Sleep Is the Ultimate Brainwasher 210
sciencehabit writes "Every night since humans first evolved, we have made what might be considered a baffling, dangerous mistake. Despite the once-prevalent threat of being eaten by predators, and the loss of valuable time for gathering food, accumulating wealth, or having sex, we go to sleep. Scientists have long speculated and argued about why we devote roughly a third of our lives to sleep, but with little concrete data to support any particular theory. Now, new evidence (abstract, full text paywalled) has refreshed a long-held hypothesis: During sleep, the brain cleans itself."
During sleep, the Cerebrospinal fluid fills channels in the brain, collecting waste products. It uses a lot of energy, leading to the hypothesis that the brain can't clean up waste while also processing sensory input.
Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how well this accounts for the extremely variable sleeping periods of various animals? See http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chasleep.html [washington.edu] .
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Funny)
Cats must have very clean brains!?
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Interesting)
Cats must have very clean brains!?
It's hard work running the world and performing the duties of an Egyptian god.
Every cat knows that the human race is merely there to serve them and that's a huge responsibility.
And then there's scripting all those funny cat videos just to keep us humans (their pets) amused.
No wonder cats are tired out most of the time.
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Informative)
Humans are polyphasic too, as infants. We are conditioned into a 8-hour cycle, but it's neither the most efficient [wikipedia.org] nor the best one for your health.
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:4)
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Funny)
"This was also a favorite time for scholars and poets to write uninterrupted, whereas still others visited neighbors, had sex, or engaged in petty crime." ...Or all the above, at the same time :)
Like visiting a neighbor to have sex with his wife and steal some silver in the process... and then write about it.
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> and then write about it
Tweet during the act.
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Silver was a very popular female name.
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Extremely variable sleeping periods (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in medical school, I adopted a pattern of going to sleep for 4 hours in the early evening, waking up at midnight and studying for 4 hours then back to sleep for a few hours. This seemed to work well and improved my grades.
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That's easy you have a dirty mind.
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Its also the reason teenagers sleep so much. And we thought it was because they were growing fast.
I know I slept a lot and I was a filthy minded SOB.
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Someone has probably noticed if brain ventricle size correlated with amount of time sleeping across different species and w
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Surface tension in smaller channels requiring more energy/time?
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"Sleep is universal among vertebrates (9) and has been found in invertebrates (9, 10). The total number of hours of daily sleep varies from as much as 20 hours in bats to as little as 3 to 4 hours in giraffes and elephants (8, 11)—and there is currently no reasonable physiological hypothesis to explain this variation (11).Because CSF perfusion of the interstitial space is limited to the surface of the brain during waking, and brain volume increases faster tha
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What about ants? "Ants never sleep." --Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet. Sleep is overrated. :P
Neat. (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to imagine it as the brain defragmenting itself. Imagine that! A computer guy seeing biological topics through a computer-geek lens!
Re:Neat. (Score:5, Funny)
For teenagers, it's more like a cron job running rm -rf /knowledge/school/exam_answers/*
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For teenagers, it's more like a cron job running rm -rf /knowledge/school/exam_answers/*
Okay, how to I root my brain to edit my crontab???? Then I can finally not me fail english, which I that unpossible.
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For teenagers, it's more like a cron job running rm -rf /knowledge/school/exam_answers/*
Okay, how to I root my brain to edit my crontab???? Then I can finally not me fail english, which I that unpossible.
By an alarm clock.
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Find this book: "Mind Games", published around 1970. Find some friends, go through the exercises (doing each set a few times per week until you've mastered each level or whatever), over a period of about 2-3 months. This was the 'textbook' for a cool class I took a long time ago, called "Altered States of Consciousness Problem Solving Workshop". The purpose of the class was to research the potential for setting subjects with a problem, have them go into these altered states, and then record the result
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http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Games-Guide-Inner-Space/dp/0440556341/ [amazon.com] ?
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Nieztche probably isn't the best example. Its beyond doubt he was a brilliant philosopher. He was also completely and utterly mad as well. The guy had crippling mental illness (Possibly from Syphilis) and as a result I'm not sure its wise to draw too many conclusions from his behavior or even his claims about his behavior.
