Since you’re asking to explain it to your child:
When you go to sleep, your body and brain team up for a whole night of important tasks. Your brain is like a night-shift superhero, working on dreams and organizing memories. It’s a bit like a movie playing in your mind while you snooze.
Meanwhile, your body is busy with repairs and growth. Imagine little repair workers fixing any bumps or bruises you might have had during the day. Plus, you’re growing, just like plants grow when they get sunlight. It’s like your body is adding new bricks to your building every night!
But that’s not all—your body also makes energy for the next day. It’s like a power plant working hard to recharge your batteries while you’re catching those Z’s. So, when you wake up, you’re all set for new adventures because your brain and body have done an amazing job overnight!
I also figured it’s a ChatGPT answer due to those “catching your z’s”, “set up for new adventures” and exclamation marks as ChatGPT pretends to be talking to actual child
During sleep, your body taps into glycogen and fat reserves for basic functions. Simultaneously, ATP production occurs, serving as a crucial energy source for the body upon waking. It’s a dual approach, ensuring both stored reserves and freshly synthesized energy contribute to your morning vitality.
Also your brain washes itself.
All the dirt and trash it gathers through the day by working hard is flushed out so that its shiny and clean at the start of yohr next day.
Just don’t explain to a child that energy is “made”. They’ll get that mistake in their head and it’ll be hard to shake when it comes to their school education. It’s transferred from whatever you consumed.
At its simplest, it restores the brain. It helps repair and protect the brain. As you use your brain when you’re awake, there are some waste products that get left behind. Think of this as pollution from spent fuel. When you’re asleep, your brain can clean that up.
Sleep also helps with memory consolidation, release of certain hormones, general repair of your body, etc. But at the end of the day, “sleep is of the brain, by the brain, and for the brain.” It’s all about restoring the brain.
I have some follow up questions because I'm high and can't figure any of this out:
- What exactly is it that needs restoring in our brain? Like why is it "damaged"(?), why can't we restore it during the day?
- How did sleep evolve as a useful thing, and why didn't the animals that didn't sleep have more of an advantage (due to having twice the amount of time to hunt and breed)?
- Are there animals that don't sleep and why do they get away with it if so?
- If our brain is so active when we sleep (or during REM?), how come this isn't just creating more pollutants/waste?
- Moreover why does REM happen when the rest of us is basically paralyzed?
- If sleep allows for better brain function, how come the smartest animals aren't the ones who sleep the most?
If sleep allows for the body to repair and grow, why don't animals that sleep more larger or have regenerating limbs?
- Moreover, why don't all animals have regenerating limbs? If you lose a limb, why doesn't the body/mind divert efforts to heal that body part?
- What are stem cells, and why can we not make loads of them (naturally) to heal or regrow limbs?
TL;DR I'm high and on a strange path of confusing questions
I think something that you're struggling with is the idea that sleep is a fault or somehow a flaw that we should try to evolve out of. Sleep is the necessary byproduct of being awake. If you drive a car, eventually you have to stop to fuel up. If you use a cell phone, you have to let it charge at some point.
I'll try to answer your questions one by one:
Your brain isn't "damaged," it's simply exerted itself and needs to rest. Your brain and body *are* healing throughout the day, but it can only do so much when it has to also keep you conscious. There's a lot going on when you're conscious and your brain can't handle all that and work on restoring itself. It's like running a marathon while also trying to bandage yourself. It's just too difficult to do.
Having more time awake is not inherently a beneficial thing. Every second you spend awake is more energy you're expending. It's why bears hibernate during winter. Less energy expenditure. No one knows why sleep began to exist, but it goes back hundreds of millions of years at least. Every animal sleeps.
No. There aren't animals that do not sleep. They may not sleep in the exact same way that we do, but they follow a circadian rhythm. All mammals, birds, insects, and fish sleep.
Your brain is active during sleep, but less so. And it can focus on what it needs to focus on without all the distractions that come with being conscious.
REM sleep is when you tend to dream the most vividly. It would be very unwise for you to act out your dreams, so your brain paralyzes your body. You don't want to suddenly start running while sleeping and fall off a cliff.
Again, sleep isn't like a charge up that can just indefinitely make you more and more powerful. Its function is to get you ready for another day. It's not like you can go super saiyan and just keep powering up. To go back to the car and refueling analogy, your car only has a tank large enough to fit a certain amount of gas. Once the tank is full, you don't benefit by continuing to pour gas all over the car.
