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Drugs Eradicate the Need For Sleep
MattSparkes writes "New Scientist is running an article on lifestyle drugs that claim to help you function on little or no sleep. I'm dubious, but the interviewee in the article claims they work well. 'Yves (not his real name), a 31-year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one.'" But, sleep is where I'm a Viking!
I've always wondered about the need for sleep. For an animal to allow itself to go into an extremely vulnerable state every day for hours it must have a VERY good reason for doing so. The fact that sleep has been passed along in our genes even in the face of natural selection (sorry creationist museum) shows this. I think we've barely penetrated the real reasons for sleep.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
It's reassuring to see that pharmaceutical companies can make a pill to solve every problem, even ones that weren't a real problem before they came up with a pill.
"To die; to sleep; to sleep perchance to dream! Aye, there's the rub. For, in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?"
Give a man a match: warm him for an instant. Douse him in petrol and set him aflame: warm him for the rest of his life.
The concept behind this drug seems akin to that behind painkillers: Eliminate the symptoms, not the problem. Sure, with a sufficient dose of painkillers, I could run while my foot is broken without feeling any ill effects, but that doesn't nullify the damage that would be caused by doing this.
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But the car's going to have autopilot and land automatically. So why do you want to stay awake?
I couldn't agree more. I'm not a sleep scientist but find it alarming how willing people are to submit to the "hey, it works!" credo as if they were putting some new additive in their car's fuel tank.
The problem is:
So how does modafinil work? "No one really knows," admits Vaught.
Of course should this drug turn out to cause major depression later in life I'm sure the pharma world will be waiting with open arms and a handful of prescriptions. It's pitiful how quality of life, savoring being human (yes, damn it, savoring being an absolute loaf for a day or month or year), is so readily sacrificed for the treadmill of modernity.
Work harder, get a bonus, go ski with friends in Aspen! Buy an Audi! Vacation in Bali! You too can have "it" if you peddle just a little harder!!
Pass me a good book and a sunset any day. I used to subscribe to the rat race and am eternally grateful that I learned early on what a farce it is. Sadly this country's economic model is based on the "more, more" mindset and, almost necessarily, popular culture reinforces it at every turn.
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between not feeling sleepy, and not needing sleep.
There is quite fascinating research into this subject actually with old people. Research determined that it's not that they need less sleep in old age, but that they can't sleep more and it is speeding up the consequences of old age.
So even if you don't feel sleepy, you need sleep and the effects would be quite devastating on a medium/long term. The problem with the drug industry is that it's more profitable for them to treat/mask sympthoms than to actually cure something. There are various anti-flu pills for example that only mask the sympthoms, so it will take a month or two to recover from a simple cold instead a week or two.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
It does seem severely evolutionarily disadvantageous, doesn't it? Honest question, for anybody who knows: what is the lowest order of animal life that requires sleep? Eukaryotes don't sleep, do they? Do worm? Jellyfish? Is there some connection between higher-order brain activity and the need to sleep, and does it differ by species?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Have a newborn child. You won't be getting any sleep for a long time.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Some people only need 4-5 hours of sleep a night.
Why is that?
There can be some play in actual sleep requirements. Whereas most people need 8-9 hours of sleep per night, in long term situations, you can "economize" your sleep by appearing to make it more efficient in that latencies to certain periods of sleep may be reduced over time. But like any other economizing you see in life/financials etc...etc...etc... there are tradeoffs. For instance, I typically get about 4-5 hours of sleep per night during the week, but it does catch up with me and I have to once or twice a week get a full nights sleep to recover or there is a price to pay and I suspect that those who claim they only *need* 4-5 hours of sleep per night are doing much the same thing as I am. There are very few people in the world who have been truly documented to maintain lifestyles where they get much less sleep than on average and to remain effective long term, you need your sleep.
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You know what the saddest thing is? Most people will think you're not leading a "normal" life if you don't try and keep up with the joneses. Because not living a 9-to-6 life is considered "not serious". I stepped out of the fucking rat race a few months ago, and I wish I'd done that *years* earlier.
Playing devil's advocate here: And the problem with this is? Isn't it in man's nature to attempt to improve themselves? Assuming the negative impacts are not great, what is wrong with us having an extra limb (don't know the benefits, just for sake of argument)? It's just a natural process of evolution. We look nothing like the creatures we evolved from, but that is because our form is functional for what we do. In the future, this form may not be the most functional (i'd argue it's not right now, but all things take time).
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
An entire third of your life will be spent not doing or experiencing anything.