That said, he did one of his greatest things whilst suffering from his madness, wrote an entire book about how his good friend Wagner (the composer) was an antisemetic nationalist bastard
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Nietzche was just one example from an interesting book, "The Creative Process" [amazon.com], originally published in the 1960s IIRC - apparently it's still in print. It's a collection of 50 essays by well-known thinkers including Nietzche and Einstein, I was just paraphrasing from long-ago memory. Most/all of the essays involve that plateau-leap-plateau-leap cycle of creativity. So it's not just him.
WRT the Nazi collection, another book points out something interesting - another philosopher that was "adopted" by the
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Yeah, and a perhaps even more adequate analogy would seem to be the 'garbage collection'...
I've seen the defragging happen (Score:4, Interesting)
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i literary spat on the keyboard. well done, fairly fucked up mental image :)
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an anthropomorphic rabbit
Was he called Frank? This doesn't bode well.
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Like so many computer programs... (Score:5, Funny)
Humans suffer from major memory leaks and must be shut down periodically due to poor garbage collection.
Re:Like so many computer programs... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Like so many computer programs... (Score:5, Interesting)
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A girl in slashdot, is that possible? ;-P
You're dreaming.
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Humans suffer from major memory leaks and must be shut down periodically due to poor garbage collection.
Except for C programmers who can go on and on without any apparent performance deterioration.
Couldn't you come up... (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's not like researchers are going so far as to pay for advertising their papers.
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Re:Couldn't you come up... (Score:5, Informative)
...with a better word than "brainwashing?" Since that already means something that does not match the contents of the article.
BEEP BOOP I am a robot can't detect a joke.
Brainwashing is a perfect word to use here since that's exactly what's happening.
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...with a better word than "brainwashing?" Since that already means something that does not match the contents of the article.
BEEP BOOP I am a robot can't detect a joke.
Brainwashing is a perfect word to use here since that's exactly what's happening.
"brainwashing" != "brain washing". And I don't think it was that the OP didn't get the pun, it's just that the pun was crap. As I said above, I would have gone with a pun on "dirty mind" if it was my headline.
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BEEP BOOP! I am a robot. I have no sense of humor. Must suppress humor in others.
I like how you edited out my joke so you make your point without looking like a dick. That was clever.
(Do you need the sarcasm pointed out to you or can you get it yourself?)
Re:Couldn't you come up... (Score:5, Funny)
...with a better word than "brainwashing?" Since that already means something that does not match the contents of the article.
Agree. A "dirty mind" joke would have gone down far better.
Windows (Score:2)
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You should get to it before someone else does... I'm thinking something along the lines of Larry Niven's body banks... or the premise of the (terrrible) Repo Men
It Also (Score:2)
Gives to time to better process and analyse the data that you collected during the day. Most of what you learn, you learn in your sleep, while unconscionably looking over the stuff that you just did not get while awake, distracted by all the other input going on.
Evolutionary pressure to not sleep? (Score:3, Interesting)
A higher order species that has brains that can "cleans" itself without requiring sleep would have so much evolutionary advantage that they would rapidly take over the entire planet (sort of like flowering plants). Why hasn't 3+ billion years of evolutionary produced such a species?
Re:Evolutionary pressure to not sleep? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's advantages and disadvantages to every evolutionary option. It's not clear that not sleeping is a very large advantage.
Sure, it means being active for an additional 8 hours a day. But being active also means needing more food. Being active all night in a time before artificial light means more injuries. It also means missing out on the social effects of sleeping - "sleeping together", even without sex, reinforces relationships.
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Re:Evolutionary pressure to not sleep? (Score:4, Insightful)
We, sleeping creatures are "lucky"* that by "coincidence" the day is divided in two parts so different that an animal well adapted to one of them don't fare very well on the other. So, most animals adapt to one of those parts, and just protect themselves the best way they can at the other. For nearly all animals, being awake wouldn't make much of a difference.
* Lucky that we adapted to exactly the environment that we evolved on. What a coincidence, isn't it?
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There'd probably be a huge overhead to doing this kind of thing while awake. Enough to make it completely impractical. Also, evolution doesn't tend toward perfect, it only tends toward "lives long enough to have children."
