[ExI] why sleep?

Wed Jun 17 20:58:30 UTC 2020

Half of my scientific career has been in the field of neuroscience of sleep
(the other half in gravitational waves that is one of the topics we discuss
here often).
I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at
Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory.
I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep
that is the most restorative part of sleep.
https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi  We received a lot
of press coverage for this invention (Times, ABC, Smithsonian,  WSJ),
several grants including one from DARPA.
Here a podcast where I discuss my work in the field
https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi.
In the transhumanist community the topic of doing without sleep comes often
up and of course I have my very strong bias and reservations having worked
in the field and realized the fundamental importance of sleep.
Sleep has many functions. It is basically a time off for the system to
reset and do a lot of things that would not be a very good idea to do while
the system is operating and interacting with the world.
One of the main functions of sleep is memory consolidation, that is a
process where new information acquired during the day, is selected and then
integrated and redistributed in the brain. New memories are made permanent
and other erased. The brain needs to be isolated from the environment and
produce slow oscillations (that don't support consciousness) for this
fundamental process to take place.
Other important function of sleep is the production  and regulation of
hormones (Human Growth Hormone for example, testosterone in men) that have
important anti-aging effects, immune system learning, repair of tissues and
so on.
Almost all animals sleep, from unicellular ones to the largest creatures,
even if sleep may mean just a time off for the simplest ones.
It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins that can have some
level of low alertness because they learned how to make half of the brain
sleep while the other is functional but at very low level of operation. The
main reason they do this is because they need to come up to the surface to
breath. They still sleep a total of 33 % of their day as humans though.
That half asleep state is not very efficient and it is basically almost
like napping. May be able to do simple automatic actions (maybe hunting
slow moving fish) but I doubt their attention and higher functions are
engaged. I intended to study more this topic of dolphin sleep but I had not
chance yet. But in general it is the exception that confirms the rule that
sleep is so fundamental that all the complex organisms do it and they do it
for a large part of their day. The paradox is that sleep seems a waste of
time in terms of basic priorities like food procurement and mating but also
because it exposes the organism (given it is motionless and with most
senses shut off during sleep) to predators that have reversed the sleep
patterns (they sleep during the day for example). This points to the
fundamental importance of sleep.
My intuition has been for sometime that even AIs that mimic brain
architecture would have some form of time off that would be the equivalent
of sleep. This article that come out recently confirms this intuition:
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html

It is not really wasted time but it is a fundamental part of being alive.
By the way my invention is about making more efficient sleep by enhancing
its restorative property in particular memory consolidation. We created a
Brain Computer Interface that locks to the brain waves using machine
learning algos to boost the slow waves and this boost in amplitude
correlates with improved cognition. There are other groups around the world
that showed that this approach can also improve learning, immune system
performance and cardiovascular health.
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58 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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>
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