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Drug Reverses Effects of Sleep Deprivation
Ryan O'Rourke writes "According to a study led by Dr. Sam A. Deadwyler and published by the Public Library of Science Biology, a new drug called CX717 developed by Cortex Pharmaceuticals has been shown to reverse the biological and behavioral effects of sleep deprivation. Tests performed on monkeys that were subjected to 30-36 hours of sleep deprivation revealed an average test performance accuracy drop to 63 percent, but that performance was restored to 84 percent after administering CX717. During normal alert conditions, performance accuracy of the animals was improved from an average of 75 percent to 90 percent after an injection of CX717. It is also believed the drug may help prevent or restore memory loss in Alzheimer's patients."
but People do need REM sleep on a regular basis for our conscience to rest.
Though I am sure there are many coders who would try it for a week to get that project done(aka MSFT forcing it on longhorn developers?)
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The military is going to love this.
Expect Cortex's IP to be bought the us mil any second now.
Of course the real fun will be when they discover that taking this for months and sleeping 1 hour a night, you go insane and think your a humming bee.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
There have been studies that suggest sleep is simply a method for the brain to purge itself of "weak memories" (basically clean up the clutter) rather than rebuilding muscles/organs as you suggest. Has anybody else read these studies? I wish I had a link for the one I read. I'll look for it.
bluespaceradio.com - New Wave, Indie and Alternative
I was just thinking this morning as I punched in the old door combination for the hundredth time that it would be nice if that memory vanished a bit more quickly.
Your brain already does a pretty good job at figuring out what memories should be stored strongly and which ones should be left to fade away. It's almost certainly possible to override that mechanism, but you'll probably end up with incredibly vivid memories of things that aren't very relevant.
Imagine if I popped these pills before studying for organic chemistry in college. Now I'd be having flashbacks of acid/base interactions and other useless trivia while I try to go about my daily job.
I don't know, in the past, I have found that I have a much smaller risk of being of eaten while I am awake and activly defending myself. Unless of course you kickbox in your sleep...
Some of us are jealous of the relative ease with which the rest of you fall asleep. (The absolute worst is sharing a hotel room after a long trip, where your traveling companion falls asleep right away, but you don't fall asleep for hours) I'd be happy to at least feel as awake as most people seem. The only time I feel that way is when I can sleep in on the weekends. It's mostly just depressing that I can't be that alert the rest of the week -- you know, when it matters most.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
ha ha...no kidding...my last semester of school we had a huge project where we were working in a lab we could only use at night. Classes, of course, were still during the day, so sleep was something like 9:00-11:00 MWF and 10:30-1:30 TTH. Not a great schedule, but what can you do. Well, about 4 weeks into this (just before exams) I left the lab one morning feeling quite ill. Woke up 4 hours later on the floor of my bathroom. Don't even remember getting home, but from what my friends tell me I was talking about a chipmunk and kept swerving the car. From that point on we decided that it might be good to get a little sleep. Sure enough, 8 hours of solid sleep later I felt like a million. At that point, I think I would have taken something like this gladly, but really...if you're getting that broken, suppressing the symptoms CAN'T be a good idea.
...no two people are not on fire.
My favorite oddball drugs that are heavily advertised are the "prevents that uncomfortable full feeling" and "cures fullness".
We literally live in a time when being full is considered a major problem worthy of heavy advertising to a large chunk of the human population. Consider the fact that the majority of human history is full of people fighting not to starve to death... and now we're worried about being uncomfortably full.
You can look at that with either bitter sarcasm or wonder at the accomplishments of humanity -- I rotate back and forth. But either way, it's durn funny.
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
It worked for me.
I went for a week where I didn't allow myself to stay on the computer later than 10:00PM because of a severely distorted sleeping schedule, and by the end of the week, I had my schedule back to a very sane 11PM-8AM (I'm a teenager, so that might even be a little on the light side compared to some others, haha.) and I felt considerably more alert, as well as just feeling more healthy.
I doubt this drug will become a sleep replacement for the average man, but I can see it being used to help at critical times, such as having an emergency amount of it on-board a space shuttle in the event of a prolonged emergency where maximum alertness is necesary or similar scenarios.
I wouldn't mind having a few doses of this, though, for LAN parties. While everyone else is struggling to drag their mouse across their mousepad, I'll still be zipping around, even long after the Bawls run out.
If this drug eliminates the desire for sleep but not a physical requirement, it provides a test for the theory. See if people fall over dead after not sleeping for a while.
