I wonder if there are universal laws that transcend biology and technology, all following the same rules that we haven't figured out yet.
I'm not saying its not fascinating though. It is incredibly fascinating, and this kind of research is exactly why we should be investing MORE not less in pure science.
I disagree. Look at the paper: https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...
Can you point out where they even report the temperature of the brain/brainstem? This looks like it is just wild speculation.
Indeed, it’s natural that we do this but kind of funny when you consider that our machines now have their own circadian rhythms in tune with ours.
What might our IT infrastructure look like if humans evolved to sleep far less or not at all I wonder!
Sounds like your typical developer or sysadmin to me, so probably not much different at all. ;)
We probably would have started with multi-core systems much sooner.
It's not amusing in a bad way, it's not ridiculous. I mean to say that it's highly surprising and counterintuitive, like a punchline in a joke. Most theories about REM are focused on brain function, as is almost all research on it. Chaperone production, though, is a basic housekeeping routine. Saying "well, REM isn't about episodic memory consolidation or dreaming or wherever you might think, it's an epiphenomenon of a very low-level mechanism that prevents boiling alive" is almost as unorthodox as claiming that learning to code is about forearms' dexterity.
Personally I agree with Marcus Schmidt and his idea of "energy allocation function of sleep". Basically it says that distinct physiological states provide viable configurations of priorities for vital functions that allow for the lowest possible energy expenditure over the whole cycle. I.e. there's no single specific function of REM sleep, it hosts all functions that are too costly to prioritize during other states, and the same is true for NREM.