Slashdot Mirror
Matsushita Designed Sleep Room
wersh writes "Matsushita Electric Works has developed a room that helps people sleep. They've been letting their employees take 30-minute sessions in the room and so far, not one has failed to fall asleep, they claim. They plan to open the sleep room to the public next week and intend to start selling it in June 2005 for 30,000 USD."
Recently, I've been looking into hypnotism, subliminal pursuation, inducing alpha state conciously and lucid dreams.
Although this does seem pretty cool, I have a breif idea of how it works, and just like most things, once you know how it works, it doesn't impress you as much (well, if it's not that hard in the first place).
To me, it looks like it's using hypnotism techniques to make you fall asleep (dimming the lights, making you relax, playing music (if you time the beats right you can change the brain waves into an alpha state)). Anyway, as we know, hypnotists can make people fall asleep in seconds, so making a computer which makes people fall asleep in 30 minutes, I have to admit, doesn't impress me that much. Considering the techniques are very similar
The sleeping gadget which impress me is the NovaDreamer - a device which, when you train yourself, can induce lucid dreams - It detects when your eyes are in REM sleep, and then uses flashes and sounds at the right level to wake you into a lucid state.
For those who don't know what lucid dreams are; they are dreams in which you know you are dreaming, and can therefore control your dream in any way you want - fly, breathe underwater, whatever. There are reports people can predict the future in lucid dreams too, which I really don't know if thats BS or not, we've all had deja vu's, and apparently they are previous dreams we've had. Lucid dreaming deviced would be more impressive to me, but hey.
Anyway, there's my opinion.
I have sleep apnea, and I wonder if they have accomodated for anyone with this disorder? I think a pressurized room might do the trick, but I'm not sure.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Churchill, JFK, Napoleon, Thatcher, Leonardo, Brahms, Edison all (have) partaken in the power nap.
Actually, if you take enough 30 minute naps during a day (usually 30 minutes every 4 hours) you can get away with as little as 3 hours of sleep PER DAY. It's known as polyphasic sleeping, and it tricks the mind into falling into REM sleep very quickly rather than waiting several hours (as when you only sleep in one 8-hour chunk). You even end up getting MORE REM sleep this way.
;)
0
Lots of mammals do it naturally, including us as babies, but we are raised by our parents to stay awake all day and sleep at night.
I tried this a few semesters ago to get through a rough finals week. Works great, you even feel more awake than usual. But you have to have a lot of stuff to do, otherwise you bore yourself to sleep
Anyways, I wish Universities and workplaces would have sleep-rooms and schedules separated in 3.5 hour chunks!!
Link: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/15/103358/72
Have you heard of light and sound machines? They use flashing LEDs and pulsing sounds or binaural beats to induce certain brainwave frequencies through something called the frequency following effect. I can even recall seeing one of these machines on the net that actually used a mild electrical charge pulsing at these frequencies as well.
Another thing you ought to know about lucid dreaming is that text in dreams does not stay constant. While you're dreaming, if you read anything then read it again a second time, it will change. The sleeping mind doesn't have the external stimuli to keep the dream imagery constant.
Psychologists didn't believe that it was possible that people could be conscious while dreaming. However some sleep researchers found out that wherever your eyes are looking at in a dream is where your eyes are facing in REM. They found one subject with a constant pattern in his REM activity- his eyes kept moving from side to side- while he dreamt of watching a Ping-Pong game. Sleep researchers used this to prove lucid dreaming exists. They got subjects to perform a pattern of eye movements when they achieved lucidity while dreaming, which they recorded with polygraphs so they had actual evidence.
I'm curious to know if anyone out there has any experience with enhancing the ability to have lucid dreams. I actually have a NovaDreamer, but the thing just wakes me up. And I'd like to know what these "computerized dream-inducers" mentioned in the article are. Could it be this? I heard that taking the nutritional supplement 5HTP enhances dreaming, but I've never tried it. I've tried Melatonin, but that doesn't seem to affect me.
They use those brand names (technics, panasonic) since their can't be practically spelled, happy japanese spell checking genius! :)
;)
ps: Check my sig