What is the real reason we sleep?
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Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#2[deleted]
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#3"Because we get tired." is what I've always heard from people that aren't researching it.
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#4> forcibly keep an animal awake for long enough and you will kill it. The same almost certainly applies to humans.
There was a PBS Nova episode on sleep many years ago. It showed people who never sleep. They are rare but they exist and have been studied extensively. They do have down-time where they rest for hours, but they never fall asleep. If this was any other show than Nova I'd call bullshit.
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#5> forcibly keep an animal awake for long enough and you will kill it. The same almost certainly applies to humans. There was a PBS Nova episode on sleep many years ago. It showed people who never sleep. They are rare but they exist and have been studied extensively. They do have down-time where they rest for hours, but they never fall asleep. If this was any other show than Nova I'd call bullshit.
You're sure they weren't talking about people on polyphasic sleep schedules?
Also, fatal familial insomnia is a thing, so we have a pretty good idea of what happens when people are deprived of sleep for too long.
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#6> forcibly keep an animal awake for long enough and you will kill it. The same almost certainly applies to humans. There was a PBS Nova episode on sleep many years ago. It showed people who never sleep. They are rare but they exist and have been studied extensively. They do have down-time where they rest for hours, but they never fall asleep. If this was any other show than Nova I'd call bullshit.
I believe one explanation for this may be that even if you think you've been up for a very long time, you will still have unknowingly experienced some microsleep states.
Animals in studies seem to die after around 30 days (which I think is longer than any scientifically verified claim made by a human?), and also may even have microsleeps prevented, depending on the experiment.
Humans may also have some rudimentary system of "local sleep". Some other animals have much more sophisticated systems. Basically, parts of your brain might "sleep" and become inactive temporarily, while others are still functioning. I don't think there's any hard evidence of this in humans yet, though.
Also, the longer you stay up, the less aware and cognizant you are, so you might even doze off for an hour or so and not actually realize or remember it. I imagine the people Nova reported on were studied and confirmed not to have actually napped, but it probably does apply to many people who give personal anecdotes of staying up for more than a week.
The only cases of a human truly "never sleeping" are from fatal familial insomnia, I think, and it is as fatal as it sounds like.
So, I suspect if an experiment really kept a human up for a month and prevented microsleep, they'd also die. Even if they didn't die as a direct result, their immune system would be so compromised that they'd probably die from a pathogen pretty quickly.
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#7[deleted]
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#8Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#9Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.
But not before we determine whether salt is bad for us.
Re: What is the real reason we sleep?
#10Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.
Probably related. Mammals dream, and we humans experience time in dreams much faster than the actual passage of time. Dreaming is likely the same mechanism as 'experience replay' used in AI reinforcement learning. We're just training our neutral networks using minibatches of our experiences from our waking hours.