The actual research is quite interesting. Sleep disorders themselves are fascinating. There is evidence that TBI (traumatic brain injury) can cause lasting sleep cycle disruption. Perhaps sleep disruption and TBI is a much bigger factor in the lasting impact of TBI than previously thought.
Article review: This is pretty good science reporting, actually providing a link to the study being referenced. My one nit is the use of the word "Toxins". That is a trigger word for me that immediately makes me suspicious of the reporting. Scientific papers about the human body very rarely if ever use the word "Toxins" preferring precise terminology such as "brain waste products" or just keeping to the chemical names at hand. "Toxins" is one of those normative layman words that gets used to sweep up all sorts of ill-conceived explanations and pseudo-science.
> The process is important because what's getting washed away during sleep are waste proteins that are toxic to brain cells, Nedergaard says.
Evolution found a nice little optimum in sleep that works pretty well- use less energy during a time of the day that isn't a very efficient time to be awake while also cleaning out the brain.
This could be interesting for future research. Could we find chemical means to remove those waste proteins?
Or maybe some sort of mechanical pumping system? If it takes too much energy away from the brain to both remain awake and clear those proteins, a mechanical pump that is powered externally could solve that energy problem. (I'm only half joking--we already have mechanical means of replacing other biological functions such as a dialysis machine).
There's an interesting concept. I wonder what the trade-off would be. How much efficiency would it cost to clean the brain continually rather than in a dedicated sleep cycle? Would it even be possible to process these toxins while maintaining consciousness? I'm sure there could be huge benefits for many modern lifestyles to trade heavily on reaction speed and/or lightly on IQ for 50% more waking hours. Or even 25% more waking hours, if you just cut the need for sleep in half, over the long term.
Maybe looking for the reason we sleep is the wrong way to look at it? What if being asleep is the default state for any organism?
Sleeping require much less energy. The only reason to be awake is to eat and reproduce. For any animal there is probably an optimal ratio between sleep and hunt/reproduction where sleep is the most favorable.
This strikes me as the type of comment that sounds artificially 'deep' but has no constructive or logical basis. What does 'default state' even mean in this context? The fact is we naturally sleep sometimes and we're awake at other times. If you're suggesting there's no reason for sleep other than conserving energy, that's patently false.
The (assumed) primary motive here is to find a way to sleep less. We already have ways to force wakefulness. We now need to find ways to mitigate negative side effects hence the research on various health functions sleep contributes towards.
That's quite an insightful comment. Reminds me of an article about sea squirts who literally eat their brain once they are settled and have no longer a use for moving [1]
But sleeping makes you much more vulnerable to predation, and really doesn't save much more energy vs. quiet/restful wakefulness.
Just think of how disoriented you are when something wakes you up in the middle of night - that's a definite biological cost if that thing is something threatening to you.
And of course, never mind creatures that have gone as far as the 50/50 brain adaptation (IE Dolphins), they simply have to be at least partially awake all the time.
A related and quite recent piece of research - Stimulating toxin cleanup via brain stimulation using pulsed light. Has been used to treat Alzheimer symptoms in mice models. Last I heard was being fast-tracked to humans.
"This treatment appears to work by inducing brain waves known as gamma oscillations, which the researchers discovered help the brain suppress beta amyloid production and invigorate cells responsible for destroying the plaques."
There's already research that being sleep-deprived has similar cognitive effects to being drunk, especially with regards to driving safety. This new result implies that may be more than a coincidence, as the biological underpinnings may be similar.
Random thought: Could dreams be a result of the processing of toxins? In the same way some "toxins" cause us to hallucinate etc. so too could these toxins, as a side affect of processing?
>The team discovered that this increased flow was possible in part because when mice went to sleep, their brain cells actually shrank, making it easier for fluid to circulate.
It could be that the brain needs to fire up for short periods in order to help pump the increased fluid out to prepare for another rinse.
I read somewhere in the last 10 years that dreams were practice for real life situations. After hearing that, when I awake in the middle of a dream, I always test that hypothesis, and sure enough, sometimes is quite plausible.
If dreams only were the result of some cleanup process (i.e. just arbitrary neurons firing), I imagine they would be a lot less coherent and all events would be (stochastically) independent. While dreams usually don't much make a huge lot of sense, they are sometimes quite realistic and "past" events seem to influence "later" events.
I went through the course on your recommendation. Thanks, it was great!
Apparently much of it based on Oakley's book A Mind For Numbers, which I'll try to read soon. Much of the content also reminded me of Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning. A related thread elsewhere on HN [1] also suggests Make It Stick by Peter Brown.
