ps: in death you seek knowledge. #deadline

A widely used scientific term.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus

So I imagine the trade-off isn't as severe as someone might guess; it's definitely theoretically possible to run entirely without sleep with the right hardware. For example, lets say sleep was fundamental to cognition. If you were willing to have redundant hardware, you could run two brains and just take turns sleeping them [1]. So that probably gives something of an upper-bound to efficiency.

The problem is that a lot of stuff is getting built on top of these things. Scheduled downtime is getting used by other adaptions. Things like handling 'garbage collection' or 'waste collection' inline get shunted away to the downtime to improve response times. This keeps happening. Over short periods there are going to be plenty of cases where being paralyzed isn't optimal. What if something shows in the night? Long term though if the creature is continually staying active when its at disadvantage that's really bad. So additional penalties accrue to force the issue.

Then the original 'purpose/benefit' starts getting lost. Things get messed up. Enough adaptions end up taking advantage of the fact that the downtime existed that now there is so much benefit to it for reasons unrelated to its initial creation that it starts becoming worth doing even at times where light levels aren't an issue.

So now when you try to mess with sleep, you're not just messing with one little thing. You're messing with a whole bunch of different entangled processes. One to reduce activity during periods where the sensors suck. Another to prevent continued activity when the sensors suck. Another that handles waste. Another that starts up ML algorithms during the downtime to take advantage of the freed-up processing. Another that does data backup. The muscles use the downtime to start construction. Basically all over the body everyone is starting to get to work.

It's like that tradeoff problem that gwern talks about with using notropics, where each one improves one thing but causes problems in other areas. So basically, it isn't a question of whether or not you need sleep from a theoretical process perspective. You don't, if you had a different design. But now sleep isn't just the reduce activity time because its night adaption. It's all tied up in everything else.

You shorten the amount you sleep? You die younger, because you cancelled the bodies maintenance period.

[1]: Which dolphins are kind of doing.

A bizarro thing to say, given that the parent gave several arguments that make sense from an evolutionary/physical viewpoint, like "sleeping requires much less energy" and "the only reason to be awake is to eat and reproduce".

>What does 'default state' even mean in this context?

The state that requires the less energy expenditure? Similar to a rest/equilibrium state in physics?

I wonder if this brain hack will have unwanted side effects. That is, I wonder if using the light trick could cause the normal processing to either not happen or happen less often.

This is really exciting research, though, and I really hope it is effective in humans like it is in mice.

(Of course, you could justly ask why oh why my sophomore-year-self didn't exercise discipline and cut myself off trying to improve my beta.)

As far as I remember it wasn't always like that. Eventually at some point around my 20s I start working more and more hours and never got "break". Eventually I think my body got used to _knowing_ how many hours per night it can expect and adjusted. That or perhaps a heart attack is coming any day now at 35 (knock on the wood)

It's possible that our invention of computers was and continues to be a slow brew to simulate something innate within us...