[ExI] why sleep?

[SR Ballard]

Dolphins can hunt while “sleeping”. Migratory birds fly while “sleeping”. And so on. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep

SR Ballard

> On Jun 17, 2020, at 9:55 AM, spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
>  
> This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually slays the insomniac:
>  
> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/
>  
> If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool: you get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff.
>  
> As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism.  Any organism which never sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we can do in the lab at some point.  The insomniac beast could hunt night and day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage.
>  
> On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab.  So… let us hope it is true.
>  
> Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.)  We sit in front of a computer a lot of the time.  So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom described in the article.  Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff.  Cool!
>  
> spike
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