[HN Gopher] Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
___________________________________________________________________
Sleep all comes down to the mitochondria
Author : A_D_E_P_T
Score : 525 points
Date : 2025-07-30 08:34 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just been
| answered.
|
| The paper shows that cell-autonomous mild uncoupling in
| Drosophila sleep-inducing neurons -- via Ucp4A/Ucp4C -- keeps the
| flies awake by lowering mitochondrial Dp and therefore electron
| leak. This suggests a biochemical rationale for sleep -- which is
| postponed by the uncoupler. That form of pharmacological
| manipulation is also a very local intervention and likely has
| never been tried in mammals. (Most mitochondrial uncouplers
| aren't that specific and don't cross the BBB very well. Even
| "safe" new ones like BAM15.) If the paper is correct, not only is
| the mystery solved, but "healthy" wakefulness-promoting drugs
| might be on the horizon.
|
| I'm curious about what this means for deep vs. light sleepers,
| and for people who need more or less sleep than others. Perhaps
| those traits are modifiable.
| v3ss0n wrote:
| What would happen to the main and brain with "Healthy"
| wakefulness promoting drugs .
| can16358p wrote:
| Probably nothing initially.
|
| Then over years of us and accumulated data, people will
| realize that they can't game a complex system that the body
| needs like sleep with a simple drug, and those "healthy"
| wakefulness drugs will either be banned or face lots of
| controversy.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| That's almost exactly what people said about the appetite
| -- about the biochemical pathways which govern hunger,
| which are known to be massively redundant and overlapping.
|
| But then Ozempic was released and it turned out there was a
| shortcut after all.
|
| Which is not to say that such things are necessarily
| "healthy" or desirable, just that you can't rule out that
| biochemically-modifiable characteristics, however complex,
| have "one simple trick!" you can use to attain a desired
| end.
| can16358p wrote:
| And exactly as I said, Ozempic does more harm in the long
| run.
| drgiggles wrote:
| There are mountains of data that show it actually has
| long term benefits beyond weight loss (beyond even the
| obvious health markers that improve due to losing
| weight). I wouldn't be surprised at all if the majority
| of the population ends up taking next gen drugs in this
| space, most of them purely for longevity.
| immibis wrote:
| Reminds me of the alleged neurological benefits from use
| of hallucinogenics - but they're still banned.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| source?
| mwigdahl wrote:
| Proof? Doesn't need to be specific -- a general study
| showing higher all-cause mortality in Ozempic users
| compared to a control group over a long period would be
| just fine.
| hyghjiyhu wrote:
| That's a pretty poor comparison. A drug that makes you
| not need sleep is more like a drug that prevents you from
| starving to death without eating.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I mean that would be TPN, where people can be kept alive
| indefinitely through intravenous fluids (and nutrients).
| kbrkbr wrote:
| > So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just
| been answered.
|
| I would be very surprised if sleep would serve only one
| purpose. In complex interconnected systems you usually don't
| get far with monocausal explanations.
| lolive wrote:
| AI frenzy almost convinced me that sleep was the training of
| our neural network with all the prompts of the day.
|
| And now this /o\
| ozgung wrote:
| That's what I still 'believe'. Wake-sleep algorithm [1] is
| a good start for speculation. I think brain needs to be in
| a different mode to reorganize its weights and to forget
| unnecessary things to prevent overfitting. In this mode we
| happen to be unconscious. I also believe dreams are just
| hallucinations caused by random noise input to the system.
| The brain converts noise distribution to a meaningful
| distribution and samples from that. I have zero evidence
| btw, but I believe these are related.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-sleep_algorithm
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| When we don't sleep, we can lose sensory and cognitive
| coherence. Mild visual hallucinations begin and reality
| can start slipping.
|
| Sleep itself is characterized by coherent neural
| activity-- the large number of brain regions with
| synchronized neural activity. The slow waves where huge
| numbers are all firing close together in a rhythm. Low
| frequency and high amplitude delta brainwaves (1-2
| hertz).
|
| Complex adaptive brain activity requires more complex
| firing than a simple rhythmic frequency. So, in a way,
| the complex activity must be stopped in order to support
| global synchrony.
|
| Why would our neurons want to all fire synchronously?
| Well, it is healthy for neurons to fire together in a
| causal manner-- neurons release growth hormones then.
| That neural growth during synchronized firing is the
| basis of "neurons that fire together wire together." And
| it doesn't seem coincidental that a successfully
| predicted model _feels good,_ as in the case of
| successfully throw a ball in a basket. Neurons are trying
| to predict other neuron firing and respond to it. If they
| are unable to effectively, they may become like the 1 /3
| of our baby neurons in the cortex -- they will be pruned
| and die.
|
| _Good feelings_ is positive reinforcement--behaviors
| leading to good feelings get reinforcement. The feeling
| of harmony or harmonization, where we have to balance a
| broad set of internal neural impulses, feels good when we
| do it well. We feel harmony in music -- and in our own
| internal sensory resonance to the world.
|
| Hypothesis 1: the harmonization of neural activity might
| cause conscious feelings due to the convergence of the
| activity to platonic forms (see Platonic Representation
| Hypothesis in LLM research).
|
| Returning to sleep -- this is a proposal for why sleep
| feels good. Synchronization might intrinsically feel
| good. But because the sleep also disrupts your working
| memory contextual attunements (ie, whatever your day was
| about) - taking your brain into deep synchrony -- it
| strengthens the overall dendritic connections between the
| synchronizing neurons.
|
| And, because it wears off the edges of your previous
| experiences -- you can return refreshed.
|
| In this way, sleep seems to contribute to the overall
| integrity of the operation of our intelligence. Without
| it, we lose integrity and internal harmony.
|
| And yet, _not sleeping_ is one of my favorite drugs. Can
| be a major performance enhancer, even if it is variable.
|
| Hypothesis 2: Not sleeping increases the (statistical)
| temperature of the brain.
| skirmish wrote:
| > not sleeping is one of my favorite drugs. Can be a
| major performance enhancer, even if it is variable.
|
| Sleep deprivation is a well known treatment for
| depression [1]. Maybe you lean to the depressive side,
| that would explain positive effects.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_deprivation#Treat
| ing_dep...
| incognito124 wrote:
| It's not _training_ as much as it 's _discarding bad
| examples_. Sort of.
| andrepd wrote:
| Jesus christ, not even a biology thread is safe in the
| orange website.
| gitremote wrote:
| Indeed. Animals without linguistic ability (like fruit
| flies) need sleep, but after ChatGPT's release in 2022,
| now tech bros think LLMs specifically might model the
| animal brain in general because of anthropocentrism and
| anthropomorphism.
|
| It's also a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs
| work, mixing up inference with training.
| immibis wrote:
| It was applicable to all neural networks, not just LLMs.