It always amazes me to read articles like this. How come I don't need more than 3 hours of sleep a day and its been like that for over 15 years now?
I sleep "late hours". I go sleep around 8am and wake up around noon. I don't eat breakfast just coffee. I work most of the day on different projects, eat quite large dinner at 8pm, then every day go for 45 min to the gym, around 10pm and then 20 min walk. After that its about midnight and I start working. I don't get tired until 5am but then 2 glasses of water "wake me up". By 8am I'm in bed truly tired.
I been running this schedule for 15 years now, no symptoms of nothing. I don't smoke and don't drink btw. I barely watch TV (never found anything interesting; I take breaks on my PC watching some travel-related documentaries)
Edit: perhaps once a month I feel truly tired and usually on the weekend, I tend to sleep about 8-10 hours. But that doesn't happen often.
I remember my friend mentioned to me she might have a mutation in the DEC2 gene (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2884988/) because she usually goes to bed around 2 am and wakes up at 6-7 am, and has been doing it throughout her life. And she says she's fine and like you doesn't feel tired if she only gets 4-5 hours of sleep.
Interestingly, if she gets the standard number of hours of rest (say, 7-8), she gets really groggy and it totally disrupts her ability to function throughout the day!
Back when I was trying to make the uberman (and eventually the everyman) sleep schedules work for me, I ran across a person like you, it made me incredibly jealous. He seemed to think it was that his brain only went into REM mode for some reason. As the other comment mentioned maybe it's just a simple gene mutation, if so perhaps CRISPR can replicate the effect... Lots of stuff if you google "Short sleepers".
I'd be very surprised if it turns out that there's not a major "computational" element to sleep. Sure, it may be difficult to circulate fluid through a waken beings brain, but I think evolution could have managed. If the "computational resource" is needed for something else though (like running backprop over your neural networks or something :P)... That to me is the only reasonable explanation for the huge evolutionary cost most creatures pay for sleep.
What's the huge cost? Most land reptiles and mammals spend most of their time idle anyhow, including humans. In many cases sleep is arguably preferable as the animal is less likely to get itself eaten. If you're not foraging or reproducing, your best bet is to hide and stay still. Because animals, especially land animals, tend to be specialized for particular parts of the day or for other scenarios which preclude 24/7 activity, there's not much that can be done in that idle time. Except improve neurological function, apparently.
Animals that need to be constantly in motion have other adaptations.
For modern humans the cost can be immense according to our cultural calculus. I'm not sure it's an evolutionary cost. Only time will tell whether those burning the midnight oil have better reproductive success.
But evolution doesn't "manage" anything. Evolution often plateaus at "good enough." I think this is the risk in the computer metaphor for the brain. Computers have designers that try to optimize them, brains do not.
It's interesting that in almost every sleep related article I've read on HN, the overwhelming majority of people who respond about their personal life say that they hate getting up 'early'-for various definitions of early. Surely there are programmers who like getting up early?
I like getting up around 5:30 or so. Puts me outside the heaviest traffic times and gives me a few hours in the morning of uninterrupted time to mind meld with the computer. And then I get to leave 'early' in the afternoon and enjoy my free time and plentiful daylight.
When I was younger I preferred staying up late and working and it allowed me to get a lot done. As I've gotten older and now have a family, things have flipped and now I much prefer to start my work day early, usually around 6am. This gives me more family time in the afternoon/evenings.
There a lot of programmers in my company who are in super early and leave by 2-3pm. But I think most of them do it out of necessity because either they have kids or they have long commutes.
If I wake up before 8 for work I feel physically tired.
In my current job I'm waking up at 7.30 everyday and I feel that I lost 10-20% of productivity.
And it is not strictly correlated with lack of sleep because now I'm sleeping at 10.30-11.30 pm.
I can do my best work when I have no mandatory early show in the office and I can arrive whenever I want between 9 to 10, ideally after a nice 30 minutes walk to wake up properly.
I like getting up early since everyone else likes getting in late and leaving late. For example if I arrive at 6 and they at 10 I will get 4 undisturbed hours of work. To get the same amount on the other end I would have to arrive at 3 in the evening.
IIRC the story Manhole 69 by JG Ballard references a requirement to divert neurotoxins in men whose sleep centres were disconnected/cauterised.
Ballard I presumed was just speculating. But based on his relatively high level of scientific knowledge I imagined it was rooted in some sort of real world science.
That story was written in the 1960s...so has the state of research on this remained slow or was Ballard just making a lucky guess?
