How Sleep Works

[Chris]

For any animal living in the wild, it just doesn't seem very smart to design in a mandatory eight-hour period of near-total unconsciousness every day. Yet that is exactly what evolution has done. So there must be a pretty good reason for it!

-How Sleep Works

My dreams are nothing but random bullshit.

[Gnosital]

Chris wrote

My dreams are nothing but random bullshit.

That's a cool link, thanks, I was looking for something on consciousness variations to make my online intro psych students read.

And you forget the vast majority of your dreams, it's sort of like alcohol-induced blackout while you're asleep. Very little gets consolidated. Random bullshit is probably the jettison process, there is some evidence that we do a bit of synaptic housecleaning while we're asleep.

If you don't have very significant dreams that cause you to wonder WTF for half the morning, then you probably don't have any major unresolved emotional issues nagging at your subconscious either.

Freud wasn't totally wrong about everything.


Except for that penis envy stuff. That was totally whack.

[Professor Chaos]

Sweet link!

I've often used sleep to question Intelligent Design proponents. What kind of all-knowing, all-powerful creator would have his creation spend 33% of their lives unconscious?

[Philboid Studge]

That website needs better sourcing. By better I mean "some."

It must be in there somewhere, but I couldn't find it on that busy busy webpage, and I'm loathe to cite "How Stuff Works" as an authority ... Is it compiled like Wiki? Are there in-house experts? Would it kill them to note who/where the info is coming from?

I think life is best spent learning and wrestling
Polyphasic sleeping all the way
I'll have plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead

[Gnosital]

Philboid Studge wrote

That website needs better sourcing. By better I mean "some."

It must be in there somewhere, but I couldn't find it on that busy busy webpage, and I'm loathe to cite "How Stuff Works" as an authority ... Is it compiled like Wiki? Are there in-house experts? Would it kill them to note who/where the info is coming from?

Yeah, citations would improve the site, but I can tell you with some authority that the content on the sleep series, at least, is accurate.

[Gnosital]

Amichai2 wrote

I think life is best spent learning and wrestling
Polyphasic sleeping all the way
I'll have plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead

Death and sleep are far from similar from a neurophysiological perspective, dearie.

[calpurnpiso]

Sleeping is simply computer rebooting. Assimilation of quotidian perceptions
( learning) then a path to future actions could be created. One could control one's dreams to a certain extent. When this is done one can produce amazing adventures, not unlike the euphoria producing religious experiences one has while awake. Logic is non existent while one dreams, it is as if one would immersed one's conscience inside a Salvador Dali's painting enjoying its irrational epiphanies. I love going to bed at night, since I become the protagonist, audience, director of the awesome dream adventures I am about to experience.

A dream is a hint of what death would be like, but since the brain decomposes and one becomes non existent, only the introduction to death is what one would experience. The white tunnel, spirits, voices and rest of hallucinations then the neural decomposing unknown sets in with nonexistence. This can be experienced only by the person on the outside which is the doctor performing the autopsy. Our conscience dies at night then resurrects in the morning.

[Chris]

I was drawn to it this morning because I was trying to find out what issues I need to resolve. I'm always having reoccurring dreams about an ex boyfriend. It's been 12 years since we broke up, I can stop dreaming about him now, shesh, he wasn't even 'the best I ever had'.

[Sternwallow]

It is interesting that the dolphin sleeps with only one half of its brain at a time so that it can still swim and breathe. This suggests that the benefits of sleep are mainly physiological and that dreams are merely side-effects of those physiological changes.

I'm wondering how they figured out that insects don't sleep.

[Sternwallow]

bokonon wrote

I'm wondering how they figured out that insects don't sleep.

The scientists wired their little brains and measured the various waves. I am not sure what the data showed when they tested The Fly/Vincent Price. Probably a mixture of snoozing and "Hellllllp Meeeee!".

[Kate]

[GodlessHeathen]

Is that what Jeff Goldblum looks like in HD?

[Kate]

Yeah.