|
| Can we say that after ChatGPT's release in 2022, now
| antitech bros think everything is about LLMs
| specifically?
| gitremote wrote:
| The statement was "AI frenzy almost convinced me that
| sleep was the training of our neural network with all the
| prompts of the day."
|
| Prompts are specific to LLMs. Most neural networks don't
| have prompts.
|
| Additionally, prompts happen during LLM inference, not
| LLM training. There are many non-technical people who
| claim they have experience "training" LLMs, when they are
| just an end user who added a lot of tokens to the context
| window during inference.
| sva_ wrote:
| > Additionally, prompts happen during LLM inference, not
| LLM training.
|
| It is pretty common during the fine-tuning phase.
| gitremote wrote:
| Sure. Foundation models aren't fine-tuned, and companies
| fine-tune foundation models to optimize user experience.
| So they are modeling the animal brain on an even more
| specific type of LLM that happens to be related to being
| a consumer of AI products.
| immibis wrote:
| You're being pretty pedantic about the specific term
| used. Everything they said makes sense if you change
| "prompts" to "training examples" and you wouldn't expect
| someone who hasn't implemented an AI model to know the
| difference.
|
| It's like someone said while driving the car "let's give
| it some gas" and you said "but the tank is almost full"
| when they obviously meant "let's press the accelerator
| pedal"
| yreg wrote:
| Philosophers of mind have always tried to describe the
| brain using contemporary technology analogies. It's only
| natural and nothing to frown at.
|
| Descartes compared the human mind to waterworks and
| hydraulic machines, other authors used mechanical clocks,
| telegraph systems, digital computers, and (in the recent
| decades) neural networks.
|
| In the end it's all computing and to a degree all of
| those models serve as good analogies to the wetware, one
| just needs to avoid drawing wild conclusions from it.
|
| I'm sure there will be new analogies in the future as our
| tech progresses.
|
| We don't literally train on today's prompts while we
| sleep, but there actually _are_ some _computing_ tasks
| going on in our brains at that time that seem to be
| important for the system.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> sleep was the training of our neural network with all
| the prompts of the day_
|
| Periods of sleep certainly seem to be used in that sort of
| way, but that is an extra use evolution found for the sleep
| cycle once it existed rather than the reason sleep
| developed in the first place.
|
| There are a number of things that seem tied to, or at least
| aligned with, our wake/sleep cycle that likely didn't exist
| when sleep first came about.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Curious how the zeitgeist changes, on a previous AI cycle
| we could thought sleep was required/generated by a semi-
| space garbage collection brain-LISP process :)
| AIPedant wrote:
| You didn't need this study to realize that this was wrong:
| jellyfish and hydras also sleep despite not having a
| central nervous system. There are indications that sponges
| sleep too, despite not having any neurons (though obviously
| it's somewhat ambiguous):
| https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-
| brai...
| xgkickt wrote:
| Rebalancing the weights.
| yreg wrote:
| It would make sense if there was a monocausal explanation of
| why ancient ancestors started sleeping, but then other body
| functions started making use of the sleeping system since it
| was at hand.
| hhjinks wrote:
| Hey, that's Hyrum's Law!
| Waterluvian wrote:
| This is why I implemented private
| static readonly final sleep()
| baq wrote:
| What if you dream about reflections?
| Filligree wrote:
| Sleep is still detectable via CPU load, so I added a
| thread that checks for load and runs some critical
| cleanup processes when it drops below a preset threshold.
|
| Hope you don't mind.
| tux3 wrote:
| The obligatory related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1172/
| tomrod wrote:
| Hyrum would be so proud!
| vendiddy wrote:
| sounds like legacy code
| ddalex wrote:
| > why ancient ancestors started sleeping
|
| I tend to believe that our ancestors didn't start sleeping,
| they started waking up ! the default pattern is sleep and
| conservation of energy, but you need to wake up to expend
| more energy for a short period in order to feed yourself
| efficiently
| jjk166 wrote:
| There definitely was never a life form which exclusively
| slept - all the critical parts of life require being
| awake. Life that didn't sleep, however, is possible.
| otoburb wrote:
| Maybe not 'exclusively' slept, but koalas[1] sleep for a
| majority of the day (16-20 hours) in order to digest
| highly toxic eucalyptus leaves which constitute the main
| portion of their diet.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koala
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Fascinating. I wonder whether they'd sleep less if fed a
| less toxic, more easily digestible diet.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| Maybe I should really lean into that nap after eating..
| _alternator_ wrote:
| Or quit eating poison :P
| jjk166 wrote:
| But that's a case of requiring additional sleep for a
| specific purpose
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I don't think they meant "Modern" sleep. I think they
| meant "Only brief periods of highly energetic activity
| before returning to the usual activities were precursors
| to our modern consciousness/wakefulness"
| jjk166 wrote:
| That is also what I am referring to. Energetic activity
| is required to live and to reproduce, those are the
| normal activities. An active creature may have evolved a
| state of dormancy for various reasons, but there was
| never an organism in a state of pure dormancy.
| jldugger wrote:
| Do sponges sleep?
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Presumably. Some jellyfish sleep[1]
|
| But do fungi and Archea sleep?
|
| My guess based on what we read is yes and no.
|
| [1] https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-
| sleeps-brai...
| rkomorn wrote:
| Of course fungi sleep. That's how we can catch them in
| order to eat them.
| jldugger wrote:
| Yea, but at some point this is probably gonna strain the
| colloquial definition of sleep. So I went for one of the
| oldest and perhaps simplest animals around, to examine
| the "creature" angle in extrema.
| chaps wrote:
| A seed?
| immibis wrote:
| Plants?
| jjk166 wrote:
| Plants have a day/night cycle but none have permanent
| states of dormancy.
| immibis wrote:
| By animal standards, plants are permanently dormant. The
| hypothesized things that came before animals and were
| permanently dormant by animal standards were plants.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Depends on your definition but several...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-
| wave_sleep
| cubefox wrote:
| Yeah. Perhaps animals are the first organisms that
| developed the ability to be awake, not the first that
| developed the ability to sleep.
|
| By the way, even Cnidaria (jellyfish etc) exhibit sleep-
| wake cycles [1]. They don't have a brain, but they do
| have a nervous system. Maybe the first animal with
| nervous system (a common ancestor of Cnidaria and
| Bilateria) was the first to have a sleep-wake cycle.
|
| I don't understand the current research on mitochondria,
| but it sounds as if sleep has to do with how neurons
| work.
|
| 1: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-62
| 723-1_...
| tsol wrote:
| That's actually very interesting. The most convincing
| explanation for also I've heard is it's just a result of
| living in a planet that is cold and dark half of the
| time. It makes sense to use that time to recharge. I
| wonder how much sunlight would factor in for something
| like a jellyfish.