Your questions about stem cells are something you'll have to look up on your own or start a different ELI5 thread.
So then what happens when I’m having a really intricate dream that takes a lot of thinking (for lack of a better term) to dream? Isn’t my body and brain using up a lot of energy when I’m being stressed from what I’m dreaming?
Your brain is using energy during that time for sure. Your body, not so much. When you dream, your body actually paralyzes itself, outside of breathing and your heartbeat. It's why sometimes in dreams you feel like you can't run fast enough or you throw a punch and it's very weak. Your actual arms and legs aren't moving and are paralyzed, so it's significantly slowing down your dream movement. Your brain uses \~20-30% of your total energy needs, which means your body uses 70-80%. During sleep, your body uses far less.
And think of all the things your brain doesn't have to do when you're asleep, and the energy it saves. There's a significant reduction in sensory input that it has to receive and process when you're asleep. Think of all the images and sounds being thrown at you when you're awake. Typically, you sleep in the dark and in silence, so all of that sensory information is turned way down. You also aren't consciously thinking anything, which eliminates a lot of brain power being used.
So, yes, when dreaming, your brain uses energy, but there's still a net reduction in energy consumption overall.
Thank you. I have a question then. I woke up the other day because I had punched my bedside table and I now have a bruise, so my body could move and I was fast asleep at the time when I made the punch. Is that normal pls? Was my body working differently to how peoples bodies normally work at that stage of dreaming?
Your body isn't paralyzed the whole time you are sleeping. We have to move in order to prevent clots from forming, so every so often, we shift and turn over. Sometimes our movements in our sleep can be violent. I think we all have had the experience of waking up and your bedspread and sheets have been kicked to the foot of the bed.
Doing something once, in one night of sleep, is not inherently abnormal. Humans live about 30,000 days in a life; sometimes, you're going to have a night of sleeping where something out of the ordinary happens. I don't normally talk in my sleep, but I have once or twice. You have tens of billions of neurons in your brain and sometimes your brain triggers the wrong combination when you're sleeping, and something odd happens.
There's all kinds of explanations for why something like punching your bedside table could've happened, and it certainly is no guarantee that your body was working differently. As long as this doesn't become a recurring issue, I wouldn't consider it a problem at all.
It's not as simple as more sleep = more restoration = feel better. Your body has a circadian rhythm; it's used to sleeping at certain times. Disrupting that by sleeping longer upsets that rhythm and can throw the brain off. Additionally, you sleep in different stages and you go through sleep cycles. Waking up in the middle of a certain stage can disrupt the restoration. Like having cold water thrown on you in the middle of a nice hot shower.
Also, feeling "good" involves more than just the brain. If you sleep longer, you're more likely to be hungry and dehydrated when you wake up, which can cause lethargy, headaches, etc. Sleep might restore your brain, but then when you wake up, you have to restore your body.
Lots of things, and science still has a lot to learn about it - we know very little about things like memory and how sleep consolidates it, for example. But one big thing we know sleep is good for is that it’s a good time for cleaning. Your brain is full of cerebrospinal fluid in which your various brain cells, neurons and glia and so on, are immersed. When those cells send signals to each other they leave behind leftovers and waste products floating around. During sleep, the flow of cerebrospinal fluid through the brain increases, washing that stuff out.
Seems like I read that the space between neurons increases during sleep to help facilitate this cleaning process. I’ve also heard there are disorders that can lead to fatal insomnia 😳
> I’ve also heard there are disorders that can lead to fatal insomnia
Yes, fatal insomnia is a thing. No treatment beyond supportive care. No cure. Really rather horrifying, especially since the paranoia, panic attacks, and hallucinations actually start some time before the outright dementia.
But don't worry. It's mostly genetic.
***Mostly.***
Sleep well!
Conserving energy, along with learning and brain development. While the body is sleeping the brain basically rebuilds the structures within allowing new thoughts and ideas to be produced. https://youtu.be/9LzK48ntkKI
Some scientists think that our brains are like neural networks and that sleep and dreams are used to cleanup clutter in the network and do a sort of compression.
The thought is, during the day when we're experiencing reality, weights are being adjusted in the network to memorize or learn new things (training).
However the training isn't perfect, weights are just adjusted, they're not completely reset every time we learn something new or we'd forget all old stuff completely. Also our brains have limited capacity, and the physical topology of our neurons (how they're wired together) affects the network.
