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A comment on The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment. Parent comment

Re:The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment by JumpCrisscross on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @05:19PM (#49264655)
> the much more likely explanation is that the brain uses contrastive learning somewhere

This doesn’t explain sleep in virtually brainless creatures. A metabolic root cause seems more likely.

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Re:The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment by smallmancontrov on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @05:29PM (#49264761)
Why would neurons be exempt from training just because they weren't clustered into a brain? By comparison, transport-related phenomena are almost completely trivialized in the simple creatures. The existence of sleep in simple critters seems strong evidence in favor of contrastive learning over cleaning explanations.

Could you make the case for metabolic explanations? Are there a bunch of coupled mechanisms that all require downtime and couldn't possibly be phased?

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Re:The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment by JumpCrisscross on Wednesday August 12, 2026 @09:35AM (#49272202)
> Could you make the case for metabolic explanations?

Animals without nervous systems exhibit sleep-like states [1]. Potentially even animals without neurons [2].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28943083/

[2] https://www.science.org/content/article/if-alive-sleeps-brai...

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