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Sounds like my microservices
| eutropia wrote:
| TFA also acknowledges this: > There could
| well be many other functions that have since joined in with
| the sleep cycle (such as memory consolidation), but the
| authors hypothesize that mitochondrial function is the
| process that underlies all of them. If you need oxygen, then
| you need sleep!
| hearsathought wrote:
| > If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!
|
| Do plants sleep? Don't some insects, like flies, live
| without any sleep?
| mock-possum wrote:
| Plants breathe _out_ oxygen, like we breathe out the
| other one.
| andy99 wrote:
| That's true for photosynthesis but don't they still have
| oxygen respiration (i.e. oxidizing sugar for energy?)
| tingletech wrote:
| yes, at night they breath oxygen. Maybe they sleep during
| the day.
| wongarsu wrote:
| But their cells still consume oxygen during the day,
| don't they? In sunshine they produce more oxygen than
| they consume, but the cells are still fundamentally
| powered by mitochondria oxidizing glucose
| bdamm wrote:
| Perhaps different regions of the plant "sleep" at
| different times? The plant has no need for high response
| synchronized behavior at all.
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| You still consume oxygen when sleeping.
| SamBam wrote:
| Plants respire oxygen continually, day and night. It's a
| myth that they only respire at night.
|
| Like every other organism except for anaerobes (mostly
| microbes, some fungi) they need oxygen in order to burn
| fuel for cellular processes. Plant cells are doing things
| day and night.
|
| The origin of the myth is simply that they produce more
| oxygen via photosynthesis than they respire, and so are
| net producers of oxygen during the day.
| tingletech wrote:
| yes, I meant net.
| throwup238 wrote:
| They need oxygen for the mitochondrial electron transport
| chain to produce ATP. The vast majority of multicellular
| organisms need oxygen for that reason, and I can count
| the exceptions on one or two hands (i.e. Pogonophoran
| tube worms, some anaerobic sponges, a few parasitic
| helminths).
| sampo wrote:
| Plants have chloroplasts that produce oxygen and sugar.
| But plants also have mitochondria that consume oxygen and
| sugar and run many of the same metabolic functions as in
| animals.
| burkaman wrote:
| Insects do sleep, the paper we're discussing is a study
| of flies.
| cubefox wrote:
| No, plants don't sleep, and neither do fungi or single
| celled organisms. Sleep seems to be a property
| specifically of animals.
| steeleyespan wrote:
| Maybe plants are "always asleep" ?
| lelandfe wrote:
| And pray they never wake
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Some plants do change to a "night" configuration though
| (closing leaves or petals, etc). Not sure if you could
| call it sleep.
| wvbdmp wrote:
| I would be surprised by any organism that can sense its
| environment and doesn't change behaviour at night. The
| difference is pretty extreme, whether its temperature,
| light or just all other beings changing what they're
| doing. Even if you don't notice yourself, you'll probably
| be affected by second-order effects.
| prerok wrote:
| By which criteria? They do respond to daily cycles. How
| do you know they do not sleep?
| cubefox wrote:
| > Across the animal kingdom sleep satisfies most, though
| not necessarily all, of the following criteria: (1)
| decreased brain arousal and its behavioral correlate,
| decreased responsiveness to an animal's surroundings,
| which distinguishes sleep from immobile wakefulness (also
| known as rest); (2) electrical changes in the brain's
| activity patterns relative to the waking state; (3)
| behavioral quiescence, often accompanied by a preferred
| location and characteristic posture; (4) rapid
| reversibility, which distinguishes sleep from
| hibernation, anesthesia and coma; (5) homeostatic
| regulation, in which lost episodes of behavioral
| quiescence and low arousal are followed by compensatory
| (rebound) episodes [10].
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5120870/
|
| 4 and 5 don't seem to be exemplified by plants.
| prerok wrote:
| Across animal kingdom.
|
| And you don't think different criteria might apply to
| plants? I mean, look, we are just discovering how plants
| function as a society. They are immobile and 4 and 5
| might be caused by the fact that an animal is mobile, at
| least for the most examples, but where not, it can at
| least react in some manner. Plants have a very very slow
| reaction time so to them 4 and 5 don't apply even in
| waking condition, I mean unless you consider several
| hours to be a reaction. Let's be frank: we don't know
| (yet).
|
| What I don't appreciate is an outright dismissal "plants
| do not sleep".
| jhrmnn wrote:
| I think it should have been "If you need oxygen and have
| a CNS, then you need sleep." Other tissues can take
| oxidative break during wakefulness, but since CNS is
| _generating_ wakefulness, if it takes a break, by
| construction there is sleep.
| steve1977 wrote:
| It might have one evolutionary root cause and then got
| hijacked for other uses as well.
| ge96 wrote:
| When I'm awake for a very long time (32hrs+) it feels like
| there is poison built up in my mind, then sleep clears it
| up/feel better.
|
| Also if you lift in the mornings you feel lack of
| sleep/alcohol sleep disruption.
| xnx wrote:
| > it feels like there is poison built up in my mind, then
| sleep clears it up/feel better.
|
| I'm not sure how common this is, but I feel this acutely
| after sustained mental exertion (e.g. reading informational
| material for a few hours). A deep 15 minute nap takes the
| feeling away completely without any grogginess.
| skirmish wrote:
| > A deep 15 minute nap takes the feeling away
|
| Almost the same here but it's not a deep nap for me. I
| relax, start seeing dream-like images in my mind (yet
| still drifting into-out of conscious awareness), then in
| ~15 minutes I feel energy build up and am ready to jump
| up and go.
|
| I would say that the darn alarm clock prevented me from
| completing a sleep cycle properly in the morning, and now
| I did complete it and made my brain happy.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| How do you ensure you are asleep for 15 minutes? Do you
| have a smart watch that detects when you drift asleep and
| can start a timer then? Or are you not losing
| consciousness, but are you simply closing your eyes and
| meditating?
| xnx wrote:
| For these instances where I get urgently fatigued ("brain
| tired") in the daytime, I close my eyes and fall asleep
| in 1-2 minutes. I'm definitely unconscious. I don't set
| any alarm and naturally wake up in ~15 minutes. It's been
| as short as 8 minutes, or as long as 30, but probably
| averages around 15. "Body tired" is different and
| requires the normal multiple hours of sleep.
| ge96 wrote:
| This is something I have considered getting into where
| and alarm goes off from when you actually fall asleep.
| For me it seems 5 hrs of sleep is the sweet spot
| (functional, slightly sleep deprived, but motivated)
| legohead wrote:
| I wouldn't. The current theories on sleep and "brain needs
| sleep" always struck me as a stopgap theory. Even spent some
| time with GPT arguing about it and never felt fully
| convinced, like the real reason was still missing.
| bsenftner wrote:
| I'm curious how the few famous people that do not sleep at all,
| what's going on in their biochemestry? I don't mean
| celebrities, there are a few people who became famous because
| they do not sleep. They hold 2 complete careers, one during the
| day and one at night to keep from getting bored.
