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Got Sleep?
Whispers_in_the_dark writes "ABC News is running a story about how the U.S. Military is striving to find methods to allow soldiers to skip sleep without the ill effects associated with that sort of activity. Probably would have useful applications for computer folk too..."
When is someone gonna get around to inventing good old Napcaps from sci-fi. AFAIK REM sleep, when the brain switches to alpha waves is the most benificil, so a device that stimulates alpha waves would offer more value out of less sleep.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Don't allowing people to dream.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Methods already exist, without drugs.
Note that it's not without sleep altogether -- anyone see Jacob's Ladder ? Of course, they don't mention what a cursory search would turn up:
Polyphasic sleep
The 'Uberman Sleep Schedule'
Apparently Buckminster Fuller and Thomas Jefferson practiced variants of this, getting as little as three to four hours per 24-hour period.
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Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
... Is anybody else as worried about an approaching time when we don't need those 8 hours of sleep a night, and can just pop a refreshing pill instead? True, it would be nice to have those extra 8 hours a day for other stuff, but it's going to make for quite a change in society if we're suddenly awake all the time! I'm imaging 16 hour work days...
Illegitimi non Carborundum.
While the article mentions research on humans who exist on little sleep and manage to function normally, they are also looking at the animal kingdom. I think this can only go so far, as the animals they are looking at are missing something humans have: consciousness. Your mind, your consciousness is a very delicate thing and messing around with something as basic as sleeping is a very dangerous thing.
Psychologists and neurologists still aren't sure what happens during sleep, but sleep deprivation is generally very bad for people - which is why it's used as a torture. I've been trying to find the name of the man who set the record for going without sleep - he was a radio DJ who decided to set the record as a sponsored charity event. After about five days without sleep he ended up with a personality disorder.
About two hours of delta wave 'deep sleep' and some more REM dream sleep seems to be necessary for people to stay sane and able to concentrate while they're awake. If you deprive rats of dream sleep for a couple of days (letting them have delta sleep as normal) then let them have uninterrupted sleep, they tend to 'catch up' with far more REM sleep than normal, which would generally indicate REM sleep is doing more than just playing pretty movies to our minds while we wait for it to get light outside.
Whether you can knock a few hours off a 7-8 hour sleep schedule and take naps during the day and lead a normal life is one thing, stopping sleep for days or weeks at a time is quite another. Only very long term studies will be able to show whether people get side effects from whatever drug they come up with, so even if they come up with something for military use, it'll probably be best to avoid it if it becomes commercially available. It's all very well to think it's great because you can code all night, but really, do you want to take years off your life or damage your personality for a bit of short-term gain now?
Paul
"What if they're using IE?" "I've dumbed Mozilla down to cope with it." - BOFH
Yes, that's right... as computer folk we don't deserve sleep, or time to ones self, or anything that resembles an enjoyable life.
Makes sense.
The Generation
I'd say something witty here, but I'm not that bright.
I absolutely agree. If I were in a foxhole, I'd want this.
Well, if you're in a foxhole, you won't need it. Combat is way too stressful for people to just suddenly fall asleep. The real problem on the battlefield is the prolonged stress which causes lapses in judgement and concentration.
The other angle here you should think about is that most people in the military aren't 100% combat oriented. Like civilian life, the military needs a LOT of services that are not directly combat related in order to function. Examples: transportation (air, land, and sea), food/water supply, quartermastering. Those are the people who really feel the staff shortages and these are the people they'll drug first in order to get more work per day out of a single person. I personally feel sorry for the poor bastard who is forced to go on a sleepless regimen with the help of drugs just to cover a personnel shortage.
Make no mistake about it: this isn't just designed to give us a combat edge; it's designed to help keep the military functional and efficient in the presence of limited funding. But let's not talk about all the medical bills we as taxpayers are going to be paying to compensate the individuals we brain damage in the name of efficiency.
Criminy people.. start reading between the lines, will ya?!
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Be careful with Modafinil. It can induce mania or paranoia. I took it regularly for a month or so but stopped after the third time I went manic.
So probably sleep is due to a very simple requirement. The theory is that brains simply use more energy than the blood can deliver to them. Sleep is needed to store energy for the next day's use.
When the brain starts running out of energy, those cells which run out of power start malfunctioning. That's why hallucinations, usually starting with flickers in the field of vision, are common (the periphery of the eye is wired to detect movement, so bad signals often get interpreted as motion, which the rest of the brain ascribes due to small things which ran out of sight before they could be examined in detail, thus the impression is of insects or spiders). Totally running out of energy is a bad thing, so the occasional death due to sleep deprivation is not surprising.
Sugared caffeine seems like a reasonable way to stay awake longer, although a more precise mixture of nutrients would work better. However, sleep is necessary unless somehow a lot more nutrition can be delivered than now is.
It does seem that advanced brains are doing some maintenance during sleep. As others have noted, the obvious example is that sleep has some effects on long-term memory -- although sleep does not force storage of all memories, such as trauma victims who won't remember details of an event when they next sleep.