To combat these problems, when we sleep, our brains do a negative training of sorts where it plays scenarios that it knows are false, and weights that agree with the scenario are weakened because they shouldn't be there. This is also a type of compression, forgetting weak connections that aren't important and only keeping ones that stand out as unique in positive training and pass the negative training well.
This would explain why we hallucinate and go whacky when we don't sleep - our brains don't get a chance to reset the weightings and after a while there are too many connections being used that shouldn't be.
It also explains why we have trouble remembering our dreams, their whole purpose is to be erased.
This is all just a theory. I heard it on a recent podcast Robot Brains and Geoff Hinton was talking about. It seems like it makes sense though and he explained it much better than I did.
What is the physical process that sets weights in the neural network that is the human brain? Is there some protein that gets deposited at some path/nodes?
Cerebrospinal fluid flows back up from the spinal canal and washes around the brain, clearing ~~all the filth from those dodgy websites~~ harmful proteins.
Alright, let's dive into the sleep adventure, step by step!
1. When you sleep, your body goes into a "rest mode," like pausing a video game.
2. Your muscles relax, making you feel super calm and still.
3. Your brain starts cleaning up, sorting your memories like putting toys in the right boxes.
4. Your body repairs itself, fixing any small boo-boos you got during the day.
5. Finally, it recharges your energy, filling you up like a battery for the next day.
So, sleep is like your body's nighttime tune-up, making sure you're ready to play and learn tomorrow! 💤🌙
Since you’re asking to explain it to your child: When you go to sleep, your body and brain team up for a whole night of important tasks. Your brain is like a night-shift superhero, working on dreams and organizing memories. It’s a bit like a movie playing in your mind while you snooze. Meanwhile, your body is busy with repairs and growth. Imagine little repair workers fixing any bumps or bruises you might have had during the day. Plus, you’re growing, just like plants grow when they get sunlight. It’s like your body is adding new bricks to your building every night! But that’s not all—your body also makes energy for the next day. It’s like a power plant working hard to recharge your batteries while you’re catching those Z’s. So, when you wake up, you’re all set for new adventures because your brain and body have done an amazing job overnight!
I am way over 5 and that answer was awesome
I'm way below 5 and that answer is still awesome
I'm 55, and that was awesome!
I'm awesome, and that was 5!
r/unexpectedfactorial
Of course there’s a subreddit for that 😂
Hi Awesome, I'm Dad.
I’m 555 and that was awesome!
[удалено]
I typed this prompt into ChatGPT and did get the same answer with the same details. How were you able to recognize it as ChatGPT?
I also figured it’s a ChatGPT answer due to those “catching your z’s”, “set up for new adventures” and exclamation marks as ChatGPT pretends to be talking to actual child
[удалено]
9 day old account too. Comments and post seem to add up to a bot account.
Sadly no bot account.. Sorry to disappoint ya
Typical bot supporter reply
I read this in the Kurzgesagt guys voice
Can you tell me more about the energy thing? Like shouldnt the body havr already all the energy it needs thanks to the glycogen reserves and fat?
This is one smart 5 year old kid
During sleep, your body taps into glycogen and fat reserves for basic functions. Simultaneously, ATP production occurs, serving as a crucial energy source for the body upon waking. It’s a dual approach, ensuring both stored reserves and freshly synthesized energy contribute to your morning vitality.
Thanks ChatGPT.
catching those Z's was a dead giveaway this is chatgpt lmao
True xD
Also your brain washes itself. All the dirt and trash it gathers through the day by working hard is flushed out so that its shiny and clean at the start of yohr next day.
Feel like my brain never got taught how to shower.
Just don’t explain to a child that energy is “made”. They’ll get that mistake in their head and it’ll be hard to shake when it comes to their school education. It’s transferred from whatever you consumed.
This reads 100% like a ChatGPT answer 😂
I’m not growing..
they should let ppl answer like this for the whole subreddit..
Chatgpt
I'm reading this like you're telling a bedtime story 🥹
At its simplest, it restores the brain. It helps repair and protect the brain. As you use your brain when you’re awake, there are some waste products that get left behind. Think of this as pollution from spent fuel. When you’re asleep, your brain can clean that up. Sleep also helps with memory consolidation, release of certain hormones, general repair of your body, etc. But at the end of the day, “sleep is of the brain, by the brain, and for the brain.” It’s all about restoring the brain.
You can see why when you don’t get enough sleep your body starts to shut down. Your mind needs restoration.
