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What is the real reason we sleep?

bbc.com

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Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#31

Post by poizan42 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #5
mchahn wrote: post #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.

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.

FFI is a bad model for long term sleep deprivation since massive neuronal loss is also involved.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#32

Post by Omniusaspirer »

mchahn wrote: post #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.

Are there any decent sources for Nova episodes online? It's been years since I watched any of them but I'd love to dive back in.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#33

Post by samueladam »

azeirah wrote: post #27
KannO wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't all be plants and fungus.

Plants seem to sleep as well, can't pinpoint the exact source right now, but it was from a documentary. Something among the lines of "the hidden lives of plants"

http://www.ted.com/talks/stefano_mancuso_the_roots_of_plant_...

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#34

Post by personjerry »

yason wrote: post #21

What if the question was phrased as what is the real reason we wake up and dedicate some conscious time for our mind? Surely, because in the physical world we live we need to arrange for some time to deal with the unavoidable practical things such as finding food and shelter. Then, after a long enough period of this activity focused on these very tangible, physical and physiological constraints we can finally say we…

Perhaps to that question the answer is: to secure nutrients and safety for our body as we sleep?

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#35

Post by Dylan16807 »

yason wrote: post #21

What if the question was phrased as what is the real reason we wake up and dedicate some conscious time for our mind? Surely, because in the physical world we live we need to arrange for some time to deal with the unavoidable practical things such as finding food and shelter. Then, after a long enough period of this activity focused on these very tangible, physical and physiological constraints we can finally say we…

Doesn't make sense to me. To take care of those needs, we don't need to be awake nearly as much as we are. On the other hand, staying awake all the time would have moderate efficiency benefits and provide a lot more protection from threats. So we should either be sleeping a lot more or barely at all; the middle ground has no benefit under this model. The model of sleep as recovery works a lot better for the durations we see.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#37

Post by Toenex »

carsongross wrote: post #8

Conjecture (half serious): we won't get strong AI until we figure out why we need to sleep.

Begins to sound like a science fiction novel where a bunch of sleep researchers discover that far from being 'down time' sleep is actually a period where our neural hardware is being used by beings from another dimension to perform some nefarious calculation. Or if Douglas Adams were still alive a P2P version of Deep Thought.

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#38

Post by kristjanfe »

narsil wrote: post #25

I took Matt Walker's class on sleep at UC Berkeley (Psych 133) and it was fascinating. Short-term effects of a lack of sleep are easily observable, and I'm sure we can all relate from personal experience. However, long-term effects of sleep deprivation are harder to determine. One of the few known correlations appears to be that people who are susceptible to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia are more likely…

also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOI45ntO0iA [The Mysteries of Sleep, Prof. Matthew P. Walker]

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#39

Post by vacri »

Two things missing from the article: physical repair is improved in sleep; and the laydown of long-term memories is an important part of sleep. You can screw up someone's memory of the previous day by waking them at the right times.

And, as usual, REM sleep steals the show. Probably because of that funky acronym, and that's when we tend to have movie-like dreams. Wake people up at the right time in slow-wave sleep and they'll report 'dreams' that are just sounds or flashes of light.

Bonus factoid: you can wake most people up from even deep sleep by calling their name a few times. When I was a 'sleep technician', that's how I used to wake people up when I had to fix a sensor - much more gentle than physically touching or shaking them.

It's a bit disappointing that journalists are still peddling the "sleep is a great big mystery" angle. And also that the article is arguing that there must be one particular reason why we sleep. There isn't one reason why we respirate, one reason why we digest, or one reason why we circulate - why should there be one reason why we sleep?

Re: What is the real reason we sleep?

#40

Post by spyder »

yason wrote: post #21

What if the question was phrased as what is the real reason we wake up and dedicate some conscious time for our mind? Surely, because in the physical world we live we need to arrange for some time to deal with the unavoidable practical things such as finding food and shelter. Then, after a long enough period of this activity focused on these very tangible, physical and physiological constraints we can finally say we…

You are saying we wake up just to survive ("finding food and shelter"), but it's right in the article:

“The cost of losing consciousness to survival is astronomical,”

"This means we can confidently reject one of the simplest theories of sleep: that we drift off simply because we have nothing better to do."

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