Your brain is a washing machine, AGI's job prospects, Americans are alone, the Earth passes "peak child"
Desiderata #31: links and commentary
The Desiderata series is a regular roundup of links and thoughts for paid subscribers, as well as an open thread and ongoing Ask Me Anything in the comments.
Table of Contents:
Sleep aids like Ambien may counteract the evolved purpose of sleep.
The anti-social century.
The world passes peak child.
AGI (probably?) won’t make human intellectual labor worthless.
Graduate student stipends slip below the poverty line.
Monkeys officially cannot write Shakespeare before the universe dies.
4chan’s literary taste praised by… The New Statesman?
From the Archives.
Ask Me Anything.
1. You might think science figured out why we sleep a long time ago. But nope. Why are animals forced to (vulnerably) lose consciousness for ~one-third of their lives?
A breakthrough occurred back when I was in graduate school in 2012 (as part of a sleep and consciousness lab). A breakthrough not by us, though, but by a Danish researcher: Maiken Nedergaard. She proposed that the brain is involved in a process of “glymphatic waste clearance,” which is a fancy way of saying that your brain gets washed, quite literally, while you sleep, by cerebral spinal fluid. Neurons create a lot of junk as they operate, and this washing clears it; it also occurs during the parts of sleep where you're least likely to dream, in deep NREM sleep. If I had to bet on which scientific explanation for why we sleep holds up, I would bet on this one, despite some current debate about it (if true, Nedergaard will win the Nobel Prize for this, by the way).
A recent paper by her and co-authors in the prestigious journal Cell gave a lot more detail into how this actually occurs. Norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter that's pretty similar to adrenaline) makes blood vessels contract, and during deep sleep it increases cyclically in the brain over the course of about a minute. Then the blood vessels relax. Contraction and then relaxation creates motion, which pushes the cerebrospinal fluid throughout the brain, since the whole thing is pulsing in the limited space of your skull.
But there's a critical part:
The sleep drug zolpidem, better known as Ambien, impedes the blood vessel oscillations and the fluid flow they promote, implying it could hamper cleansing.
So it is likely some powerful sleep aids are working against the actual evolved purpose of sleep. You awake, after Ambien, with a still-dirty brain.
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