Sleep also plays a part in synaptic conditioning -- it's when the brain prunes itself by separating signal from noise...
"Sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health believe it is more evidence for their theory of 'synaptic homeostasis.' This is the idea that synapses grow stronger when we're awake as we learn and adapt to an ever-changing the environment, that sleep refreshes the brain by bringing synapses back to a lower level of strength. This is important because larger synapses consume a lot of energy, occupy more space and require more supplies, including the proteins examined in this study."
"Sleep — by allowing synaptic downscaling — saves energy, space and material, and clears away unnecessary 'noise' from the previous day, the researchers believe. The fresh brain is then ready to learn again in the morning" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.ht...).
these two things are not comparable- computers tend to reboot due to 'cosmic rays', cruft left behind by poorly written applications, or, more commonly, nvidia drivers.
my brain goes down to sleep at night to commit and file my memories of the day, for area's to be selectively cleaned, for the brain and body in general to consume less energy and last longer/heal.
I can't hit a reboot button, it's not defrag- it's a complicated required process for living in a human skin.
Some of my dreams would take months of planning, the best modelers/animators in the world, million dollar render farms and even that would pale in comparison. But to play the boring computer analogy, I'd say all brains are on a virtual P2P network sharing centralized cloud storage (various permissions/ownership) and sleep would include customized patches from a master repo.
My point is that its incredibly inefficient and bringing it up in an article about sleep seems like typical New Age evangelism to me. While there are certainly some benefits to it, its nothing like taking a nap.
Test it for yourself. Sit comortably but with good posture, close your eyes and bring your brain to a neutral place.
Let whatever thoughts pop up pop up, acknowledge them, then let them go and return to neutral.
I find that this practice makes my brain feel cleaner and less burdened, like when you turn to a child that had been saying "mommy, mommy, mommy..." and ask them what they need.
Basically inbox zero for your brain.
There are many other meditative practices and techniques but I use this one fairly often.
What makes you think that your brain may not be 'poorly written' for supporting 24 hr+ uptime? Think of the brain has having bad garbage collection or a memory leak, so at some point in time you have too much built up memory that needs to either be dumped or written to disk.
"Sleep researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health believe it is more evidence for their theory of 'synaptic homeostasis.' This is the idea that synapses grow stronger when we're awake as we learn and adapt to an ever-changing the environment, that sleep refreshes the brain by bringing synapses back to a lower level of strength. This is important because larger synapses consume a lot of energy, occupy more space and require more supplies, including the proteins examined in this study."
"Sleep — by allowing synaptic downscaling — saves energy, space and material, and clears away unnecessary 'noise' from the previous day, the researchers believe. The fresh brain is then ready to learn again in the morning" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090402143455.ht...).