| eastbound wrote:
| Cocaine and amphetamines, for a lot of them ;)
| portaouflop wrote:
| They have a different gene expression which leads to them
| needing less sleep.
| drw85 wrote:
| I don't think any of those actually do not sleep. They
| probably sleep less than normal and skimp on sleep, but i
| have a hard time believing that they actually do not sleep at
| all.
| dboreham wrote:
| They could also be liars.
| meindnoch wrote:
| [citation needed]
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Stimulants and embellishment (potentially inadvertent)
| bearl wrote:
| We microsleep whenever we blink. Or at least that was the old
| science, maybe there's a new explanation.
| alphazard wrote:
| > So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just
| been answered.
|
| There are layers to this, some of which are definitely not
| ancient mysteries. We sleep because the environment has a day-
| night cycle. If any task an organism must perform is better
| done during the day, then evolution has a very clear gradient
| towards only doing that thing during the day. That leads to
| doing other things at night, since it would be comparatively
| advantageous to do them at night, given whatever task is most
| benefited from being done during the day.
|
| If there wasn't a day-night cycle it's unlikely that the brain
| would have evolved to crucially depend on approximately a
| night's worth of time of not using the body.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Not sure anybody is disagreeing with this. Yes, evolution,
| day night cycles.
|
| The point of this is finding the 'mechanism' which evolution
| came up, and now we can manipulate it to fit the modern world
| and stay up at night.
| alphazard wrote:
| 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.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 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.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I mean you can suppress sleep right now with coffee,
| adrenaline and mind-control and this is what it results
| in.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Mind control? Do tell
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Haha.
|
| I meant control by the mind, not hypnosis. (But maybe
| that also works?)
| cyberax wrote:
| 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?
| hackyhacky wrote:
| What you say is true and fairly obvious, but the interesting
| mystery is the _mechanism_ of that dependency, not its
| evolutionary advantage.
|
| Knowing the mechanism opens the door to medical
| interventions. Analogously, no one is confused as to why the
| human body stores fat and gets hungry, but knowing the
| mechanism allows weight-loss treatment like Ozempic.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _the interesting mystery is the mechanism of that
| dependency, not its evolutionary advantage._
|
| Nah, I'd say the evolutionary advantage is the more
| interesting mystery. The mechanism is just an
| implementation detail, after all.
|
| And by the way, if we tamper with something without
| understanding its purpose we risk messing something up.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| The question isn't the timing but why it happens at all. Even
| at night, being unaware of one's surroundings during sleep is
| a huge disadvantage that requires lots of effort and
| adaptation to work around. It needs to produce commensurate
| benefits, but we're not sure what they are.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Exactly! Going offline for hours every day in an
| adversarial world is _positively nuts_! The reason can 't
| be idiosyncratic. No gentle gradient of comparative
| advantage can rationalize it. It must be something severe
| and nigh impossible to do any other way.
|
| Furthermore, sleep is very specifically about the taking
| the brain offline: that's what deteriorates first in the
| absence of sleep and the tortured workarounds for animals
| that absolutely must avoid sleep (e.g. migratory birds)
| involve sleeping part of the brain at a time. Any
| explanation that isn't highly specific to the brain's
| responsibilities has the immediate hurdle of explaining
| this away, and for that reason I don't buy the
| mitochondrial explanation. Mitochondria are too universal
| and sleep is too specific to the brain. Energy is fungible,
| so I don't buy that nature wouldn't figure out the "trick"
| of having a subset of the mitochondrial population sleep at
| a time.
|
| My money is on the "brain algorithm" requiring an
| online/offline phase, whether that's contrastive learning
| or memory consolidation or something else. There are lots
| of candidates for fundamental brain algorithms with the
| "feature" that they require an offline phase that cannot be
| incrementally worked around, and these fit the observations
| much better.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| I mean, it still can be idiosyncratic if the local
| maximum is steep enough. Identifying and signalling
| subgroups of mitochondria in a cell to put on pause might
| be prohibitive, for instance, and would still reduce the
| power available to that cell.
|
| Or maybe going all the way on and mostly-off with your
| mitochondria, even specifically with your brain
| mitochondria, really is that much more efficient than
| having half of them offline (but still consuming energy
| for upkeep) at any time. The brain is a big ol energy
| hog, after all.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Mitochondria are too universal and sleep is too
| specific to the brain
|
| The brain has uniquely high specific power requirements
| per gram of dry weight. Not even the heart is this power-
| hungry. This surely places a lot of uniquely high
| metabolic stress on the neural cells.
|
| And neural cells are long-living, so they can't be easily
| replaced throughout the lifetime. So their housekeeping
| has to be very thorough, carefully cleaning up all the
| waste products.
|
| So this hypothesis actually makes a lot of sense.
| munificent wrote:
| _> Going offline for hours every day in an adversarial
| world is positively nuts!_
|
| It's no more nuts than being awake given how much energy
| vigilance costs.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I will admit I'm mostly ignorant on these subjects, but just
| using rational/logic
|
| > If any task an organism must perform is better done during
| the day, then evolution has a very clear gradient towards
| only doing that thing during the day.
|
| But wouldn't remaining conscious and aware be the optimal
| state? So you don't get eaten by predators or attacked by
| other humans etc? It seems to me your sentence points to an
| ultra low energy but conscious state, not one in which you're
| very vulnerable...
|
| But maybe the vulnerability is just too little, maybe
| cooperative tribal/family type arrangements covered this
| sufficiently to not be selected?
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| If the brain fundamentally needs sleep then we'd sleep
| regardless, just not aligned to the day-night cycle. There's
| quite a bit of variation in sleep patterns and amounts
| between different animals. Chinstrap Penguins only sleep a
| few seconds at a time, but still manage to rack up ~11hr
| sleep in a 24hr period! Elephants only sleep for ~2hr/day,
| horses for 3hr/day.
| Symmetry wrote:
| This seems like a plausible evolutionary reason for sleep to
| start existing but humans use sleep for plenty of things
| besides this, like moving declarative memories form short to
| long term memory in spindle sleep or consolidating procedural
| memory in REM sleep.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's long been found in exercise research that exercise itself
| attenuates many of the negative effects of sleep restriction.
| This might also explain why the military can get away with such
| poor sleep, because of the hard standards on minimum aerobic
| fitness required to even wear the uniform, and the fact that
| the infantry and special operators experiencing the worst sleep
| deprivation are also the people in the best shape. There are
| plenty of other adaptations you get out of aerobic exercise
| (capillarization, eccentric heart hypertrophy, increased red
| blood cell count, localized muscular endurance), but the most
| important and durable adaptation is more efficient
| mitochondrial function.
| layer8 wrote:
| "Healthy" restorative-sleep drugs might be even more useful.
| Would these new insights help with that?
