From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Tue Sep 24 2002 - 15:51:02 MDT
Rafal writes:
> As much as I wish this were true I can't help being quite skeptical
> here. Since we know that in the ancestral environment falling asleep is
> dangerous, with all the hyenas prowling around, there must have been
> some selection pressure for reduction of sleep. That we still sleep
> is for me a strong indication that getting rid of the need for sleep
> is neurophysiologically difficult, probably burdened with unfavorable
> trade-offs (e.g. diminished high-level information processing). While
> eventually new technologies will most likely allow constant wakefulness
> without getting stupider, this will require very advanced revamping of
> our neurophysiology, perhaps even discarding it altogether in favor of
> a tireless inorganic substrate. Fiddling with neural network setpoints
> using something as crude as drugs is not likely to achieve a feat that
> our Mother Evolution couldn't accomplish in 20 million years.
I remember reading an alternate explanation of sleep by one of the Big
Thinkers; Dawkins or Dennett, someone like that. Maybe someone will
recognize this description and remember who it was.
Anyway, he turned the question on its head: it's not so much, why do we
sleep; it's why don't we sleep all the time?
Sleeping is relatively safe. Most animals aren't killed in their dens.
You lie still, you don't make much noise, you're safe in your burrow
or cave. It's being out and about that's dangerous. That's when you're
exposed, when you're distracted or busy. And sleeping saves enormous
amounts of energy, compared to going out and foraging, which is often
just barely a break-even strategy energy-wise.
In a sense, he went on, plants are like animals who are always asleep.
They stay in one place and they conserve their energy. And they do pretty
well with it. There's probably a lot more biomass in plants than animals.
So the explanation, in these terms, is that we sleep because it's a good
way to pass the time. It's safe and it conserves energy. We're awake
the bare minimum necessary to stay alive.
Now of course there have been experiments where they keep people
and animals awake all the time, or deprive them of specific kinds
of sleep. And they don't do too well. They go crazy, or they become
immune depressed. But this is just restating the fact that sleep
is necessary now. It doesn't mean that we couldn't create a drug to
reproduce whatever it is that the body needs from sleep. That is the
goal of current research.
And of course the "killer app", pardon the expression, is for military
soldiers.
The fact that this new drug lets you go for 2-3 days without sleep, with
much fewer side effects than just using stimulants, suggests that the
side effects are not inherent to the lack of sleep, as might have been
thought previously. It seems very plausible to me that with improvements
we can gradually extend the period of wakefulness and reduce the amount
of sleep necessary. Maybe people will be able to stay awake all week and
then catch up on the weekend (or vice versa, depending on your lifestyle).
Even if we can't reach the goal of absolutely no sleep, it seems to me
that greatly reducing the amount of sleep necessary is a very plausible
prospect in the next dozen years.
Hal
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