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Fluid oscillations in human sleep (science.sciencemag.org)
80 points by rdpfeffer 2424 days ago
6 comments

Press writeup: http://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/cerebrospinal-fluid-washing-...

The HN title seems quite misleading compared to the original title of "Coupled electrophysiological, hemodynamic, and cerebrospinal fluid oscillations in human sleep" (which could be shortened using CSF). The main focus of the study is measuring cerebrospinal fluid flows and its finding that CSF flow is correlated with slow wave EEG activity in this three phase neurons quiet, blood flow decreased, CSF flow increase pattern. The abstract does reference some work from 2006/2010 about consolidation and from 2015 about waste cleaning, but the paper is not a literature review paper so there's better writing on that subject elsewhere.

Almost like the brain has a compaction and garbage collection phase.
I'm surprised nobody asked to rewrite it in Rust yet.
Maybe Roko's Basilisk is so evil because it discovers we wrote it in JavaScript and in so doing doomed it to eternal metaphysical angst by using == instead of === making it impossible for it to conclude anything.
People have tried rewriting it in Metal many times but there is still a long way to go.
If anything, we should focus our efforts on porting it to Vulkan.
Touché :)
It would be interesting to have them study brain functions during the so called “transcendental” meditation. The school claims that it were a third state of brain activity, somewhere inbetween of sleeping and being conscious. In my experience it also may have the cleaning effect.
A side thought about this: dreams.

I have this theory that dreams are the experience of our brains rebooting after being taken down for maintenance; kind of like reading from uninitialized memory.

Dreams are maintenance. They are overnight batch processing after the realtime system is largely shut down. Your realtime conscious system then reboots from the now consolidated memory when you wake up.

You are a new and different person each morning.

This new and different person is practically indistinguishable from the old, though.
It depends. For example, if you were drinking you may have been conscious of things the night before that you no longer remember the next morning.
Sounds like the brain uses Doug Lea Malloc
Boehm GC
Cleaning waste and Consolidating are almost opposite functions, I believe it archives the memory and waste together. I suffered from a traumatic event and simultaneously forgot about a bank account I opened a week earlier. Seven years later I tried to open a new account at the bank, was reminded about the account after getting into an argument with the manager, and the trauma returned in the form of insomnia and nightmares.
Physical metabolic waste, not figurative waste.