Sleep is Garbage Collection

[lucumo]

If sleep is garbage collection, can I switch back to old malloc/free? So I can do it more evenly over the day? :)

[amichail]

Modern garbage collection is done more evenly:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garbage_collection_(computer_sc...

Perhaps the brain could do something similar.

[mechanical_fish]

Well, if this mechanism is the same in fruit flies and in humans, that implies that it's a pretty low-level kernel function.

We could change the source, but it might take several hundred million years to finish compiling your new biosphere. And in the meantime the old biosphere might well eat it for lunch. Literally!

[illicium]

Watch out, you might run into some nasty memory leaks

[flankk2]

Actually, yes. It is called polyphasic sleep:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

[tsally]

In yet another example, the overhead for automatic memory management is shown to be prohibitive.

[jodrellblank]

The dominant species on earth (humans) sleep, the generally believed to be smartest animals sleep (humans, monkeys, dogs, various birds), the biggest (elephants, giraffes), the hunters (big cats), the hunted, herbivores, omnivores, the dominant type of fruit fly (in the article) sleeps. Even creatures that would drown if they went unconcious (dolphins, whales) have a kind of sleep.

What, exactly, has it prohibited?

[giardini]

Subjects taking modafinil can go without sleep for weeks. And studies show no learning decrement in subjects taking modafinil. So is sleep truly required for humans?

Memory in humans and other animals may so different from that of fruit flies that drawing such a general conclusion as "Sleep is Garbage Collection." may not be valid.

[anuraggoel]

Sleep = GC and more available synapses = smarter*

So smarter people need less sleep?

Is the converse true?

* http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/scie...

[lunchbox]

Do you mean that smart people need less sleep to be able to perform a particular task, or that smart people need less sleep to perform at their own peak?

The above analogy leads more naturally to the first conclusion. Give a smart person a cognitive task to perform, and gradually deprive him of sleep; eventually, his performance will be reduced to the level of the average person.

It's less clear how the second conclusion would hold -- that smart people are incrementally affected less by sleep loss than average people. In other words, a priori, I don't think there's much reason to believe that a smart person would be impaired less by losing an hour of sleep than an average person would.

[ryan-allen]

I wouldn't think so. Your body is made up of more organs and systems than your brain.

Depending on how intensely I exercise, I need more sleep as it's repairing itself, so I think the answer to your questions is either 'probably not' or 'it depends'.

I know that in addition to all this, that apparently sleep also moves information in to your long term memory, and that in certain trades (military comes to mind), that after intense training excercises, it is encouraged if not enforced to get a 'good night's sleep' instead of 'getting stuck into the beers after a hard day's work' in order to properly 'store' what was learnt during the day.

So, if you want to remember stuff, get good a good night's sleep!

[mapleoin]

I need a lot of sleep, so I must be dumb.

[tdavis]

I must have a very aggressive GC because my memory is all but worthless for everything besides code.

[wingo]

I have this too. I find it disturbing.

[kashif]

I always thought so,I think it does some defragging too.

[almost]

Nice one on the title soundsop! Great summary of what the article is saying in terms that are familiar to us here :p