I'm currently reading Arianna Huffington's "The Sleep Revolution". If you're interested in more stuff like this, it's pretty good. It's definitely made me more mindful of winding down and night and getting plenty of sleep.
One thing in particular that stood out is the rise in cortisol associated with lack-of-sleep, and cortisol's relationship to gaining fat; having hit a couple of rocky weeks sleep due to young kids at home, this was particularly relevant to me.
I now rank sleep as pinnacle in terms of health / fitness training, mental well-being, creativity, etc.
There have been two Vox articles about people who are biologically late sleepers are often viewed as "lazy." It's sad considering the current state of sleep deprivation throughout the western world.
I hate being up early for work. I am 9am scrum since our team is spread out over the planet and it's truly painful. The right attitude is not "you should get to bed at a reasonable time," since I often get bursts of productivity between 11pm and 4am. I'm probably the most productive in that window.
Choosing jobs and career paths based on your sleeping pattern (and overall heath) should be encourage more over money or benefits or retirement or all of those other bullshit traps:
Wild analogy.... Inference machines cleanup the neutral model itself when put to relax. Wait, are there any Neural Nets out there, which produce toxic "weights" to be discarded later, If not than we are far from copying the real glucose based neural networks. /Imagination
Additionally-when ingesting any number of substances that changes cognition my personal antecedent to add is that 'I just don't feel right' unless I nap.
This is true for all things one would imbibe to 'escape reality'.
I take modafinil on a daily basis each morning, and have a regular sleep pattern of 7-8 hours a night.
It even helps with going to sleep earlier, because I feel depleted by 10 PM, so there's less incentive for me to stay up and waste time that I could use resting for the next day.
bitexploder|9 years ago
(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3482689/).
Article review: This is pretty good science reporting, actually providing a link to the study being referenced. My one nit is the use of the word "Toxins". That is a trigger word for me that immediately makes me suspicious of the reporting. Scientific papers about the human body very rarely if ever use the word "Toxins" preferring precise terminology such as "brain waste products" or just keeping to the chemical names at hand. "Toxins" is one of those normative layman words that gets used to sweep up all sorts of ill-conceived explanations and pseudo-science.
pnathan|9 years ago
inputcoffee|9 years ago
Consider: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=toxins+brain&btnG...
I don't have more information. I just typed that in based on your comment.
mabbo|9 years ago
Evolution found a nice little optimum in sleep that works pretty well- use less energy during a time of the day that isn't a very efficient time to be awake while also cleaning out the brain.
This could be interesting for future research. Could we find chemical means to remove those waste proteins?
zip1234|9 years ago
bryondowd|9 years ago
Tharkun|9 years ago
Puts|9 years ago
Sleeping require much less energy. The only reason to be awake is to eat and reproduce. For any animal there is probably an optimal ratio between sleep and hunt/reproduction where sleep is the most favorable.
smallgovt|9 years ago
The (assumed) primary motive here is to find a way to sleep less. We already have ways to force wakefulness. We now need to find ways to mitigate negative side effects hence the research on various health functions sleep contributes towards.
superasn|9 years ago
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/choke/201207/how-humans...
dbenhur|9 years ago
JimboOmega|9 years ago
Just think of how disoriented you are when something wakes you up in the middle of night - that's a definite biological cost if that thing is something threatening to you.
And of course, never mind creatures that have gone as far as the 50/50 brain adaptation (IE Dolphins), they simply have to be at least partially awake all the time.
jwilliams|9 years ago
http://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment-alzhei...
"This treatment appears to work by inducing brain waves known as gamma oscillations, which the researchers discovered help the brain suppress beta amyloid production and invigorate cells responsible for destroying the plaques."
bcherny|9 years ago
bcherny|9 years ago
Edit: FWIW: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaiiJsfgP58
afarrell|9 years ago
If you want to learn effectively and work efficiently, take care of your body and take care of your brain.
piannucci|9 years ago
cbsmith|9 years ago
vkat|9 years ago
lmkg|9 years ago
Overtonwindow|9 years ago
clavalle|9 years ago
It could be that the brain needs to fire up for short periods in order to help pump the increased fluid out to prepare for another rinse.
e40|9 years ago
d8421l01vv4r|9 years ago
Yabood|9 years ago
akprasad|9 years ago
Apparently much of it based on Oakley's book A Mind For Numbers, which I'll try to read soon. Much of the content also reminded me of Josh Waitzkin's The Art of Learning. A related thread elsewhere on HN [1] also suggests Make It Stick by Peter Brown.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815148
joering2|9 years ago
I sleep "late hours". I go sleep around 8am and wake up around noon. I don't eat breakfast just coffee. I work most of the day on different projects, eat quite large dinner at 8pm, then every day go for 45 min to the gym, around 10pm and then 20 min walk. After that its about midnight and I start working. I don't get tired until 5am but then 2 glasses of water "wake me up". By 8am I'm in bed truly tired.
