Slashdot Mirror
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..."
Various armies have messed about with amphetamine sulphate and benzedrine before - but I guess speed psychosis wouldn't do much for the number of friendly fire incidents ...
Chris
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."
I cant wait for them to figure this out and make a commercial version for the public... ...my EQ character would ROCK if I could play for a week without sleep! ;)
Grimwell - old, cranky, mean, obsessive
Don't allowing people to dream.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
And the results were NOT positive. Drove 'em crazy, it did. But, they were good soldiers.
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.
========================================
Death will come, and will have your eyes
-- Pavese
Probably would have useful applications for computer folk too...
Yeah, it would be good for soldier folk and computer folk. Too bad it's useless to everyone else.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
just my 2 cents of euro...
*goes back to sleep*
Tsuyoikoto ha taisetsu da ne, dakedo namida mo hitsuyousa (Strength is an important thing, but tears too are necessary)
Do we really want it to?
Do you really want another 8 hours of your life to become that available?
Who gets that time, you or your employer?
For arguement, let's pretend for a moment that the sleep you miss is taken directly off of your lifetime. Use a drug and skip sleep for a year, take 1/3 year off of your life.
Is your employer in a position to demand that you shorten your life in order to meet a schedule?
What's appropriate compensation?
I might not mind not needing to sleep, if the time gained were mine. But somehow I don't think things would work out that way.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Bomber pilots in particular work incredibly long hours to be active just a few minutes here and there -- those trans-polar missions over Afghanistan to Diego Garcia for example.
Re the Gulf War.
I think the military has been careful to play it down, but drug use is a significant factor on a wink-wink basis. The public doesn't want to think too hard about sleep -starved pilots flying planes that might be nuclear-armed.
... 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.
... as well as read more articles about it.
MAC | A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Here is a story on ProVigil, a new drug Cephalon is testing.
http://www.you.com.au/news/1377.htm
Its primary usage is to treat problems arising from a lack of sleep, or drowsiness, provided they arise from a clinical problem and/or the treatment prescribed for it. However, it can also potentially be used to maintain an alert state for a long time, without the jitteriness of caffeine, or drowsiness of plain ol' sleep deprivation.
I wrote to them a while back, asking to try
some, citing the desire to have a "really
productive day."
They wrote back promptly, essentially saying
that such a usage would essentially be
misusage of their product.
GIMMIE GIMMIE! I need it! I've been at work since last night, all through the wee hours listening to talk radio with Art Bell, and I'm getting the shakes here at 11:00 a.m. I'm still have to put in a full days work today and I'm starting to hallucinate!
WTF, what is a cow doing in my cubicle?!
Seriously, this would be a great benefit to use computer nerds/programmers/technicians!
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
You mean I could become a railgun god in a reasonable amount of time? I mean, hey, I'd love to that extra 8 hours a day to practice with!
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
A more recently developed stimulant, modafinil (sold under the name Provigil), was approved by the Federal Drug Administration in 1999 and has been shown to keep people awake and alert for two days straight.
I wonder if I combine this with viagra and extacy if I could fuck for days and still feel good about doing it?
Nyquil = Nectar of the devil
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 take Provigil for EDS (Excessive Daytime Sleepyness), which it has been a remakable help for me. I haven't tried taking it at night or using it other than how it is perscribed, but if it can keep me awake through the afternoon without having to crawl under my desk and sleep, then I'd imagine it's pretty effective to avoid sleeping at night as well. The nice thing about Provigil is it doesn't seem to have a down side following the alertness.. It's just like you put off the drowsyness for a few hours, so I'm usually feeling at 7:00pm what I normally feel at about 2:00pm, not more tired (or in a sleep debt) as you'd expect with normal stimulants. The bad thing is the stuff is about $350 a bottle; over $10 per pill! But it's either take it and work full salary time at a nice office, or stop taking it and probably get fired for sleeping at work. =D
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
This doesn't make any sense to me -- why not just DRINK COFFEE, like the rest of the military?
I never drank coffee until I joined the Army, and after that I found out why everyone in the military (that I know) regularly drinks coffee -- because the peace-time military ain't exactly exciting. I've rarely heard of anyone overdosing on coffee (I heard on the radio yesterday a woman OD'd on coffee and died after drinking over 400 cups in a day, but that's extreme), and I've never heard of anyone for whom coffee did not wake them up.
The only disadvantage on watch duty is you have to take a piss more often, but isn't that worth avoiding drug side-effects? I have taken caffeine pills before, and they work, but there are side-effects compared to just drinking coffee.
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.
As a warning, caffeine does have it's drawbacks: you get withdrawel symptoms. If you stop drinking coffee after heavy usage over time, you can get headaches.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?