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| It's good to know but the practical applications may be
| limited. Once we finally figured out why/how we use oxygen in
| the 1930s, it led to a couple applications, like anesthesia
| regulation and hyperbaric oxygen therapy. But there wasn't a
| lot you could do with it. We've probably gathered all the
| information about sleep that has practical applications, and a
| lot of it has to do with other things like hormones, sensory
| input, age.
| ralfd wrote:
| I understand some of these words. Explain like I am 15?
| 0xEF wrote:
| The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Sometimes
| that powerhouse needs to be tidied up.
| superfrank wrote:
| Your brain is like a server and the way mitochondria make
| energy is like a slow memory leak. Sleep is like running
| garbage collection.
| profstasiak wrote:
| would kinda explain why people on keto commonly report needing
| less sleep - as keto is one of the best way to improve
| mitochondria functioning in the body
| llamasushi wrote:
| Piggybacking off this, for a more general reason for sleep: "My
| definition would be as follows: sleep evolved as a species-
| specific response to a 24-hour world. During sleep - a period
| of physical inactivity - individuals avoid movement within an
| environment to which they are poorly adapted, but then use this
| time to undertake essential housekeeping functions demanded by
| their physiology."
|
| From Life Time by Russell Foster. Still one of the most lucid
| and well-written books on sleep I've ever read.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| Does it explain why we need sleep? My read was it explains why
| we get sleepy.
| Xss3 wrote:
| Iirc it is adenosine build up that makes us sleepy
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| The paper proposes what is one level deeper, though.
|
| Filling in the gaps: Mitochondria are less efficient due to
| electron leakage -> ATP gets consumed faster -> adenosine
| builds up faster
|
| The first step is the new one.
| timr wrote:
| > So the ancient mystery of why we need sleep might have just
| been answered.
|
| No, science doesn't work that way. The ancient mystery of why
| we need sleep _has a new theory [1]._
|
| [1] I am assuming it is new. It might actually be old. I don't
| know.
| ajkjk wrote:
| a completely unnecessary interjection
|
| "might have been answered" is absolutely valid: the correct
| theory might have been produced
| timr wrote:
| On the contrary, this is such a common misunderstanding
| that it practically defines the meme of pop science.
|
| Proposal of a hypothesis is not answering. Even if, decades
| from now and after many additional studies, scientific
| consensus settles on this hypothesis as "the answer", the
| first paper to speculate about the idea is still just a
| speculation. Moreover, if you're an outsider, the
| speculation is often an idea that's been floating around
| the field for longer than you've been aware of it.
|
| Basically, just abandon your notion that there is "an
| answer" to any sufficiently complex scientific question,
| and you will be better off.
| ajkjk wrote:
| It sounds like you're just dead set on defending the rude
| way of dismissing someone's comment? "Might just have
| been answered" is a completely valid description of what
| happened: the correct hypothesis might have been
| produced. It is obvious to anyone that it still requires
| verification; producing an answer is not the same as
| proving it beyond a shadow of doubt, and no one said it
| was. You're pretending to debate some philosophy of
| science but actually are playing pedantic word games to
| sound smart or gatekeep or something.
| mrbungie wrote:
| I don't think GP was rigorous, but your comment is kind of
| pedantic, isn't it?
|
| Most people commenting here know that all models are false
| but some make good predictions, and achieving that status is
| enough for most laypeople to classify it as a (potential)
| answer.
|
| Going further, yes, this is a new theory among others, but
| afaik is the first one with strong evidence.
| timr wrote:
| I don't mean it as an attack on GP, but no, I don't agree
| that this is pedantic. This happens constantly when science
| is popularized -- people read one article and leap to the
| conclusion that a problem has been
| revolutionized/solved/answered _simply because they 're
| reading about it_ -- and no, the HN audience is no better.
| Technophiles love a good scientific revolution story.
|
| It's very much a fundamental misunderstanding of how
| science works. Almost nothing in science has an answer, and
| if you let your brain lock in that way, you forego the
| opportunity to ask interesting questions. It also leads
| directly to lots of downstream pathologies common in
| amongst laypeople (e.g. "The Science is Settled", which it
| almost never is).
|
| > Going further, yes, this is a new theory among others,
| but afaik is the first one with strong evidence.
|
| I am not an expert in this field, but others have evidence
| too. Particularly when asking "why" questions like this,
| the bar for proof is incredibly high.
| mrbungie wrote:
| It might not be intended as an attack, but it does feels
| like one (especially that unnecesary jab at
| technophiles). Also I find it incredibly ironic that you
| are making so many assumptions about what GP meant, what
| HN audience understands from the article and what they
| will make of it just to make a point about philosophy of
| science and popsci.
| timr wrote:
| It wasn't a "jab". There's no other way to say it --
| technophiles fall into this trap constantly.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| what about the brain flushing mechanism that won the nobel
| prize?
| oc1 wrote:
| Crazy. If true this solves the question why humans need sleep and
| could be a great direction to resolve further question about
| sleep diseases.
| amelius wrote:
| Something I thought was just an internet tale: mitochondria are
| close descendants of bacteria, and so taking antibiotics will
| potentially harm them. But turns out this is actually rooted in
| science ...
| chasil wrote:
| It does appear that this can be a problem.
|
| This paper is focusing on ribosome inhibitors like
| tetracycline.
|
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8301944/
| alphazard wrote:
| It's specifically Quinolones which can harm mitochondria.
| There's no ongoing concern for something like Penicillin. We
| also shouldn't expect there to be mitochondrial risk from a
| fungi-derived chemical like Penicillin, since fungi also have
| mitochondria.
|
| In general you want the weakest and most targeted antibiotic
| for the job. Most people will never need a Quinolone, and you
| should be skeptical whenever sophisticated antibiotics are
| prescribed. Why not Penicillin? should have an answer involving
| the name of a bacteria, not the doctor's personal preference,
| or a relationship with a company.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quinolone_antibiotic#Cellular_...
| omnibrain wrote:
| > Most people will never need a Quinolone
|
| At least in Germany eye doctors are very happy to prescribe
| them. It's "only" eye drops, but it is (for laymen) almost
| impossible to find information if they are also dangerous in
| this form.
| geuis wrote:
| Be very careful when stating this kind of thing. It's extremely
| easy for people that already have a hard time understanding
| science and medicine to take this as evidence to support their
| anti science and anti vaccine/medicine.
|
| Different antibiotics target different cellular mechanisms
| depending on what the microorganism is. And almost none of them
| target the mitochondria at all.
|
| Yes the common hypothesis is that mitochondria were originally
| a symbiotic separate organism that joined the cells that
| eventually became the origin of most complex life.
|
| Remember that if that's what happened, it was over 3 billion
| years ago. After that immense amount of time, mitochondria
| aren't really separate organisms anymore. They're deeply
| entwined into every complex organism in the world. Very
| unlikely for common antibiotics to have any effect on them at
| all.
| beacon294 wrote:
| The core principle of classic antibiotics is affecting the
| bacterial (prokaryotic) common ribosomal structure and not the
| eukaryotic ribosome, they are very diverged.
|
| That's not to say there couldn't be some unrelated effect, but
| that's why we test medicine.
| phtrivier wrote:
| So, what products would work as "sleep in a pill", at least on
| the "not being exhausted" part (I suppose the "not getting crazy
| because of lack of REM sleep" would be different) ?
