4 ms·

This isn't about the time "right as you fall asleep". If it were, it would fit just fine with various earlier theories of sleep: the ones that concluded that sl

This isn't about the time "right as you fall asleep". If it were, it would fit just fine with various earlier theories of sleep: the ones that concluded that sleep was just an extreme form of rest, a chance to let all those overworked neurons cool down and heal, and that you could get most of the benefits of sleep by, say, meditating. But the new data is beginning to home in on what sleep accomplishes. And, in fact, your brain is doing a lot of work while you sleep. If I were to indulge in some CS-freshman handwaving, I'd say that the sleeping brain is doing garbage collection, lossy compression, and search indexing and optimization. Is that surprising? I'd say that the really surprising thing is that we've gone through life up to now without really having any data on what sleep is for. So the new theory that sleep is primarily about memory management is more gratifying than surprising. It's about time we figured this out!

kirse 18y ago
I think it's surprising that we still can't figure out the purpose of an observable process that blows a third (or more) of our lives, yet somehow we've come to a definitive theory on how the entire universe came into existence. I guess the more we know, the more we realize we don't know.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  I know folks who work on neural imaging. Let me assure you that to call sleep "an observable process" is a big exaggeration. Stars are much easier to observe than the details of your brain at work. Indeed, the reactions which drive stars are easier to see, understand, and simulate than a single neuron is. It's not the size or the distance -- it's the complexity. I'm not saying that astrophysics is easy, but it's a lot less complex than the brain. Your brain is the most complicated thing in the universe... as far as we know.
  - eru 18y ago
    It is just a matter of what you mean by understanding a thing. There are different standards applied to brains and stars. A lot of things that count as understanding in stars are just normal to know about brains - for example mass, density, mechanical properties, energy throughput, age. That "Human brains are the most complex thing in the universe"-meme strikes me as human chauvinism.

kirse 18y ago

I think it's surprising that we still can't figure out the purpose of an observable process that blows a third (or more) of our lives, yet somehow we've come to a definitive theory on how the entire universe came into existence. I guess the more we know, the more we realize we don't know.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
I know folks who work on neural imaging. Let me assure you that to call sleep "an observable process" is a big exaggeration. Stars are much easier to observe than the details of your brain at work. Indeed, the reactions which drive stars are easier to see, understand, and simulate than a single neuron is. It's not the size or the distance -- it's the complexity. I'm not saying that astrophysics is easy, but it's a lot less complex than the brain. Your brain is the most complicated thing in the universe... as far as we know.
- eru 18y ago
  It is just a matter of what you mean by understanding a thing. There are different standards applied to brains and stars. A lot of things that count as understanding in stars are just normal to know about brains - for example mass, density, mechanical properties, energy throughput, age. That "Human brains are the most complex thing in the universe"-meme strikes me as human chauvinism.