if we lack enough data to figure out why yet". Note that, eg, of the 19 studies reviews, 5 tried to check for differences in mitochondrial respiration between ME/CFS patients and healthy controls, and 4 of the 5 found notable differences; one study was able to reliably detect if a cell sample came from a ME/CFS patient or a healthy control based on measuring mitochondrial respiration.

I don't know that's enough to fully reject the null hypothesis just yet, but it's certainly not clear we can accept it either.

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