Brain Waves are Snoring Neurons

I posted my theory about why we sleep and dream here. Here's a summary:

My theory is that sleep occurs because neurons need to dump their waste products and they are unable to process information properly while they are doing so. Rather than an average of 25% of your neurons being in "dumping waste products" phase throughout a 24-hour period, it makes more sense for them to synchronize this activity and do it all at once during a time where they are least needed - at night. Dreams are simply thoughts that occur when a subset of your brain wakes up and the rest is still asleep. As neurons dump their waste products, the probabality of greater numbers of neurons waking up approaches one, and eventually your whole brain "wakes up".

Here is my follow-up theory about brainwaves:

When a neuron is awake and processing information properly, it emits a train of electrical signals that have meaning and are used as inputs by other neurons. When a neuron goes to sleep, it's important that its signals are ignored since they no longer carry meaning. 

One solution would be that a neuron just stops outputting signals. However, because of its construction, a neuron cannot go silent; it's designed to *always* emit something. Given this constraint, another solution is for it to emit a steady stream of signals at a constant frequency (which does not naturally happen during waking hours). Other neurons would simply ignore all inputs that are at this constant frequency and only process those with non-constant firing patterns.

However, if a neuron receives inputs from thousands of other neurons that are all sleeping and firing at a constant frequency, it's hard for the signals to be ignored if they are arriving in different phases. It's much simpler to ignore inputs if they're all synchronized. So neurons that go to sleep fire at the same constant frequency as the inputs they're receiving from other neurons that are already asleep.

To summarize:

1. Sleeping neurons emit a steady stream of pulses to indicate they're sleeping

2. Sleeping neurons synchronize their pulses with other sleeping neurons

3. The result of (1) and (2) is a "brainwave" of pulsing signals

4. Awake neurons ignore signals that are synchronized with the background "brainwave"

If my theory is right, "brainwaves" are essentially just the sound of neurons "snoring" in synchrony.

Comments

[Downes]

> Sleeping neurons synchronize their pulses with other sleeping neurons

Now connect this idea to that of the 'Boltzmann Machine'.