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Speculative: Gentle mitochondrial uncouplers that cross the BBB
| very well, possibly in conjunction with elamipretide, MitoQ,
| MitoTEMPO, or something similar.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Would these also have a thermogenesis effect? I used that
| hyper deadly illegal one (can't remember the name, very
| yellow) several years ago and got a sauna in my torso
| (shredded abs too) but didn't notice any perceptual energy
| balance change.
| A_D_E_P_T wrote:
| Yeah, probably.
|
| DNP (2,4-Dinitrophenol) is the stuff you took. It's
| reported to cross the BBB, but it's so toxic, with such a
| narrow therapeutic window, that most people report feeling
| pretty sick on it.
| storus wrote:
| I would look at PQQ, CoQ10, B-complex, GlyNAC or just glycine,
| AXA1125, R ALA, DCA, creatine; those are known to improve
| mitochondrial fitness under various mechanisms. Add 99%-100%
| dark chocolate and exercise, both of which act similarly to
| PQQ. Theanine for increasing GABA, primary calming
| neurotransmitter.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I back this up as a human who is doing 90% of these and has a
| daily A/B test of perceived energy balance and endurance
| difference depending on using them.
|
| Thank you for the tip about DCA!
| robwwilliams wrote:
| There will not be "sleep in a pill". Even the happiest of
| mitochondria and cells have been entrained for eons to
| circadian rhythms. (Even benthic deep sea fish sleep; well
| cyclic rest behavior.)
|
| Long-distance drivers and pilots on long missions have their
| drugs of choice (e.g., Modafinil), but they are crutches, not
| replacements.
|
| There is good evidence that fur seals, rays, and some sharks
| have brain asymmetry in sleep, with half the brain sleeping
| while the other half keeps an eye open.
|
| Unihemispheric sleep! Convenient.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf0566
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| If you want to pull an all-nighter then caffeine pills will
| keep you awake and alert, but no substitute for sleep. I'm sure
| if you did this for multiple days in a row, you'd be just as
| messed up as if you forced yourself to stay awake without the
| pills.
| beerws wrote:
| Happy to read that they didn't go for 'Mitochondria Are All You
| Need', such titles are making me tired
| manmal wrote:
| Sleep is all you need, then?
| jijijijij wrote:
| Mitochondria, power douse the self?
| skeezyboy wrote:
| i wonder if it relates to that chronic laziness disease, i cant
| remember what its called
| skeezyboy wrote:
| Fibromyalgia
| qiine wrote:
| hu no ?
| smallerfish wrote:
| Vibe coding
| petesergeant wrote:
| Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) might be what you're thinking,
| although I think generally it's described as chronic _fatigue_
| rather than laziness.
| ck2 wrote:
| Yes many types of long-covid and me-cfs are forms of
| mitochondria dysfunction
|
| There are a few drugs far off in development that might help
| restore or reboot mitochondria but years if not decades away
|
| They are also experimenting with mitochondria transplants
| which if work will be a powerful therapy, maybe even a cure
|
| https://longevity.technology/news/physicist-90-joins-
| experim...
| gediz wrote:
| ADHD?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Chronic fatigue syndrome?
| purerandomness wrote:
| ME/CFS?
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
| henryaj wrote:
| Given its role in energy transfer, does this suggest creatine
| might be a good supplement for improving sleep?
| Aerroon wrote:
| That's a bizarre coincidence. For the past few days I've run
| across a bunch of accounts of people taking more creatine than
| suggested (10-20g a day). They seem to all talk about how it
| makes them work better during sleep deprivation. So the answer
| seems like it helps.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| I mean there are studies that show this as well. Not the
| improved sleep, but help in sleep deprivation scenarios
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| It's a rational expectation. Improves phosphate transport
| for more efficient or unbottlenecked ATP synthesis.
|
| Everyone should use creatine. It's not just for bros.
| parliament32 wrote:
| Do you have any links? This is interesting
| jayunit wrote:
| I've seen some social media posts in the last week by
| Rhonda Patrick discussing 20g/day for cognitive benefits.
|
| Can't find that post, but here is a breakdown of claims
| from an interview she conducted a few months ago: https://w
| ww.reddit.com/r/Supplements/comments/1jo8pk8/my_top...
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| My sleep gets worse when I take creatine, so maybe it doesn't
| improve sleep, but rather helps mitochondria to get by without
| sleep?
| ck2 wrote:
| mitochondria are just so incredibly fascinating in every aspect
|
| they are like another lifeform not just living in our lifeform
| but making it possible
|
| even their mere existence might be alien or even explain the lack
| of alien life detected so far
|
| PBS Space Time has yet another awesome episode on that
|
| https://www.pbs.org/video/is-there-a-simple-solution-to-the-...
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abvzkSJEhKk
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| How far away are we from making this a pill? So we can stay up 18
| hours a day, or something. Any estimates.
|
| Any idea what foods or current methods, to trigger the same
| mechanism?
| Bjartr wrote:
| You mean operating on 6 hours of sleep? That doesn't seem that
| extreme. Perhaps less than ideal, but plenty of people seems to
| handle it fine.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| Please not, the economy will simply expand until everyone needs
| to work longer.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >So we can stay up 18 hours a day, or something
|
| That's called having a kid.
| pedalpete wrote:
| You are describing slow-wave enhancement. It's what we've been
| working on at https://affectablesleep.com, not with the goal of
| letting people sleep less time, but with the goal of enhancing
| the restorative function of sleep without altering sleep time.
|
| Measuring sleep by time makes about as much sense as measuring
| your diet based on how much time you spend chewing.
|
| Sleep isn't about time, it's about restorative function.
|
| There is no one diet for everyone, no one exercise regimen for
| everyone, why would we think sleep is any different.
|
| We don't promote sleeping less. We're not the sleep police. We
| aim to ensure the sleep you get is as beneficial as possible.
|
| Pre-sales are opening soon.
| aussieguy1234 wrote:
| Electrons are all you need
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| It's quantum particles all The way down.
