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Comment by albertgoeswoof | Hacker News Reader

> Sleep allows the brain to catch up on the day's events. That is, it buffers certain things to be processed in full later

Citation?

I didn't know there was a proven reason why we sleep...?

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Here's a good review that came out not too long ago:

>Specifically, newer findings characterize sleep as a brain state optimizing memory consolidation, in opposition to the waking brain being optimized for encoding of memories.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9ac5/c749244b9e2509a670a816... [pdf]

Interesting. It's like the Refactoring phase of TDD. So basically during the day you experience new observations ("tests" if you will), you address/process them however you can on the spot ("green bar"), then during sleep you take stock and generalize so you can reuse the experiences of the day for the future ("refactor").

I've been seeing this TDD process in a lot of things lately. Scientific progress seems to follow the same process as well (at least that's one way to capture what Popper or Lakatos have been telling us, not that I've actually read them yet mind you).

Both refactoring and GC.

There has been a lot more research recently about the neurobiological effects of sleep. A good summary: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5501041/

> I didn't know there was a proven reason why we sleep...?

I don’t know if you’re being coy and trying to say the opposite—that we don’t have one, and therefore op is wrong? If so: they didn’t say that was the reason. Just that it was what happened during sleep. Could be a side effect of sleep. We know about some of those, as far as I’m aware.

I don't think it's a question of why. That's board and difficult to pin down. However, there's plenry of studies on what happens when we sleep. Post-day processing _is_ one of those things.

The article mentioned a book that is literally called Why We Sleep, written by a sleep researcher.

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