Defrag

Every once in a while, the New York Times posts an outstanding article on some interesting subject. This time, it's sleep. It appears that one essential purpose of sleep is to defrag memories in similar fashion (not functionally obviously) to how one defrags a disk because when the brain stores information during the day, the data is temporarily "stored" in available space, something computers do all the time as "Computers do not necessarily save an entire file or folder in a single space on a disk; they're saved in the first available space."

As a disk starts to fill up with disjointed memory blocks, the system slows down and starts to generate errors as the computer cannot properly access information when the disk is badly fragmented. This also appears to happen with sleep derived people as well because the brain does not get the time needed to clean up and defrag bits of data that naturally accumulate when one is awake and conducting the normal activities of everyday living. To researchers, the ability to monitor brain functions with unprecedented accuracy while someone is asleep has resulted in some astounding findings:

"Since then the study findings have come almost too fast to digest, and they suggest that the sleeping brain works on learned information the way a change sorter does on coins. It seems first to distill the day’s memories before separating them — vocabulary, historical facts and dimes here; cello scales, jump shots and quarters over there. It then bundles them into readable chunks, at different times of the night. In effect, the stages of sleep seem to be specialized to handle specific types of information..."

"Rust never sleeps" - Neil Young