Talk:1345: Answers

Not true. We know that sleep is important for storing memories and cleaning out toxins. http://www.nih.gov/news/health/oct2013/ninds-17.htm 108.162.222.89 11:06, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

That report is entitled "Brain may flush out toxins during sleep". Note the "may". Add it to the list of hypotheses. Jim E (talk) 15:49, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Stupid personalized jokes and the like in this explanation... 173.245.53.174 11:19, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I'm not sure this is the correct explanation. The paradox of being confronted daily with a mystery and not trying to solve it is inconsistent with the title text. So this explanation doesn't sound right to me. I think it's more about defining humanity as seeking for answers, while spending a huge amount of time closing off from the world for apparently no reason. In other words, IMHO, it's not about "[not being] distracted by this mystery", but about "not being able to investigate any mystery during 1/3 of our life even if we want to".

Also, with my explanation, the original puchline "touché" works better than the the current explanation's suggestion "Which is why it keeps me awake all night". -- Shirluban@108.162.229.36 12:28, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I disagree with the above poster (and agree with the explanation) on the basis of the boldface text... "And nobody knows why". Every human sleeps, so if humans were really curious, someone should have figured out why by now.NikoNarf (talk) 14:23, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree with the original poster. It is interesting how people spend their entire careers studying a life event that they may never experience (consider a man studying the act of giving birth), yet most of us simply take sleep for granted. Now if we could only make sleep more efficient! I think we could spare a couple months worth of study to this. http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1205 Puck0687 (talk) 14:53, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

We could spare quite a lot more than a couple months on this. First, 1205 talks about the benefit over five years, and for us the benefit would be over an entire lifetime. Furthermore, far more people don't study sleep than study it, so the "couple months" you talk about can be multiplied by the total population of people who benefit (both alive today and yet to live), and divided by the population of people studying sleep. That gets you quite a lot more than two months. 108.162.219.11 16:18, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

I've thought for a while that the reason we sleep is primarily due to the accumulation of adenosine in the brain (?) - who really knows... Brettpeirce (talk) 16:02, 21 March 2014 (UTC)