The future involves waking up again, and sleep makes us rested enough to deal with that.
Simples.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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call me willfully ignorant, but i don't know if a site called "science alert" will finally tell us how we know how sleep works.
The brain flushes cerebrospinal fluid through itself during sleep, cleaning out spent fuel (beta, tau, amyloids and such). Buildup of amyloids in the brain is linked with Alzheimer's disease. Anything the fluid touches activates neurons so the body has to be immobilized for the process otherwise you'll flail around during the sleep process (See: Sleepwalking and night terrors). Memory consolidation and repair also occur in this stage. The optical clusters are so important for survival in evolution, they are never turned off, so dreams occur as the fluid hits neurons causing rapid eye movements (REM).
There was a BBC article/paper I read like a decade ago talking about the role/function of sleep in animals/organisms.
That first long morning piss? That's all spent brain fuel.
If I got something wrong feel free to correct me, I'm going off years old information from the Interwebs__
While more research is needed, this could be valuable insight for education and treatment of memory disorders, and it could help uncover novel ways to help people maximize their cognitive performance.
"We believe that manipulating brain activity during sleep or sleep patterns may uncover methods to enhance memory by unlocking the brain's latent potential," Inokuchi says.
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Sounds quite like Sci-Fi to me. Maybe the way our brains and sleep processes have evolved are already good enough. Meddling with that will require immense care.
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I'm all in for making our brains less smooth, but I hope these optimization potentials will be driven by the goal of making us better as humans. This should not be driven by capitalistic forces that would make us just more efficient cogs in the machine.
Unfortunately, we all know how your final sentence will play out.
TLDR: I agree with you
I have HSAM, highly superior autobiographical memory.
I am technically the thing the authors of the paper are trying to create; the human-alien hybrid.
One of the things I did most when I was a child was emphasize the importance of good sleep and dreaming.
As a result, I dream every night. Vividly. Lucidly. I also can remember essentially everything that has ever happened to me, or around me, like a video camera set to record on an infinite hard drive.
That being said, I don't believe my brain is special. I don't think this is a genetic quirk, or a fluke - a ghost in the programming.
I think everyone has the ability to form their brains into something like this, starting from early childhood, but simultaneously, I don't think modern industrial civilization would survive this.
Humanity has a distinct advantage of knowing and being cognizant of its death at all times, and mercifully, forgets about this until their final years.
Giving everyone this ability would make society smarter, but I suspect they would respond to it by dulling their senses -- self-medicating with marijuana and alcohol to cope with the gaping maw of wasting their fully lucid, fully hyperburning stardust on making some rich fuck richer.
Hypothetically, if you were asked to describe what garments a person was wearing when they crossed your path, would you be able to recall that? Or, would it be necessary that you were actively paying attention at that time in order to recall such information?
Yeah; it depends on the day. I'd say the recall is limited to my 140° of forward field of view, and really minor details get deleted, blurred or smeared.
I live in a major city, and pass literally, not figuratively thousands of people every day, so my memory is crammed full of ostensibly millions of people at this point. I don't remember all of their outfits, but I can visualize a memory of say, riding on the subway, and remember almost every person and where they were sitting, and a rough approximation of what they were wearing.
A more unusual outfit would be more memorable, for instance, I had a friend who got a well-paying job, we met up at a convention, and he wore a purple shirt with a mosaic pattern on it. That was in 2015, but I can remember his exact appearance, haircut, the day of, and the shirt because of how unusual and uncommon purple Oxford/business shirts are.
I want to say my memory accuracy is around 88% on aggregate, with the highest quality memories being 96% accurate. Every time I touch a memory, I risk modifying it, so I whiteglove everything, and make sure to not overwrite any information. This is especially hard when reading childhood data because it was literally encoded by a consciousness that was still learning the English language, for ex.
In other words, what I'm trying to say is, my memory is reliable up until there is a lot of crowding. Extremely rich scenes or thousands of people together simultaneously makes it a lot harder, and while the recall is there, up to 10% of the data might be lost.
That sounds like how I believed my memory worked, I used to think it was extraordinarily exact and I was some kind of savant.
But out of curiosity, I set up a test where I recorded a boardgame session with my friends. After we finished playing, we sat and wrote down our memories of that time with as much detail as possible, in a different room and with no input from others, and then watched the recording.
I was broadly correct in my recollections and able to correctly paraphrase others, but whenever I went into detail my recollections were incorrect more often than not.
Turns out, I was gifted at bullshitting myself, lol. My friends and I had a great time executing that little test, we laughed a lot and learned about each other.
Have you ever conducted a test on yourself like the one I conducted?
Yeah; I've run similar tests and my working memory is exactly average, which is where my belief that the ability to store long term memories permanently is available to everyone.
For extra long memory validations, I've got photographs, and I also leave "memory checkpoints" in the real world, like landmarks in the slipstream of time, or physical objects in vaults that I can reference.
They're important for the continuity of self, but also to have empirical anchors of "real" objects:
My brother has a pretty amazing memory for events when we were growing up, but he also wrote in a calendar every night, synopsizing the day's events. And he enjoyed reading those calendars regularly. Now, at almost 70 years old, he can still remember details of vacations we took when we were young, and I'm certain it's because of that journalling he did.
How do you determine what the average long term memory storage is?
Also, what up with the pic, lol?