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Sitting in the dark gets boring.
Now we have electricity and can have light and entertainment 24/7. I find it likely that within the next 100 years, it will be common and possibly healthy to have 4 hours or less sleep a night.
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Imagine reason waking up and finding out what the right brain has been up to. Every day or so.
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As city-based life becomes more global and the lights are on all the time, it seems plausible that some humans and their associated animals (cats?) might go toward some form of continuous wakefulness - as it is now, some stock traders are essentially living 24 hour lives, taking cat naps every so often. And I have read that there are a few people (I think a few dozen in the US) who indeed never sleep, so the gene profile is out there. There is still the problem of reproduction - how many kids are stock tr
So that is why naps are so good! (Score:3)
Mid-day sweeping keeps the cobwebs out.
So, if you're inhuman (Score:2)
And wish to engage in brainwashing of your own, how should sleep deprivation feature in your... um... "protocol"?
Modafinil (Score:2)
What does this imply for the idiots who figure they can just replace most or all of their sleep with Modafinil? I'm guessing there are going to be a few sad stories in the future.
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short sleepers (Score:2)
I've always sort of thought they were full of waste products.
There have been a few people who dont sleep at all (Score:2)
How to explain those folks?
(Google it yourself)
It's an adaptation (Score:2)
Re:Obvious question (Score:5, Interesting)
Many neurological diseases—from Alzheimer's disease to stroke and dementia—are associated with sleep disturbances, Nedergaard notes. The study suggests that lack of sleep could have a causal role, by allowing the byproducts to build up and cause brain damage. "This could open a lot of debate for shift workers, who work during the nighttime,” Nedergaard predicts. "You probably develop damage if you don’t get your sleep."
Beta amyloids are specifically mentioned, those make up the plaques that are found in Alzheimers.
Worth pointing out that the effects of sleep deprivation are well known, this is simply trying to explain HOW those symptoms occur.
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Why should WHEN you sleep matter. Night or day, as long as you get the needed sleep.
Some people may simply have a more efficient "cleaning" system, and need less sleep.
But I have other concerns with this finding, because it suggests this fluid replacement only
occurs when the brain is not awake, yet we know that there is vast amounts of neural activity
when the brain is asleep and dreaming.
Re:Obvious question (Score:5, Interesting)
The second point, you're responding to a new hypothesis put forth by the researcher based on the current findings. The current findings are only that it's cleared out during sleep, not saying that low neural activity is the reason. That part is just speculation. I'd suggest it's probably more complex, that the glial cleaning activity causes abnormal neuronal activity when it's in that mode. Perhaps the reason it happens during sleep is because if it happened while you were awake, you'd hallucinate, act even more irrationally and irregularly etc. Perhaps that's part of the reason that dreams are so bizarre. Pure speculation.
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There is activity, particularly during REM sleep, but it is certainly not of the well coordinated nature of the waking state.
As for when, it's only important because most people find daytime sleeping less restful and more prone to frequent wakeups.
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Why should WHEN you sleep matter. Night or day, as long as you get the needed sleep.
Some people may simply have a more efficient "cleaning" system, and need less sleep.
But I have other concerns with this finding, because it suggests this fluid replacement only occurs when the brain is not awake, yet we know that there is vast amounts of neural activity when the brain is asleep and dreaming.
Why should WHEN you sleep matter.
Give shift work a go, not just for a couple of days, try it for a few years. It's like a permanent hang over only without the headache. However I agree, according to MRI scans the brain is actually MORE active during sleep than when it's awake, and not just during dreaming. It's an interesting finding but the "hypothesis" in the summary doesn't make sense to me either, nor can I see anything that resembles it in the abstract. Perhaps the "hypothesis" is just the submitter's speculation?
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Yeah, I've done my share of sift work in the past.
Oddly I would seek to trade guys to work their graveyard shift, so that I could stay on that shift. I found no shortage of takers.
Plant was cooler at night, and house was quieter to sleep with the rest of the family at work or school.
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Re:Obvious question (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently, brain poop which may lead to many brain farts.
