An attempt at explaining sleep

Ever since I started engineering, I’ve been fascinated by the inner working of our brain. Thinking that there might be a correlation between computer brain and the biological brain. One of the mysteries that needs to be explained before I can reach that ultimate solution is: Why do we need sleep? It’s been on my mind forever and is the cause of my 1 month fiasco in a Triphasic Sleep schedule. I will attempt to write down.

One possibility is that the conscious and unconscious can be explained in terms of Hard Disks and RAM. My theory is that consciousness (RAM) resides in the RAM part of our brain and a copy of it is loaded each morning from the subconscious every morning when we wake up. The information is then sorted and written to the subconscious (or hard disk) when we sleep. Since the amount of information is equal between subconscious and conscious, we need sleep to “write” to the subconscious.

It makes sense because the sleep state shuts down the need to be conscious so that the brain can take advantage of the extra space in “RAM” space to do the sorting and linking before comiting the “write” to the “hard disks”. In computers, if RAM and Hard disk have the same size, then it’s most efficient to perform the copy this way. It would explain why the last information we try to learn at night is usually reconstructed best the next day and also explains why we are sharpest in the morning. The dream state can store the most recent information directly to the “hard disk” to free up “RAM” space since they suffered the least distortion. Then use this space to sort and make sense of the rest of the day as it traverses the informations backward in time to the morning. Since this sorting and making sense happens in the part that are usually associated with consciousness, we experience dreams.

This will mean that the brain needs two different type of matters. One specialized in long term storage with one write per day and numerous read and another temporary state that’s good at fast operations and communications, but requires daily recharge. No problem, it’s been long known that we have both Grey and White matter in the brain. One for “hard disk” (Subconscious) and the other for “RAM” (Conscious).

The above mentioned theory is mine and mine alone. It is how I, as an engineer, would go about designing a brain with the hard constrain that the size of memory has to remain the same all throughout life.