| niemandhier wrote:
| "electrons flow through the respiratory chains of the respective
| feedback controllers like sand in the hourglass that determines
| when balance must be restored"
|
| Wow, that is my new favorite sentence from any paper ever,
| replacing Mark Thomas' equally epic: "What it begins to suggest
| is that we're looking at a Lord of the Rings-type world" from the
| legendary meeting at the Royal Society in London 2012/13.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.14196
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Perhaps sand won't save you this time, but this sand will save
| you time.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I wonder how this relates to sleep apnea, as in that state you
| sleep more the less oxygen you get. By the way, many people who
| don't think they have it yet feel tired during the day or simply
| feel like they need more sleep should get tested for it, as it's
| not just a problem for the obese.
| brbrodude wrote:
| My dad always had a notorious sleep apnea but also has
| notoriously been strong & 'youthful' all his life, very active,
| even up to this day at almost 70(never working desk jobs,
| always moving, etc). This always leaves me wondering about how
| relevant & impactful this kind of thing really is..
| JCM9 wrote:
| Sleep is super important. I've seen too many workaholic types
| that barely sleep. So many of these folks end up with serious
| issues later in life.
| jajko wrote:
| Workaholism is always just manifesting underlying psychical
| issues, be it some form of OCD, deep unhappiness with one's
| life and escapism from emptiness or similar. Such state
| manifests in many destructive behaviors, which then like in
| case of sleep create their own forces of destruction.
|
| One can't escape psychology, one thing no school taught me (and
| they should have since we all deal with this in some way! plus
| its not that complex). Once I grokked the basics, dealing and
| with people and understanding them became much easier.
| andruby wrote:
| I'd be careful with saying that is "always" the case.
|
| What about people who are deeply passionate about their
| mission and chose to devote their life to it?
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Maybe some people just enjoy working.
| saulpw wrote:
| Being addicted to workahol means they aren't able to enjoy
| other things. Your comment is like saying "maybe alcoholics
| just enjoy drinking".
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I love working and I love doing other things too. Working
| doesn't get in the way of doing other things I also love.
|
| Maybe alcoholics do enjoy drinking. But working 60 hours
| a week isn't going to cause brain damage and liver
| failure on its own. Productivity isn't a chemical or
| vice.
| skirmish wrote:
| > working 60 hours a week isn't going to cause brain
| damage
|
| If it causes you to sleep too little, it just may.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| you cut out "on its own" from that quote, which I think
| is an important qualifier.
| keysdev wrote:
| One best things about getting laid off from work is that one
| get to sleep as long as one want in the morning!
| andruby wrote:
| I don't think this person has children :P
| skirmish wrote:
| My teenage daughter is happy to sleep until 3:00pm every
| day during the summer vacation and then stay up late night
| after night. It's probably genetic, my wife does the same
| when she can.
| ge96 wrote:
| Or binge watch the entire Walking Dead series in a month
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Yes, that's the "lay" that you will be doing.
| derbOac wrote:
| The paper is here:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09261-y
|
| Not an expert in this area, but the essay feels a bit like an
| oversimplification. Not only is this in flies, but I wasn't
| entirely convinced this isn't about rest rather than sleep per
| se. It's a cool paper, interesting to read and read about, but my
| hunch is there's more steps in the chain, and am not sure it will
| replicate in humans or even mammals. But maybe I'll be wrong.
| crocowhile wrote:
| It is an awful paper and I am a very expert in this area. This
| is science, alas.
| flobosg wrote:
| Not an expert, but I'd love to hear more about what makes it
| awful.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Please elaborate.
| ed wrote:
| Huh, you actually are an expert in this area. I'm curious to
| hear more too.
|
| > There, I studied the early stages of neuronal development
| in the Drosophila embryo... > I graduated with my Ph.D. in
| September 2006 and decided that I would continue my research
| activity on sleep, using flies as the animal model.
|
| https://lab.gilest.ro/giorgio
| Symmetry wrote:
| Could this be an explanation for why people who go without sleep
| for long enough eventually just die? The Guinness Book of World
| Records doesn't accept records on staying awake for the same
| reason they don't accept records for the longest game of Russian
| Roulette.
| nialse wrote:
| While it is true that Guiness stopped keeping track of records
| of staying awake for health reasons, people with severe sleep
| deprivation ends up being psychotic and admitted to psychiatric
| care and administered sleep inducing drugs. So, lack of sleep
| is not something you die from short term. Long term (years,
| decades) short sleep is associated with higher all cause
| mortality risk though.
| type0 wrote:
| there's this prion disease
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia
| downrightmike wrote:
| And there is the hereditary version: fatal familial
| insomnia [FFI]) stemming from a mutation in the PRNP gene.
| nialse wrote:
| Yes, it does seem to cause one death per year worldwide
| and is a long onset disorder with psychiatric symptoms.
| One need not be afraid of not sleeping in general though.
| (Being worried about lack of sleep is one of the common
| causes of lack of sleep.)
| Symmetry wrote:
| I'm getting this from the book _Why We Sleep_ by Matthew
| Walker. There were some other exaggerations in the book that
| people have noted, though, so maybe I was too trusting of
| this particular fact.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| So lack of sleep damages thr little critters.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| When he says lack of "restorative" sleep, he means stage III
| NREM? I wish he were more precise.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The heart beats non-stop and doesn't sleep. How does this fit
| with this theory?
| Rooster61 wrote:
| I was thinking along the same lines, but bigger. Mitochondria
| don't "shut down" when we sleep. If they did, we would die very
| quickly. If anything, they produce quite a bit of energy during
| things like REM sleep and digestion. I'm sure I'm missing some
| subtle details about HOW they "rest", but from a 30000 ft view,
| it's puzzling.
| SalariedSlave wrote:
| The paper's core idea isn't that all cells that use
| mitochondria need sleep, but rather:
|
| > In a specific subset of sleep-inducing neurons, mitochondrial
| electron leak builds up when energy is available but underused
| during neuronal inactivity. That mismatch acts as a sleep
| signal.
|
| The heart doesn't fall into that subset.
| dbagr wrote:
| This has been known for a long time to those interested in the
| field.
| boringg wrote:
| Isn't mitochondria the hot new topic du jour (last couple of
| years) for bio? Is this kind of peak hype cycle?
|
| Science follows the exact same cycle as tech ... I feel like the
| microbiome was huge and going to solve all our problems 8 years
| ago.
|
| I don't want to sound jaded but history repeats itself in echoes
| - and these cycles seem somewhat predictable if the specific
| technology isn't predictable.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| There is a difference between being physically tired as a result
| of metabolic effort, and being mentally tired/sleepy. Even if you
| lie on the couch all day you will still be tired come night time,
| and can not survive for long if deprived of sleep.
|
| It seems the mental need for sleep comes from the brain needing
| offline (no sensory input) downtime for "housekeeping" activities
| - perhaps essentially organizing and filing away the day's short-
| term memories.
