While forgeting might be one of the effects that happens it is certainly not the main purpose of sleep.
If you forbid people to sleep long enough they die and nobody knows why (not counting microsleeps). Fatal Famililal Insomnia is erm.... fatal. Its certainly not because you didn't forget. You can use alternatives for that, such as boosting endocanabinoid system. THC in mices also make them forget stresfull events in life and vice versa (blocking CB1 receptor makes them remember). There is strong anecdotal evidence that it happens in all human consumers too. Also, there are few people that can never forget [1], one depicted in House MD episode and those people sleep and I bet they would still die if they didn't.
All those facts do not align in my mind with above stated hypothesis.
AFAIK, some neural pathways get improved during the sleep while others are pruned. That sounds more like a brain is in a maintenance mode, filtering out irrelevant stuff from important (among other things that might happen).
It's possible Fatal Famililal Insomnia kills you by some other mechanism, and the sleeplessness is just a symptom, I figure. I don't think we know that the sleeplessness is the thing that kills you.
"Like all prion diseases, FFI is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, which means over time there are fewer neurons (nerve cells). Loss of neurons in the thalamus, as well as other mechanisms not yet fully understood, cause the symptoms of FFI."
"Although the main target of FFI is the thalamus, other parts of the brain are affected as well including the inferior olives. The inferior olives are part of the medulla oblongata and are important for coordinating our movements (motor control). Losing neurons in the inferior olives can make it harder for a person to control their movements as seen in later stages of FFI."
> When your whole brain is going haywire due to neuron loss, attributing death to sleeplessness seems premature.
Or it could be another way around, as its not easy to have experiments like this I guess we can never know.
But yes, that is certainly possible that in FFI you die due to some other reason. I didn't see that info you provided but I remember reading in NGeo many years back that FFI people seem healthy in other aspects.
There was 1 experiment with mices tho - after 32 days they all died witout sleep:
> Fatal Famililal Insomnia is erm.... fatal. Its certainly not because you didn't forget.
It might be. It's a kind of garbage collection. Long-lived dynamic programs with bad GC run out of memory and exit with fatal errors, precisely because they didn't forget.
While forgeting might be one of the effects that happens it is certainly not the main purpose of sleep.
If you forbid people to sleep long enough they die and nobody knows why (not counting microsleeps). Fatal Famililal Insomnia is erm.... fatal. Its certainly not because you didn't forget. You can use alternatives for that, such as boosting endocanabinoid system. THC in mices also make them forget stresfull events in life and vice versa (blocking CB1 receptor makes them remember). There is strong anecdotal evidence that it happens in all human consumers too. Also, there are few people that can never forget [1], one depicted in House MD episode and those people sleep and I bet they would still die if they didn't.
All those facts do not align in my mind with above stated hypothesis.
AFAIK, some neural pathways get improved during the sleep while others are pruned. That sounds more like a brain is in a maintenance mode, filtering out irrelevant stuff from important (among other things that might happen).
[1] http://discovermagazine.com/2006/jun/j-woman-memory