Is CX717 an American drug companies marketing name for Meth. American drug companies are missing out on some major bucks not being able to market Meth. If they can give it a new name, have the Bush administration give them a green light in the name of free enterprise I'm sure it will be fine to start selling it over the counter or maybe at worst with an easy to acquire prescription. After all the government lets them sell Oxycontin, often with the drug company's full knowledge its going out the back door on to the steet. It is for all practical purpose legalized narcotics.
@de_machina
There is an extremely rare disease (less that 100 people in the world) that is hereditary that makes it impossible for someone to sleep. However, when the onset of this system appears they ALWAYS die within a few months. There is no cure and it's 100% terminal. Anyone tells you that they never sleep and keep going is full of shit.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
"The body tell us its tired for a reason - it needs good healthy sleep, in order to keep you all in check."
I've often thought about why we still have certain primal signals.
Pain from obvious sources, for instance.
I skinned my knee. I know I skinned my knee. I can see it. I'm looking right at it. I just cleaned the darn thing. Yet it still smarts like hell.
Why can't I turn off the darn pain receptors?
Why, as a (okay, this next bit is questionable, but just go with it) intelligent being can't I just acknowledge those signals, and snooze them or something?
I know. It hurts. Leave me alone until I get to the hospital.
I know, I'm exhausted. Let me get to a bed without falling over.
I know, I get the picture, send the right chemicals to the right places until I get the right treatment, but until then, just leave me alone!
My knee tells me it hurts for a reason: it needs attention so it won't get infection.
Broken bones hurt so they will get mended.
Neither one know they've been fixed once they've been tended to, so they continue to complain.
"The body tell us its tired for a reason - it needs good healthy sleep, in order to keep you all in check."
If this drug can keep us from actually needing to sleep, then it's just like my knee. I don't really need to sleep, but nobody's actually informed my body yet.
/sig
If I could work one 40 hour shift a week, and have the rest of the week off, I'd be thrilled. Even more so if science finds a way to reduce my weekly sleep time without negative health consequences.
I forget the name of it- But one of the "street drugs" (Maybe Ketamine?) that used to be used by bodybuilders supposidly (sp) allows you to feel rested fully with a few hours of sleep a night
Do NOT take Ketamine as an aid to health! *LOL*
GHB will send you to sleep when you ordinarily wouldn't and do so in a natural (loose definition of the word) way. And when it wears off, you'll be very fine and refreshed. Taking it before bed so you can concentrate the night's sleep into a couple of hours, isn't going to work however.
GHB is considerably less harmful to you than many patented drugs (including some over the counter drugs), but was made illegal in the US and the EU. As you have natural GHB in your brain, being attached to your head can now count as possession.
The criminalization of GHB was a dubious process, with indications that big pharmaceuticals had a hand in the process. More information on the history of this here.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
People need to sleep for various reasons (rest, various chemicals get regenerated, etc).
From what I understand, there's not a clear consensus on why we need sleep. I mean, it does a number of things, and we've figured many of them out, but as far as biology goes none of them seems to be a deal-breaker. I can easily imagine a large mammal that just walks around eating and doing stuff all day. Why is it that we spend a third of our lives in this comatose state?
I mean, it's pretty much taken for granted, but when I stop to think about it, it seems pretty damn weird. Imagine an alien that shows up and we say "we need to go, gotta sleep" and they say "why?" and we say "uhhhh, to recharge." "I thought you ate food for energy." "yeah, it's for . . . maintanence?" "what kind?" "not sure. it's just this powerful compulsion." "what are the leading theories? you mean you aren't even sure why you do this every night?" "zzzzzzz."
Just something interesting that I've given a lot of thought to, especially since I started working unpredicatble night shifts. I wonder if every major mammal needs sleep because we evolved with a light/dark cycle, or if it's just something that it's impossible to construct a complex brain without.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
She would take Melatonin which is aparently a "natural" chemical in the body that is released to make it sleep. I convinced her to stop drinking tea after 3pm. She now has no problems sleeping, and has no need for the pills.
You may want to try exercise and smoking a lot of weed. The exercise will help you get tired, and also burn off all of the fat you will absorb when you order pizza every night after smoking up. It is sure to knock you out, but then again I've never had an insomnia problem. So take my advice for what it is.
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
It may simply be essential for the body to rest, peridocly. When you sleep you don't move very much, of course, your heart rate, breating and such go way down. Your organs fall in to a low activity state, you use less energy, etc.
Well it may be as simple as that if you go all the time, things start to wear out. There is some justification for this in injuries. If you keep working the thing that is injured, it won't heal, if however you allow it to rest, your body will fix itself. Well some things, like our heart, can't ever really rest as in do nothing, so perhaps sleep is the next best thing, a perodic low state where essential organs can rest.
