Comment by alphazard
6 months ago
It's interesting that sleep is controlled by mitochondria, but sleep is clearly involved in learning, and whatever algorithm for intelligence the brain does. Do those algorithms still work if you intervene at the level of the mitochondria? Or are the mitochondria just a good way of measuring elapsed time through energy expenditure? e.g. The algorithm needs a sleep phase to run roughly every x neural firings, or performance degrades and mitochondria were available as measuring devices when nature needed a way to guess how long the wake phase had been running.
Maybe you could intervene to prevent anyone from feeling tired, but would the learning algorithm still work? That part is still a mystery.
That's a good point. Maybe we found the mechanism to stay awake, but if that doesn't also translate to normalizing everything else that happens while sleeping, then who knows. Maybe people turn into wide awake zombies after a few days.
I mean you can suppress sleep right now with coffee, adrenaline and mind-control and this is what it results in.
Mind control? Do tell
2 replies →
There are also other reasons for sleep, like cleaning up neurotransmitters and stocking them up in advance. I would guess it's a more immediate trigger?