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A comment on Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight. Parent comment

Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by lossolo on Thursday October 27, 2016 @04:14PM (#12809472)
Brain is very active when you sleep, a lot is happening. Imagine sleep is just a mutex on big set of data on which computation needs to be made, compression, data reorganization, index optimizing. Data that you received that day is segregated , decisions are made which data to keep and which to delete. After that lock is freed and you wake up. If you don't sleep your system will run slower and slower over time and will timeout more and more queries until it will start to return corrupted data. You need to sleep to keep the system healthy.
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Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by dmreedy on Thursday October 27, 2016 @04:53PM (#12809995)
That is a theory. There are many other theories too. The OP's observation was that we don't really have a firm grasp on which theory or theories is/are correct, in the way we (believe) that we understand something like the nature of chemical interactions, or the limits of finite-state computation. Sleep, like many many other functions of the brain, not the least of which being its most recognizable function (to us), remains something speculated about without broad consensus. As per the fantastic quote in the linked wiki article,

"As far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy."

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Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by burke on Thursday October 27, 2016 @06:19PM (#12810818)
A theory, sure. Another thing to remember about biological systems is that complex features like sleep rarely serve just one purpose. There will generally be one cause that was killing lots of members of a population which the feature was developed to mitigate, but other "reasons" may have grown over time as evolution "discovered" other ways the feature can help.

I think in general, good-sounding theories produced by the "speculative evolutionary biology" game are actually very often right -- but only describe one facet of a supremely messy system with boundaries that don't conform cleanly to the mental models we try to impose.

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Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by rudolf0 on Thursday October 27, 2016 @04:49PM (#12809943)
Sure, but that's just pure speculation.
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Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by mike_hock on Thursday October 27, 2016 @04:51PM (#12809963)
Sleep = vacuum freeze analyze
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Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by mey on Thursday October 27, 2016 @04:52PM (#12809982)
Garbage Collection
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Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by amelius on Thursday October 27, 2016 @05:43PM (#12810529)
We need a concurrent GC.
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Re:Evidence that birds sleep in mid-flight by pokemon-trainer on Thursday October 27, 2016 @06:08PM (#12810736)
It's called Red Bull. It gives you wings. Nature is now selling native advertising.
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