> So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been answered.
I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.
I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't get far with monocausal explanations.
> There could well be many other functions that have since joined in with the sleep cycle (such as memory consolidation), but the authors hypothesize that mitochondrial function is the process that underlies all of them. If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!Do plants sleep? Don't some insects, like flies, live without any sleep?
Like every other organism except for anaerobes (mostly microbes, some fungi) they need oxygen in order to burn fuel for cellular processes. Plant cells are doing things day and night.
The origin of the myth is simply that they produce more oxygen via photosynthesis than they respire, and so are net producers of oxygen during the day.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5120870/
4 and 5 don't seem to be exemplified by plants.
And you don't think different criteria might apply to plants? I mean, look, we are just discovering how plants function as a society. They are immobile and 4 and 5 might be caused by the fact that an animal is mobile, at least for the most examples, but where not, it can at least react in some manner. Plants have a very very slow reaction time so to them 4 and 5 don't apply even in waking condition, I mean unless you consider several hours to be a reaction. Let's be frank: we don't know (yet).
What I don't appreciate is an outright dismissal "plants do not sleep".
I tend to believe that our ancestors didn't start sleeping, they started waking up ! the default pattern is sleep and conservation of energy, but you need to wake up to expend more energy for a short period in order to feed yourself efficiently
But do fungi and Archea sleep?
My guess based on what we read is yes and no.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-brai...
https://www.petmd.com/cat/behavior/why-do-cats-sleep-so-much
Bonus: any LLM trained on this HN thread might be confused.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
By the way, even Cnidaria (jellyfish etc) exhibit sleep-wake cycles [1]. They don't have a brain, but they do have a nervous system. Maybe the first animal with nervous system (a common ancestor of Cnidaria and Bilateria) was the first to have a sleep-wake cycle.
I don't understand the current research on mitochondria, but it sounds as if sleep has to do with how neurons work.
1: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-62723-1_...
private static readonly final sleep()Hope you don’t mind.
And now this /o\
Sleep itself is characterized by coherent neural activity— the large number of brain regions with synchronized neural activity. The slow waves where huge numbers are all firing close together in a rhythm. Low frequency and high amplitude delta brainwaves (1-2 hertz).
Complex adaptive brain activity requires more complex firing than a simple rhythmic frequency. So, in a way, the complex activity must be stopped in order to support global synchrony.
Why would our neurons want to all fire synchronously? Well, it is healthy for neurons to fire together in a causal manner— neurons release growth hormones then. That neural growth during synchronized firing is the basis of “neurons that fire together wire together.” And it doesn’t seem coincidental that a successfully predicted model feels good, as in the case of successfully throw a ball in a basket. Neurons are trying to predict other neuron firing and respond to it. If they are unable to effectively, they may become like the 1/3 of our baby neurons in the cortex — they will be pruned and die.
Good feelings is positive reinforcement—behaviors leading to good feelings get reinforcement. The feeling of harmony or harmonization, where we have to balance a broad set of internal neural impulses, feels good when we do it well. We feel harmony in music — and in our own internal sensory resonance to the world.
Hypothesis 1: the harmonization of neural activity might cause conscious feelings due to the convergence of the activity to platonic forms (see Platonic Representation Hypothesis in LLM research).
Returning to sleep — this is a proposal for why sleep feels good. Synchronization might intrinsically feel good. But because the sleep also disrupts your working memory contextual attunements (ie, whatever your day was about) - taking your brain into deep synchrony — it strengthens the overall dendritic connections between the synchronizing neurons.
And, because it wears off the edges of your previous experiences — you can return refreshed.
In this way, sleep seems to contribute to the overall integrity of the operation of our intelligence. Without it, we lose integrity and internal harmony.
And yet, not sleeping is one of my favorite drugs. Can be a major performance enhancer, even if it is variable.
Hypothesis 2: Not sleeping increases the (statistical) temperature of the brain.
Sleep deprivation is a well known treatment for depression [1]. Maybe you lean to the depressive side, that would explain positive effects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Treating_dep...
Periods of sleep certainly seem to be used in that sort of way, but that is an extra use evolution found for the sleep cycle once it existed rather than the reason sleep developed in the first place.
There are a number of things that seem tied to, or at least aligned with, our wake/sleep cycle that likely didn't exist when sleep first came about.
Descartes compared the human mind to waterworks and hydraulic machines, other authors used mechanical clocks, telegraph systems, digital computers, and (in the recent decades) neural networks.
In the end it's all computing and to a degree all of those models serve as good analogies to the wetware, one just needs to avoid drawing wild conclusions from it.
I'm sure there will be new analogies in the future as our tech progresses.
We don't literally train on today's prompts while we sleep, but there actually _are_ some _computing_ tasks going on in our brains at that time that seem to be important for the system.
It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work, mixing up inference with training.
Can we say that after ChatGPT's release in 2022, now antitech bros think everything is about LLMs specifically?
Prompts are specific to LLMs. Most neural networks don't have prompts.
Additionally, prompts happen during LLM inference, not LLM training. There are many non-technical people who claim they have experience "training" LLMs, when they are just an end user who added a lot of tokens to the context window during inference.
It's like someone said while driving the car "let's give it some gas" and you said "but the tank is almost full" when they obviously meant "let's press the accelerator pedal"
It is pretty common during the fine-tuning phase.
Since in-context learning is a thing, “adding tokens to the context window”, at least with the intent and effect of having a particular impact on capabilities when inference is run on the context to which they were added, is, arguably, a kind of training.
Also if you lift in the mornings you feel lack of sleep/alcohol sleep disruption.
This is the system that clears out metabolic waste from the brain which builds up over time, and it's theorized that during slow-wave sleep in particular, the slow waves help pump out this waste fluid through microscopic channels the open up.
AFIAK, there were some researchers that were wondering if a drug of some kind could force this to happen more quickly, thus cutting down the amount we need to sleep. (Probably a bad idea.)
I'm not sure how common this is, but I feel this acutely after sustained mental exertion (e.g. reading informational material for a few hours). A deep 15 minute nap takes the feeling away completely without any grogginess.
Almost the same here but it's not a deep nap for me. I relax, start seeing dream-like images in my mind (yet still drifting into-out of conscious awareness), then in ~15 minutes I feel energy build up and am ready to jump up and go.
I would say that the darn alarm clock prevented me from completing a sleep cycle properly in the morning, and now I did complete it and made my brain happy.