I'm having a hard time believing the following can be true:
1. This doesn't get you high, even if taken at higher doses, like cough medicine.
2. It does't get you high if you combine it with other legal or prescription substances.
3. It's not addictive.
One of the above is probably false. And that's bad. I give it two weeks before the first college kid goes on a 3 day binge the weekend before midterms, and pops 5x the reccomended dosage at 6am Monday morning, with a BAC still over the legal limit where it's been since Thursday.
Granted these could be very useful and I would probably want to use them myself, but people are idiots, and this is going to harm or kill them, I guarantee it. I'm not anti-drug, I believe what you do with your own body is your own business and what I do with mine is mine (if only a single government on the planet agreed). But in the world we live in, this isn't going to fly. There'll be lawsuits all over the place.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
He's talking about not sleeping at all, or an hour or two a night. A lot of insomnia is in your head. He just might need that little something to relax and forget about not being able to sleep.
Not trying something because it's not perfect is a sure way to fail. Alcohol changes the mood, relieves tension, and can make some people very sleepy. The stimulant effect is overrated, about like eating ice cream before bed.
Self-hypnosis also can work, and as far as I know it's free of side effects.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
You're missing the fact that herbivores sleep a lot less than carnivores or omnivores, simply because they need longer feeding hours to maintain an adequate nutritional intake.
:)
The larger mammals tend to be herbivores simply because carnivores require a huge prey population for a stable population (eg. to support a pack of 20 breeding wolves, you might require a group of 200 breeding caribou). Once large carnivores get over a certain size they couldn't effectively form a stable breeding population because they would require a huge stable prey population to sustain them. This counts against them in terms of evolutionary success.
Because of this quirk, our larger mammals are almost invariably herbivores, and this complicates the issue of sleep.
To get a clearer idea, it would be better to separate herbivores from carnivores/omnivores, and plot body size versus sleep requirements for both.
It could be that the trend still holds, and the analysis has probably already been done, but you should be careful not to forget that there are many other complicating factors which influence sleep patterns, including predator patterns, environment and feeding types
Talking Back to Ritalin
Ritalin-Free Kids
No More Ritalin
The Myth of the A.D.D. Child
(some of the selections from an Amazon.com search on the word "ritalin".)
In the case of ritalin and similar drugs intended to curb hyperactivity, especially in children, I would say, both anecdotally and as the result of doing a college freshman-level research paper, that while I'm very certain that it's been overprescribed and abused (I am not a doctor, but I do not think that a single half-hour session of observing a child is sufficient to label them hyperactive) that there are those cases where it is appropriate to treat hyperactivity and attention problems that don't respond to other methods.
I don't think that Ritalin is an appropriate substitute for parental and teacher time, attention, training, and exercise to run the wiggles out before sitting down to learn. If I, as an aunt, can get my six-year-old nephew to sit still and behave himself for the entirety of a three hour college lecture on a weekly basis (ten minute breaks in between sessions, during which there were bathroom visits and an opportunity to tear around like a mad thing) and the first grade teacher cannot get the same child to hold still in class, that speaks more of a too-large class size, not enough individualized attention, not enough opportunity to burn all that youthful energy on physical activity, and a behavioural problem with listening to the teacher, rather than a medical condition.
I can see using a focus-enhancing drug to prove to a kid that yes, you can too sit still and learn in class, and this is what it feels like -- and now you are going to learn to do the same thing without the pill. One of my camp buddies was on Ritalin, and he was much more focused on the drug, but much more personable and interesting to be around when unmedicated.
Similarly, I do not think that this new sleep-deprivation drug is going to in any way replace the actual sleep. It will be used and abused, and people are going to make an unholy fuss over it, but I think in the long run, people who use it wisely or people who just go with natural sleep are going to be ultimately more productive and pleasant to work with. The article does not mention side effects. There's no guarantee that people on this are going to be any more pleasant to work with while alert and sleep-deprived on this rather than on coffee. It didn't mention how much sleep someone requires after using this; it could well be something where people feel alarmingly hung-over after using unless they've gotten a solid ten to twelve hours of sleep. It doesn't mention effectiveness as a morning caffeine substitute.
The one brilliant application that does spring to mind is actually for resetting a funky biological clock: for jetlag and schedule-based insomnia. If this provides alertness without some of the harsh effects of caffeine, I would definitely apply it for myself on those days when I have to work mornings and start burning out around 3 pm. (I usually work afternoons and evenings, so my scheduled bedtime is somewhere upwards