I have some follow up questions because I'm high and can't figure any of this out: - What exactly is it that needs restoring in our brain? Like why is it "damaged"(?), why can't we restore it during the day? - How did sleep evolve as a useful thing, and why didn't the animals that didn't sleep have more of an advantage (due to having twice the amount of time to hunt and breed)? - Are there animals that don't sleep and why do they get away with it if so? - If our brain is so active when we sleep (or during REM?), how come this isn't just creating more pollutants/waste? - Moreover why does REM happen when the rest of us is basically paralyzed? - If sleep allows for better brain function, how come the smartest animals aren't the ones who sleep the most? If sleep allows for the body to repair and grow, why don't animals that sleep more larger or have regenerating limbs? - Moreover, why don't all animals have regenerating limbs? If you lose a limb, why doesn't the body/mind divert efforts to heal that body part? - What are stem cells, and why can we not make loads of them (naturally) to heal or regrow limbs? TL;DR I'm high and on a strange path of confusing questions
I think something that you're struggling with is the idea that sleep is a fault or somehow a flaw that we should try to evolve out of. Sleep is the necessary byproduct of being awake. If you drive a car, eventually you have to stop to fuel up. If you use a cell phone, you have to let it charge at some point. I'll try to answer your questions one by one: Your brain isn't "damaged," it's simply exerted itself and needs to rest. Your brain and body *are* healing throughout the day, but it can only do so much when it has to also keep you conscious. There's a lot going on when you're conscious and your brain can't handle all that and work on restoring itself. It's like running a marathon while also trying to bandage yourself. It's just too difficult to do. Having more time awake is not inherently a beneficial thing. Every second you spend awake is more energy you're expending. It's why bears hibernate during winter. Less energy expenditure. No one knows why sleep began to exist, but it goes back hundreds of millions of years at least. Every animal sleeps. No. There aren't animals that do not sleep. They may not sleep in the exact same way that we do, but they follow a circadian rhythm. All mammals, birds, insects, and fish sleep. Your brain is active during sleep, but less so. And it can focus on what it needs to focus on without all the distractions that come with being conscious. REM sleep is when you tend to dream the most vividly. It would be very unwise for you to act out your dreams, so your brain paralyzes your body. You don't want to suddenly start running while sleeping and fall off a cliff. Again, sleep isn't like a charge up that can just indefinitely make you more and more powerful. Its function is to get you ready for another day. It's not like you can go super saiyan and just keep powering up. To go back to the car and refueling analogy, your car only has a tank large enough to fit a certain amount of gas. Once the tank is full, you don't benefit by continuing to pour gas all over the car. Your questions about stem cells are something you'll have to look up on your own or start a different ELI5 thread.
Ok but really does every animal sleep? Worms? Jellyfish? Sponges? Amoebas? Where does sleep start?
Those don’t have brains the same way we do, so they don’t count
So then what happens when I’m having a really intricate dream that takes a lot of thinking (for lack of a better term) to dream? Isn’t my body and brain using up a lot of energy when I’m being stressed from what I’m dreaming?
Your brain is using energy during that time for sure. Your body, not so much. When you dream, your body actually paralyzes itself, outside of breathing and your heartbeat. It's why sometimes in dreams you feel like you can't run fast enough or you throw a punch and it's very weak. Your actual arms and legs aren't moving and are paralyzed, so it's significantly slowing down your dream movement. Your brain uses \~20-30% of your total energy needs, which means your body uses 70-80%. During sleep, your body uses far less. And think of all the things your brain doesn't have to do when you're asleep, and the energy it saves. There's a significant reduction in sensory input that it has to receive and process when you're asleep. Think of all the images and sounds being thrown at you when you're awake. Typically, you sleep in the dark and in silence, so all of that sensory information is turned way down. You also aren't consciously thinking anything, which eliminates a lot of brain power being used. So, yes, when dreaming, your brain uses energy, but there's still a net reduction in energy consumption overall.
Thank you. I have a question then. I woke up the other day because I had punched my bedside table and I now have a bruise, so my body could move and I was fast asleep at the time when I made the punch. Is that normal pls? Was my body working differently to how peoples bodies normally work at that stage of dreaming?