I been running this schedule for 15 years now, no symptoms of nothing. I don't smoke and don't drink btw. I barely watch TV (never found anything interesting; I take breaks on my PC watching some travel-related documentaries)
Edit: perhaps once a month I feel truly tired and usually on the weekend, I tend to sleep about 8-10 hours. But that doesn't happen often.
colmvp|9 years ago
Interestingly, if she gets the standard number of hours of rest (say, 7-8), she gets really groggy and it totally disrupts her ability to function throughout the day!
Jach|9 years ago
akvadrako|9 years ago
It sounds kind of like an evolutionary advantage. Sleep is probably for multiple uses, but I think most could all be handled in other fashions.
The exception is conservation of energy. Yet, that is no longer relevant in the upper part of society.
gh1|9 years ago
bjornsing|9 years ago
wahern|9 years ago
Animals that need to be constantly in motion have other adaptations.
For modern humans the cost can be immense according to our cultural calculus. I'm not sure it's an evolutionary cost. Only time will tell whether those burning the midnight oil have better reproductive success.
nkrisc|9 years ago
slmrnz|9 years ago
ZanyProgrammer|9 years ago
rootusrootus|9 years ago
seizethecheese|9 years ago
cgag|9 years ago
nightbrawler|9 years ago
amerkhalid|9 years ago
tigershark|9 years ago
Klockan|9 years ago
tonyedgecombe|9 years ago
shocks|9 years ago
scandox|9 years ago
Ballard I presumed was just speculating. But based on his relatively high level of scientific knowledge I imagined it was rooted in some sort of real world science.
That story was written in the 1960s...so has the state of research on this remained slow or was Ballard just making a lucky guess?
rl3|9 years ago
djsumdog|9 years ago
Mz|9 years ago
s/technology/science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
At some point, people on HN will get over their fear of words like "toxins" and embrace the Tao Te Woo as the advanced science it is.
gh1|9 years ago
- To turn short term memory into long term memory, to consolidate long term memory, and prepare the brain to learn new things.
- To clean the brain of harmful waste products (which is what this article says. By the way, it is old and from 2013).
- An evolutionary artifact of energy conservation in resource-low ecosystems.
Are there some other theories too?
gdubs|9 years ago
One thing in particular that stood out is the rise in cortisol associated with lack-of-sleep, and cortisol's relationship to gaining fat; having hit a couple of rocky weeks sleep due to young kids at home, this was particularly relevant to me.
I now rank sleep as pinnacle in terms of health / fitness training, mental well-being, creativity, etc.
djsumdog|9 years ago
I hate being up early for work. I am 9am scrum since our team is spread out over the planet and it's truly painful. The right attitude is not "you should get to bed at a reasonable time," since I often get bursts of productivity between 11pm and 4am. I'm probably the most productive in that window.
Choosing jobs and career paths based on your sleeping pattern (and overall heath) should be encourage more over money or benefits or retirement or all of those other bullshit traps:
http://khanism.org/perspective/trapped-in-the-cubical/
unknown|9 years ago
[deleted]
ramshanker|9 years ago
jacquesm|9 years ago
That's what 'dropout' is for ;)
m3kw9|9 years ago
melvinmt|9 years ago
Specifically in this article about coffee naps http://www.vox.com/2014/8/28/6074177/coffee-naps-caffeine-sc... which links to this Harvard article: http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/matters/benefits...
metamet|9 years ago
kgdinesh|9 years ago
convales|9 years ago
https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_iliff_one_more_reason_to_get_...
eof|9 years ago
empath75|9 years ago
kristofferR|9 years ago
deathhand|9 years ago
This is true for all things one would imbibe to 'escape reality'.
mrleinad|9 years ago
It even helps with going to sleep earlier, because I feel depleted by 10 PM, so there's less incentive for me to stay up and waste time that I could use resting for the next day.
Jach|9 years ago
Instead of scare tactics you could look at actual costs: https://www.gwern.net/Modafinil#costs
prodtorok|9 years ago
lucaspiller|9 years ago
jmagaro88|9 years ago
cpncrunch|9 years ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10061833
convales|9 years ago
crx29a|9 years ago
[deleted]
JacksonGariety|9 years ago
looserof7|9 years ago
[deleted]