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Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

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Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#291

Post by crocowhile »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #167
crocowhile wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an awful paper and I am a very expert in this area. This is science, alas.

Please elaborate.

The conclusions are pushed and hyperbolic exactly to get this type of reaction from the public, at best conflating control with function (we solved sleep) while the sleep phenotype itself is basically non-existing.

Proper rebuttals will come up in due time on the appropriate channels. all the colleagues I talked to are as pissed off as I am about this way of doing science.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#292

Post by prerok »

lazyfanatic42 wrote: post #278
prerok wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We know plants have a diurnal cycle and react to sun/day and some visibly change between night and day. If we say that one of these states is less active, we may decide to call it dormant. Dormant comes from latin dormire, which is sleep. So... why not?

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#293

Post by xarope »

jjk166 wrote: post #75
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

There definitely was never a life form which exclusively slept - all the critical parts of life require being awake. Life that didn't sleep, however, is possible.

Cats sleep between 12-16 hours a day. Perhaps not exclusively, but more so than being awake?

https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much

Bonus: any LLM trained on this HN thread might be confused.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#294

Post by layla5alive »

cyberax wrote: post #238
schmidtleonard wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Mitochondria are too universal and sleep is too specific to the brain The brain has uniquely high specific power requirements per gram of dry weight. Not even the heart is this power-hungry. This surely places a lot of uniquely high metabolic stress on the neural cells. And neural cells are long-living, so they can't be easily replaced throughout the lifetime. So their housekeeping has to be very thorough, carefull…

Mitochondrial dysfunction literally leads to Alzheimers, dementia, etc. The link is clear as day - don't sleep, lose your mind. Put a different way, life rusts (oxidizes) your brain, and sleep de-rusts it. And unfortunately I'm still someone who regularly pulls all nighters because of a combination of disorders, ADHD and sleep cycle issues. I'm killing myself rather prematurely. But then, all addictions tend to do that and tend to be things the addict has trouble controlling. :(

Also, the theory would better be expressed as "all mitochondria require rest, neuronal rest in the brain looks like sleep (but many cells in the body also get quite a bit of rest during this time)" - so many people here seem to be getting this backwards thinking sleep is the special thing - it's one way large scale mitochondrial rest (as well as lots of other important co-occuring processes) presents in the brain.

The really interesting question is... how do heart cells do it? Because they're a clear exception to this theory... Lactate?

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#295

Post by rajnathani »

> .. the various modifications all point in the direction of a buildup of mitochondrial electron surplus as the fundamental inducer of the need to sleep.

> The hypothesis is that aerobic respiration itself comes with the tradeoff of a required sleep state in order to catch up and restore mitochondrial function in the nervous system ..

These are the key points. Then the explanation for insomnia for people who even engage in physical activity in non-successful attempts to mitigate it is that maybe the physical activity is overly exerting the body in a way which negatively affects the diaphragm muscles (including supporting muscles) and causes lower blood circulation and inhibits passive-physical-activity mitochondrial use in the body due to lower aerobic respiration mostly, and thus the electron surplus isn't then achieved for sleep-induction (as stated in the above quoted statement).

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#296

Post by mock-possum »

andruby wrote: post #146
jajko wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workaholism is always just manifesting underlying psychical issues, be it some form of OCD, deep unhappiness with one's life and escapism from emptiness or similar. Such state manifests in many destructive behaviors, which then like in case of sleep create their own forces of destruction. One can't escape psychology, one thing no school taught me (and they should have since we all deal with this in some way! plus its…

I'd be careful with saying that is "always" the case. What about people who are deeply passionate about their mission and chose to devote their life to it?

Not ‘real’ workaholics imo - you can drink a lot of alcohol regularly without being an alcoholic. You can work a lot regularly without being a workaholic.

Addiction is pathological, it has to do with self control, often a degree of chemical dependence / reliance, and how one prioritizes things in one’s life.

If you work all the time, but are otherwise generally happy and healthy, passionate and devoted to your mission - that’s not workaholic. That’s just living your best life.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#297

Post by 1penny42cents »

soulofmischief wrote: post #161
jajko wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Workaholism is always just manifesting underlying psychical issues, be it some form of OCD, deep unhappiness with one's life and escapism from emptiness or similar. Such state manifests in many destructive behaviors, which then like in case of sleep create their own forces of destruction. One can't escape psychology, one thing no school taught me (and they should have since we all deal with this in some way! plus its…

Maybe some people just enjoy working.

An addiction is when our dependency an activity outweighs the net-negative effect of it.

If there’s no net-negative, there’s no addiction.

So yes, some people just enjoy working. Others are workaholics. It’s not all-or-nothing and the evaluation depends on how you calculate the net impact of work on the person’s life.

What OP was calling out is that chronically sacrificing sleep seems to consistently take its toll down the road. So chronically enjoying work at the expense of sleep can be a form of workaholism.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#298

Post by bigDinosaur »

geuis wrote: post #222
amelius wrote: post #6

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 ...

Be very careful when stating this kind of thing. It's extremely easy for people that already have a hard time understanding science and medicine to take this as evidence to support their anti science and anti vaccine/medicine. Different antibiotics target different cellular mechanisms depending on what the microorganism is. And almost none of them target the mitochondria at all. Yes the common hypothesis is that mito…

They do still act like separate organisms, including their own DNA and ability to synthesise proteins. Quinolones are known for being potentially very nasty, that's not 'anti-science'.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#299

Post by ericd »

gitremote wrote: post #53
andrepd wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Indeed. Animals without linguistic ability (like fruit flies) need sleep, but after ChatGPT's release in 2022, now tech bros think LLMs specifically might model the animal brain in general because of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism. It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work, mixing up inference with training.

Come on, don't be uncharitable, language isn't inherently necessary for models like LLMs, you can train something similar on visual inputs. Fruit flies have neurons that pass around ~probabilities/signal strengths to each other to represent their environments and basic concepts, it's not way off as an analogy.

Re: Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria

#300

Post by dragonwriter »

gitremote wrote: post #119
immibis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was applicable to all neural networks, not just LLMs. Can we say that after ChatGPT's release in 2022, now antitech bros think everything is about LLMs specifically?

The statement was "AI frenzy almost convinced me that sleep was the training of our neural network with all the prompts of the day." Prompts are specific to LLMs. Most neural networks don't have prompts. Additionally, prompts happen during LLM inference, not LLM training. There are many non-technical people who claim they have experience "training" LLMs, when they are just an end user who added a lot of tokens to the…

> There are many non-technical people who claim they have experience "training" LLMs, when they are just an end user who added a lot of tokens to the context window during inference.

Since in-context learning is a thing, “adding tokens to the context window”, at least with the intent and effect of having a particular impact on capabilities when inference is run on the context to which they were added, is, arguably, a kind of training.

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