Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Sleep is essential for brain functionality and overall health but understanding how sleep delivers its beneficial effects remains largely unknown. Sleep researchers are exploring new and unbiased approaches that can take sleep to a systems level. In one such approach, referred to as 'systems genetics', inferences about biological phenomena can be made by linking together several levels of information from DNA to phenotype via gene expression, proteins and metabolism at the level of a population. Systems genetics offers a global and interconnected view of biological phenomena and is therefore considered critical towards predicting disease susceptibility.
Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/08/180809141231.htm
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 12 2018, @07:17AM
Watch the Parker Solar Probe launch.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @07:36AM (13 children)
Its to conserve energy and perform maintenance.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by anubi on Sunday August 12 2018, @08:27AM (10 children)
I believe its defragging.
If I do not sleep, the first thing to go on me is cognition. I am worse than drunk.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @08:36AM (9 children)
Yep it must be garbage collection that brain can't perform "online".
When you sleep you are vulnerable, so it must be something very important or many species would have evolved out of it.
That the body uses sleep for other resting/rebuilding functions is just opportunistic.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday August 12 2018, @09:09AM (8 children)
Yup... one would have thought the need for sleep would have been bred out of us eons ago. All animal species.
I do not know of any mammal that does not sleep. I am not for sure if there is any animal that does not require sleep.
And even if they are doing something else which apparently requires cognition, are they sleeping? It is quite obvious to me that my kidneys, digestive system, respiratory, and circulatory system have been running on some sort of autopilot all night. I wake up every morning with two bags that need emptying and one bag wanting something put in it.
So, a fish that may need to be in motion 24/7 to do whatever fish do that we call breathing, may well be on the same kind of autopilot.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 12 2018, @09:59AM (2 children)
but they are in many ways quite unlike other animals.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 12 2018, @11:24AM (1 child)
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/great-white-shark-caught-sleeping-film-first-time [mnn.com]
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday August 12 2018, @06:05PM
I don't watch much TV. Because of Documents. But I always, always tune in to Shark Week. That one, she's sleeping -- they call it Catatonic. But she's still SCAREY AS HELL!!!!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Sunday August 12 2018, @02:29PM (3 children)
Or at least partially solved years ago.
I don't recall title or authors, but remember reading a study a good while back that claimed to have solved at least one of the driving forces for (deep) sleep:
The body has two fluid management systems - the circulatory system that delivers oxygen, nutrients, etc., and the lymphatic system which removes waste. But there is no lymphatic system in the brain, the neurons are simply packed too tightly for a second set of plumbing. Instead, cells simply eject waste into the space between them, where it builds up. Then, during deep sleep, the brain cells shrink by about 10-20% and the pulse in your circulatory "massages" the waste down the outside of the capillaries and out of the brain.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RandomFactor on Sunday August 12 2018, @03:13PM
Yeah, it looks like they twigged to this about five years ago.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/brain-may-flush-out-toxins-during-sleep [nih.gov]
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/10/18/236211811/brains-sweep-themselves-clean-of-toxins-during-sleep [npr.org]
I remember an article on this a year or so ago (here or /. probably) that covered it as well, talked about the brain compressing in sections much like a sponge for this purpose.
Essentially the brain is a big chemical factory and if you don't get sleep and do the rinse and repeat thing you start acting more and more impaired as a result (and yes, eventually die.)
В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Monday August 13 2018, @01:28AM (1 child)
discusses that and many other benefits of sleep: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep [goodreads.com]
Related podcast: http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/matthew-walker [joerogan.net]
From something I posted on HN with other ideas from the book ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17575177 [ycombinator.com] ):
* Sleep is when we move memories from shorter-term storage in the hippocampus to longer-term storage in the frontal cortex. If you don't sleep well at night, you lose many memories of the day.
* Without adequate sleep (about 8 hour a night) your cognitive performance during the day nosedives into the ground -- and the cumulative effects get worse over time. At the same time, you may be less able to recognize this effect.
* After 20 hours of being awake you are as cognitively impaired as if you were legally drunk.
* More and worse car accidents happen from drowsy driving then drunk driving. While drunk driving may slow reaction times, drowsy drivers have "microsleeps" where for seconds at a time they stop responding to external stimuli and can unknowingly drift over into oncoming traffic or not stop for a red light or a pedestrian.
* Sleep is needed to make new immune cells like for preventing cancer.
* Sleep is needed to process emotional events from the day so we can reflect on what happened without becoming too anxious about it. He gives an example for treating PTSD of veterans via better sleep and a medication that affects dreaming.
* Sleep-deprived people are more likely to slack off and even make unethical choices. Underslept people also are less charismatic leaders. So less sleep does not equate to more productivity.
* Sleep (and dreams) are a time when the brain connects random ideas that may lead to useful ideas when awake the next day.
* Good sleep is absolutely essential to the developing brain in children even from before birth.
* While ADHD may be a real health condition, many symptoms of sleep deprivation overlap with those of ADHD and so there may be some misdiagnosis going on from that.
* Some people are naturally early-riser larks and others are naturally late-rising night owls (and many are in the middle). Forcing one to keep the schedule of the other leads to worse performance and more accidents and so on.
* Teenagers naturally go to sleep later and wake up later than younger children or adults (possibly to give them experience acting independently of their elders in a tribal setting). Delaying the start time for high school students by about an hour in one case lead to a 200+ point increase in SAT scores of top performers -- and in another case to a 60% decrease in car accidents among the teenagers who drove.