| baq wrote:
| the brain burns more power when doing mentally exhausting tasks
| than at idle, so it makes sense to have to recharge
| mitochondria in there. (the 'more' is not huge, like 5% - so it
| also makes sense to be tired after a lazy day I guess)
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| But we're sleepy every night regardless of how much or how
| little we have done mentally during the day. Doing more work
| (mental or physical) than usual will make us feel more tired,
| but the basic need for the 24hr sleep cycle is there
| regardless.
|
| We fundamentally sleep at night based on circadian rhythm
| (evolved from earth's 24hr day), not based on activity level.
| We do also feel tired after a strenuous activity, but recover
| after a little rest and nutrition - this doesn't appear to be
| the same thing as the fundamental need for sleep.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| The body expends 2000 calories of energy (via mitochondria)
| simply to be alive, even if you lie in a hospital bed and
| are unconscious. You do a marathon's amount of work every
| day. You need to sleep to deal with that.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| We're also alive when we're asleep ... The difference
| between being asleep or awake lying on the couch seems to
| have more to do with reduced/different mental activity
| than energy usage.
|
| Being unconscious, or in a coma, in a hospital bed is
| more akin to being asleep, which is why you can be in a
| coma for years without dying.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| And frankly, while a long day makes you feel more _tired_ ,
| I don't know that having to focus a lot or working out a
| bunch really makes me want to go to bed noticeably earlier.
| pitched wrote:
| One of the ways this electron leak happens (from the chatGPT)
| is that fuel (NADH) exceeds energy demand (ATP). So a good way
| to push off the mental need for sleep is to get your body
| tired. So the processes aren't quite perpendicular.
| emsign wrote:
| Increasing the count and efficiency of mitochondria is gonna be a
| big deal. ME/CFS is caused by these organelles not working as
| they should.
| rogerkirkness wrote:
| Highly recommend red light therapy for this. There's a
| spreadsheet that contains [1] all the scientific research does
| on effect on mitochondria.
|
| [1]:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/1ZKl5Me4XwPj4YgJC...
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's a long list. Not all research is good research, or
| shows the effect you're looking for. Where did this come
| from?
|
| Do you use red light therapy? For what? How often? Where do
| you focus it? I did manage to get some red light masks
| although I find it hard to fit into my routine
| ulf-77723 wrote:
| Would also be interested in a routine that makes sense.
|
| People use habit stacking or habit chaining to get it into
| their routines - helps me tremendously to make new things a
| daily habit.
|
| But this depends on how often red light therapy might be
| actually helpful.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Isn't simply getting enough outdoor sunlight just as good as
| red light therapy.
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's not clear to me CFS is really a thing. To me it's a catch
| all BS diagnosis that basically says "we don't know what this
| is, so we're calling it CFS".
| emsign wrote:
| It is definitely a thing. It all fits with the mitochondria
| theory: after physical or mental exhaustion (increased
| metabolic turnover provided by mitochondria) the recovery
| time (sleep) for ME/CFS patients is increased to such a
| degree that normal daily tasks gets them into a energy low
| they can't recover from anymore.
| cpncrunch wrote:
| Except there isn't any evidence of mitochondria problems in
| ME/CFS, even though a lot of studies have looked at them.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I'm already getting a lot of (subjective) benefit from doing
| what I can with supplements that target each phase of the Krebs
| cycle's bottlenecks, and glutathione production to delay ROS
| damage (which this paper finger-points at). My mental endurance
| to do things like program and handle corporate politics lasts
| hours longer on days when I do this.
|
| Next I need to get a lot better cardio endurance but I have
| some pulmonary problems to deal with.
| gavinray wrote:
| Anyone interested in this should look up "MOTS-C" and "SS-31".
|
| They're readily available online. Both of them are peptides
| that enhance mitochondrial function.
|
| MOTS-C in particular is very fascinating.
|
| I have a vial of 20mg I've yet to use.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
| baggachipz wrote:
| > If you need oxygen, then you need sleep!
|
| Would this also correlate with the desire to yawn? I always heard
| that yawning was a response to needing more oxygen.
| GLdRH wrote:
| It has nothing to do with oxygen; Yawning is caused by other
| people yawning in the vicinity.
| williamdclt wrote:
| Of course not. Sympathy yawning is a thing of course, but
| have you never yawned by yourself with no one around?
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| This isn't the case for my dog or infant.
| GLdRH wrote:
| They remembered a yawn
| searine wrote:
| Funded primarily by UK and European taxpayers and foundations via
| 8 grants, predominantly from the Wellcome Trust, with additional
| support from EU research council and Swiss science programs.
| bluechair wrote:
| I'm drawing a connection here between red light therapy being
| most beneficial if done in the morning.
|
| Might mitochondria only be able to benefit from "recharging" in a
| recharge state?
|
| Biochemists?
| lawlessone wrote:
| I wonder is this why creatine gives me more energy?
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| the powerhouse of the cell
| m3kw9 wrote:
| The body system is almost never one thing that drives it,
| especially sleep
| bobafett-9902 wrote:
| ah yes the mitochondria ... the powerhouse of the cell. thanks Ms
| Jeffers 7th grade bio
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I don't know if I can buy this explanation. Sleep is dangerous
| (and not just to night drivers). You're basically in a several-
| hours-long coma where a smilodon can come along and eat you
| without any trouble. So long as cells have more than one
| mitochondria each, staging them so they don't all need sleep
| simultaneously seems like a total no-brainer, and doesn't require
| any difficult-to-manage circumstances that leave you unconscious
| as predator snacks. This is a big deal, there's more than enough
| evolutionary pressure for sleep to have been selected out of the
| genome hundreds of millions of years ago.
| andrethegiant wrote:
| The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
| bmillare wrote:
| To me this paper confuses regulation via mitochondria from the
| requirement of sleep. Even if experimentally manipulating
| mitochondria state induces sleep, this might just be a proxy
| indicator control mechanism. ETC leak is only an issue for these
| dFBNs which are specifically complementary active to normal
| neuronal cells. I would say mitochondria are important for sleep
| regulation but this is specific to animals with brains. Other
| kingdoms do not "sleep". This is too much a stretch to say
| mitochondria dysfunction is the cause of sleep when other
| kingdoms also have mitochondrial stress and don't have actual
| analogical "sleep" processes. My raw take given my PhD work was
| on mitochondria.
| pitched wrote:
| ChatGPT is telling me that caffeine is an indirect UCP (uncoupled
| protein) activator, which I think is amazing. The one thing that
| we all use to keep ourselves awake can also make us need less
| sleep.
| tgbugs wrote:
| The relation of these results to natural short sleep [0] is of
| great interest. In particular the observation that individuals
| with these mutations also appear to be protected from Alzheimer's
| disease. A strong indication that these mutations may have some
| downstream interaction with the mitochondrial maintenance cycle
| described in the parent article.
|
| 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Familial_natural_short_sleep
| profsummergig wrote:
| Mitochondria health all comes down to sleep.
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