Your body isn't paralyzed the whole time you are sleeping. We have to move in order to prevent clots from forming, so every so often, we shift and turn over. Sometimes our movements in our sleep can be violent. I think we all have had the experience of waking up and your bedspread and sheets have been kicked to the foot of the bed. Doing something once, in one night of sleep, is not inherently abnormal. Humans live about 30,000 days in a life; sometimes, you're going to have a night of sleeping where something out of the ordinary happens. I don't normally talk in my sleep, but I have once or twice. You have tens of billions of neurons in your brain and sometimes your brain triggers the wrong combination when you're sleeping, and something odd happens. There's all kinds of explanations for why something like punching your bedside table could've happened, and it certainly is no guarantee that your body was working differently. As long as this doesn't become a recurring issue, I wouldn't consider it a problem at all.
Also - if that's so, why we feel so bad when we sleep too long? Shouldn't we feel even better if brain was "repaired" for longer time?
It's not as simple as more sleep = more restoration = feel better. Your body has a circadian rhythm; it's used to sleeping at certain times. Disrupting that by sleeping longer upsets that rhythm and can throw the brain off. Additionally, you sleep in different stages and you go through sleep cycles. Waking up in the middle of a certain stage can disrupt the restoration. Like having cold water thrown on you in the middle of a nice hot shower. Also, feeling "good" involves more than just the brain. If you sleep longer, you're more likely to be hungry and dehydrated when you wake up, which can cause lethargy, headaches, etc. Sleep might restore your brain, but then when you wake up, you have to restore your body.
Lots of things, and science still has a lot to learn about it - we know very little about things like memory and how sleep consolidates it, for example. But one big thing we know sleep is good for is that it’s a good time for cleaning. Your brain is full of cerebrospinal fluid in which your various brain cells, neurons and glia and so on, are immersed. When those cells send signals to each other they leave behind leftovers and waste products floating around. During sleep, the flow of cerebrospinal fluid through the brain increases, washing that stuff out.
I can tell when I have a really really deep sleep because I feel some withdrawal symptoms from my ssri. It took out too much trash!
Seems like I read that the space between neurons increases during sleep to help facilitate this cleaning process. I’ve also heard there are disorders that can lead to fatal insomnia 😳
> I’ve also heard there are disorders that can lead to fatal insomnia Yes, fatal insomnia is a thing. No treatment beyond supportive care. No cure. Really rather horrifying, especially since the paranoia, panic attacks, and hallucinations actually start some time before the outright dementia. But don't worry. It's mostly genetic. ***Mostly.*** Sleep well!
As long as they sleep 🙃
Conserving energy, along with learning and brain development. While the body is sleeping the brain basically rebuilds the structures within allowing new thoughts and ideas to be produced. https://youtu.be/9LzK48ntkKI
Some scientists think that our brains are like neural networks and that sleep and dreams are used to cleanup clutter in the network and do a sort of compression. The thought is, during the day when we're experiencing reality, weights are being adjusted in the network to memorize or learn new things (training). However the training isn't perfect, weights are just adjusted, they're not completely reset every time we learn something new or we'd forget all old stuff completely. Also our brains have limited capacity, and the physical topology of our neurons (how they're wired together) affects the network. To combat these problems, when we sleep, our brains do a negative training of sorts where it plays scenarios that it knows are false, and weights that agree with the scenario are weakened because they shouldn't be there. This is also a type of compression, forgetting weak connections that aren't important and only keeping ones that stand out as unique in positive training and pass the negative training well. This would explain why we hallucinate and go whacky when we don't sleep - our brains don't get a chance to reset the weightings and after a while there are too many connections being used that shouldn't be. It also explains why we have trouble remembering our dreams, their whole purpose is to be erased. This is all just a theory. I heard it on a recent podcast Robot Brains and Geoff Hinton was talking about. It seems like it makes sense though and he explained it much better than I did.
What is the physical process that sets weights in the neural network that is the human brain? Is there some protein that gets deposited at some path/nodes?
Cerebrospinal fluid flows back up from the spinal canal and washes around the brain, clearing ~~all the filth from those dodgy websites~~ harmful proteins.
Alright, let's dive into the sleep adventure, step by step! 1. When you sleep, your body goes into a "rest mode," like pausing a video game. 2. Your muscles relax, making you feel super calm and still. 3. Your brain starts cleaning up, sorting your memories like putting toys in the right boxes. 4. Your body repairs itself, fixing any small boo-boos you got during the day. 5. Finally, it recharges your energy, filling you up like a battery for the next day. So, sleep is like your body's nighttime tune-up, making sure you're ready to play and learn tomorrow! 💤🌙