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Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mostly sleep deprivation though. I graduated with a 3.7 from a top 5 school in CS after I was treated. My apnea was SEVERE before treatment: 30 apneas per hour. I doubt I had any brain damage, though my study only recorded a min SpO2 of 90%.
Before CPAP, How many times do you actually remember waking up in middle of night?
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.
Our "real" bodies (minds) need some downtime from the game.
So this explains why real AI will never happen: This reality is not where our consciousness lies.
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 an…
one reason why we respirate
To replenish the oxygen in our blood.
one reason why we digest
To extract energy from our food.
one reason why we circulate
To distribute nutrients around the body.
Simplified as those answers may be, they're not wrong FAFAIK, they're incomplete. Do we have such a single not-completely-wrong answer for why we sleep?
My guess: predators hunt at night. The quieter you are, the more likely you are to survive another night.
This rambling summary article touches briefly on "natural selection" but no one has yet to look into what seems obvious. In mammals where most parents have to care for their young, if the young did not sleep, did not give their parents a break for long periods, they would not survive. Therefore sleep is selected for. Those offspring that sleep survive, passing on the sleep trait, to their offspring. - Source: parent.
While I agree that sounds like a plausible theory (and sort of reminds of the domestication theory... ie cute animals get more parental and human focus) but there are just too many animals that barely take care of their young that still sleep.... for example sharks sleep.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Likely" is not the word I would go for. "according to my wild guess" is a more accurate term.
I've heard it before and it's not their wild guess but a seriously discussed idea. It's just that it's hard to set up experiments to test these sort of ideas.
> 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.