Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/11/sleep-is-a-brain-repair-mechan.html
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Those illustrations look nice and technical!
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Oh shit. I’m fucked.
And not in any way that will lead to good sleep.
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This will be good to know when I decide to start using my brain.
Seriouly, however, I always think that aside from brain health, the immune system functions more when you’re asleep.
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The process is akin to local councils patching up potholes at night when the traffic has eased.
Yeah, but if those nightly repairs are happening near your house, you could lose sleep… and there goes your brain repair… and the pothole repair analogy!
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100% correct:
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I wish I was sleeping right now.
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i’m wondering if this also ties in to why, when you’re depressed, you tend to sleep more.
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You may be sleepwalking right now and not know it.
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A thousand dreams that would awake me
Different colors made of tears
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Benjamin Franklin slept just four hours a night. Was a genius and lived till 84 in the 1700’s when there was essentially no medical care and a poor diet.
The bastard.
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Maybe you are… 
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So am I crazy because I don’t get enough sleep, or do I not sleep enough because I’m crazy?
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Wow, so it’s not a coincidence that the one insomniac I know is also the person who seems to be knocked down for days by illnesses the rest of us shake off or never get in the first place.
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you ever get high and just look at cryptography diagrams on wikipedia?
me neither because that’s illegal 
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“Proves”
Science / biology are complicated. For instance, if sleep were impossible, perhaps the body would have found a different way to repair. Perhaps sleep evolved for an entirely different reason, but the body took advantage of it already happening to repair. In the traffic analogy mentioned here, this is like saying you found “proof” that night exists on the planet Earth because potholes need filling. Anyway proof is a word in math not science. There’s no for sure law of mathematics that I won’t drop a ball and it will fall up the next time even though it never did before, it just seems extremely unlikely / small error bars science
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Maybe where you live… 
Francis Crick (y’know Nobel prize for DNA structure?) theorized that we dream to reactivate/identify complete (holographically) stored memories which we were deleting to allow for more space for more memories to form. It was a particularly interesting theory as we otherwise don’t seem to have a specific erasure function - but (alas) i guess there’s really no evidence for it. Such is often the fate of neat theories.
For instance this “sleep is to spackle-up the holes” seems to lack any reason that the entire organism needs to shut down to accomplish that. If we get a bruise we don’t have to shut down while that’s being healed. Why can’t brain neurons whose names begin with ‘J’-‘N’ shut down while the others take up the slack? I believe that air-breathing oceanic mammals shut down half their brains for sleep while dealing with the rigors an aquatic life with the other bit - so division of labor is possible, why isn’t it more likely?
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