All this is backed by references to recent scientific studies.
Essentially, as my own analogy, our brains are overclocked during the day and need eight hours of good sleep to fix up all the deferred maintenance.
He includes advice on getting more and better sleep. One surprising recommendation from the book -- set an alarm to remind you when to go to sleep!
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @02:16AM
That's crazy enough it might be a good idea.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 13 2018, @01:00AM
Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep [wikipedia.org], some creatures sleep half brain.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @02:40PM (1 child)
Deferred processing. Sensory input is highly filtered in waking life. I think during sleep, the raw stream is replayed, enabling learning and deeper insights from details one may have missed conciously. This would explain dreams as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @02:56PM
This is just a type of maintenance.
(Score: 2, Troll) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday August 12 2018, @07:44AM (1 child)
I have a great temperament for success. I have a temperament where I know how to win. I'm tremendously honored to have the greatest temperament that anybody has, because I know how to win. You know, I'm not a big sleeper. I like 3 hours, 4 hours. I toss, I turn. I beepity-beep. I want to find out what's going on!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @12:34PM
>I beepity-beep
oh, so your ctrl-g spot gets pressed? very mechanical of you, meatbag.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday August 12 2018, @09:56AM (5 children)
when I was in grad school I realized that I could do my quantum mechanics homework in my sleep.
My therapist confirmed that that really works.
Sucks To Be Me: when I was an undergrad I always did my problem sets the night before they were due. That meant I never had the benefit of somnambulistic problem solution.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by anubi on Sunday August 12 2018, @10:27AM
Same here, MDC...
I get a lot of my most insightful ideas when I am asleep. However, I must be awake to actually implement it.
But I can surely understand about handing the problem off to the subconsious layer when I am up against a block on the conscious layer.
That's where I solve my "architectural" problems. When I am trying to see the grand plan of how the whole thing goes together. At the office, I consider it a good day if I have succeeded in not stepping on too many toes. The more suit-guys I have to interact with, the less I get done, cause often trying to do something will piss one or more of them off.
I mostly try to solve problems "at my desk" only as theatre for those paying me to solve the problem... but most of the actual work happens in my bed.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @01:19PM
I still do problem solving in my sleep. Every night before I go to bed I review the toughest part of the work on the next day's schedule. When I wake up I usually have a good head start on it, and frequently have the problem or design worked out.
(Score: 4, Funny) by mhajicek on Sunday August 12 2018, @03:18PM (2 children)
I've done CADCAM in my sleep. Then I realized I was dreaming, and kept trying to find a way to save the file such that I would be able to access it in the waking world. When I got to work I had to start over from scratch.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @08:06PM
I once pulled of an improbable speed run in Quake, having binged the game for days on end before finally going to sleep. The dream's visuals were perfectly matching their IRL template of the epoch, sparsely textured polygon graphics rendered on a CRT in 800x600. In my dream, there was no doubt in my mind that this is how the real world was supposed to look.
I never got into speed runs IRL, not my cup of tea.
(Score: 2, Funny) by anubi on Tuesday August 14 2018, @11:52AM
Yup... I remember having this dream about taking two or more microphones, digitizing their output simultaneously, storing the whole shebang in memory, at least 2048 samples from each... then running goertzels on the resulting data, from which I can beamform as the phase of each frequency comes out ... and by considering both phase and frequency, I can determine the direction of where the sound source that emanated the noise is - with an Arduino.
I even had the schematics of the thing. Then I woke up. Nothing in my hand but my pillowcase.
I still wanna build that thing.
Something go bump in the middle of the night? I'll know where! Unless its a damm cricket. Won't point out crickets because they mostly emit one frequency, and I've gotta be tracking something that emits a lot more broadband noise.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @01:22PM (3 children)
The bodily systems which require the mineral Calcium, can only perform their major biological duties while you sleep.
During waking hours, the major biological requirements switch to Iron and B Vitamins.
The Calcium cycle and The Iron cycle are antagonistic, therefore one is suppressed to minor biological duties while the other is in its major operational mode.
Therefore, sleep is a necessary part of the human biological loop.
----
Gravity and the Iron cycle have a symbiotic relationship. Therefore for optimum health, a human should be performing gravity-fighting activity every day, ie: walking, running, lifting weights, etc.
Conversely, the Iron cycle can be trained (or tricked) to degenerate to negative levels by avoiding gravity-fighting activity, ie: office workers and others whose job is to sit or lie down all day. Interestingly, degenerated Iron levels can also come about with elite athletes whose sport is not fully weight bearing, ie: cyclists and swimmers.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 12 2018, @06:09PM (1 child)
I honestly can't decide whether this is pure bio-babble snakeoil or actual science.
I would be really interested in the latter, can you point me to some studies? (... the kind that gets published on arxiv.org or some similar place ...)
(Score: 2) by EventH0rizon on Sunday August 12 2018, @10:57PM
I also found those comments interesting.
I do know that the Vitamin B/Iron mechanism has some interesting support: Folate and vitamin B12 supplementation reduces disabling schizophrenia symptoms [massgeneral.org] and Folate, vitamin B12 help schizophrenia symptoms [nurse.com], but I've never heard of the Gravity angle.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday August 12 2018, @06:25PM
So true. And without enough Iron, Restless Leg. Big league. Custom supplements all the way!!!