Re:Obvious question (Score:5, Interesting)
I went almost a week without sleep and it definitely screws you up. On day 5, I was hallucinating that there were people around me and seeing things out of the corner of my eye. I had a constant fuzzy feeling and had very little energy. It was an interesting experiment and it was not easy to get to sleep. It took me over a month to get back into a proper rhythm.
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Did you use drugs to stay awake? (caffeine counts) I've never been awake more than 40 hours.
Re:Obvious question (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that I remember. It was rough for the first two days but by day 3 I just didn't feel like sleeping anymore. I watched TV or played games all night until people were alive again and continued on with my day. I was exhausted though both mentally and physically somehow. The day after I finally slept was probably the worst. Still no energy but now coupled with nausea and no appetite. It was like a withdrawal of some sort... not recommended :P
I already kick into REM sleep really fast as it is so when I was not sleeping, I would sort of dream while being awake. It's a crazy experience for sure.
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Hmm you must have issues travelling long distances. I regularly fly between Australia and the US and since I can't sleep on planes and since you usually arrive first thing in the morning at the destination, it's usually approximately 30-36 hours awake total. I'm tired, sure, but not experiencing those kind of symptoms.
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5 days? that's nothing, 11 days was my record, granted numerous quantities of drugs were involved. By that time I was quite psychotic though and a good friend firmly suggested I sleep with a very well placed punch.
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Dreams are calibration patterns (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm still convinced that dreams are artifacts of calibration routines, and only race conditions allow you to remember them.
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The metabolic toxins build up. eventually they cause lasting damage.
Might should sleep!
In short, you're killing yourself. (Score:5, Informative)
You're possibly setting yourself up for Alzheimer's. It's been known for a long time that buildup of amyloid plaques is worsened by lack of sleep and vice versa. (Sleep issues show up long before other symptoms of Alzheimer's). This provide a mechanism by showing how the plaques are regularly removed by good sleep.
For extra fun, sleep is also when myelin-repairing oligodendrocytes kick into gear. You probably won't develop MS from not sleeping, but it isn't good for your long-term health, as that function is necessary to the survival of brain cells. This impacts mood, memory, and moral judgement.
Oh, and then there's the fact that lack of sleep disrupts the ratio of leptin and ghrelin in your body, making you far hungrier when awake. This is part of the reason that lack of sleep is correlated with obesity. You also have lower testosterone (impacting your virility) & higher cortisol levels (wrecking your memory and weakening your immune system). Other hormone changes put you at higher risks of type 2 diabetes.
In short, you're killing yourself. Seek help if this isn't voluntary. Prioritize getting more sleep.
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I had a problem with that line: the ventricles of the brain are ALWAYS full of that fluid. That's what they take during a spinal tap. You don't need to be asleep for that.
Although you may prefer to be...
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According to Wikipedia, spinal tap involves taking fluid from the spine in the lower back area, not brain. Why would having fluid there imply that the same fluid is also present in the brain at the same time?
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It's a cybernetic quandary; the only way the brain can protect itself from erasure is to periodically stop all inputs.
Sounds like a hard drive I had once...
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If you can learn to compose well-written proposals and stay relatively positive, you can always do contracting (assuming you have skills that are in demand). Take a look at Guru.com [guru.com]. You'll be bidding against third world countries, but you wouldn't want the sort of employer that would hire them anyway, and there are ones looking for quality over cost.
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I mean, even a short nap instantly improves how you feel, anywhere from 5-15 minutes.
Not everyone responds well to short naps. I don't. I know I'm no alone. ...not simply trying to be contrary, just saying that short naps aren't for everyone.
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When tired, sleep.
When hungry, eat.
When thirsty, drink.
When in pain, don't mask the pain - find the cause.
Our bodies are self-sustaining machines based on multi-million-year-old designs that have been specifically chosen for their ability to detect, avoid and cope with dangers.
We're not perfect but, pretty much, the body knows exactly what it needs at any given time (there are instances where, if you ignore the warning signs, fight through, and you're close to destruction, the body will "flip" and want you
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A lot(tm).
There's a fantastic return on that, since it effectively increases my lifespan by 30%.
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and all this time i thought the blood cells took waste away from the brain cells to the kidneys. I learned something new today. thanks for posting
There's also lymph - the forgotten circulatory system.