I tend to work out problems in my sleep. I'm not shitting you.
Besides phisical recovery my believe is that sleep is needed to defragment the brain. If only we had a better file system in our brain!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
The true horror of this drug is that if it does become commonplace and people need less sleep, my bet is that capitalism will adapt itself to this new reality and we will soon be working 14-16 hour days.
Dont believe it? Look what happened as women entered the workplace in larger numbers in the last few decades (of course this is a good thing). As the number of workers increased, the relative incomes fell. When once a single worker could bring in enough money to support himself, his spouse, and his 2.5 kids, now it is almost necessary for both parents to work to be able to make ends meet. Think what it would be like if capitalism hadnt adapted to this influx of workers - each parent could work a 20-hour week and have the same relative income as 50 years ago.
Likewise, as waking time becomes less scarce, those willing and able to work longer hours will get the jobs and steadily raise the bar and the expectations of what's a normal amount to work each week. Maybe they'll get paid more and the increasing wealth will cause the cost of goods and services to rise, which increases the need for working the longer hours.
IANAE (I am not an Economist) so I'm probably wrong on some details, but this seems like a likely general trend, IMHO.
Hmm.. well I think what the GP was asking was more specific to REM sleep. Perhaps what we call "sleep" is really a collection of different processes that serve different purposes (I'm guessing that's already been shown). You've already talked about processing long-term memories. Do we know how low this aspect of sleep goes down into organism complexity? I know dogs dream.. how about birds or reptiles?
Also, what else occurs during sleep to the rest of the body (other than the brain). Is there some greater immune response? Re-charging of different systems? If people didn't sleep and just took this pill to make their minds FELT like they slept, would people be more prone to illness, disease, etc?
AccountKiller
I tend to agree with you. However I find the same phenomenon occurs for me when I'm playing with my kids, playing Everquest, and reading articles that aren't in my field.
If it's artificially interfering with a normal function of life and it's not involved in preventing a life threatening disease, it's just a bad idea.
I think that's a too broad standard. Wisdom teeth are a "normal" part of human development and are not life threatening, but virtually everyone gets theirs removed. And I'm sure the slashdot group think would not care to apply your standard to the question of abortion.
I am concerned about long term effects of drugs such as modafinil, but I can't help but wish it was available OTC. Sleep is the thief that steals away my life; we lose a quarter to a third of our lifespan irrevocably, something I find truly frustrating.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
But sleep is nice.
\n.\n
"Ethical" discussions tend to take the ironic form of, "Hey, stop doing that. I get to say how you live."
We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
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You need to be awake during the times when things you like to eat are available. If you can't efficiently find them at night, you're better off sleeping at that time. While you may be vulnerable, the threat isn't too extreme based on the number of people who managed to survive sleeping in the past. Do you sleep at home, or do you figure that's what the predators expect you to do? Anyone could be the victim of a home invasion robbery, but very few people sit in the dark at home with a gun waiting for the predator to strike.
The problem is that you are messing with biology without even considering potential negative consequences. There is no magic bullet in medicine. What if, instead of living to be 100, with this no-sleep pill, you die at 50 instead? Would you still think it is worthwhile?
civilization has allowed people with weaker traits to survive and procreate, propegating the weak trait... rather than being eaten by the dinosaurs they coexisted with (yippee creationist museum)
Speaking out of my ass, since I'm no biologist, it seems that while all higher life forms sleep, the amount they sleep is strongly correlated with how often they eat, how long it takes to digest their primary food source (meat vs. grasses vs. sugary stuff) and how much food is available in their environment.
I did 8 days awake once (with nothing stronger than moderate quantities of Red Bull, a little booze, some really nice fried breakfasts and cups of tea, and a lot of distraction, parties, and sheer bloody-minded determination).
It was a sort of experiment; I was the control, and a friend was the "experiment", who did the same 8 days awake, but "aided" by dropping a 100mg-150mg pill of methylenedioxymethamphetamine phosphate (pretty good ecstasy) every time the previous pill wore off (and, of course, remaining appropriately hydrated - I don't remember how many he got through, but it was definitely over 50 in total, and looking back, I find it amazing he didn't die - by the end, they weren't having any effect except monging him out and despite frankly loving the drug, he couldn't bear touching it for the next 6 months afterwards - "too much of a good thing").
Of the two of us, I think I actually got the weirder experience. Sleep deprivation is fucked up.
I could feel myself lapse slightly after a couple of days, and really didn't know what day it was after about 2 and a half. 3 days in, I swear the rabbits that were native to the university campus (for where else do you conduct such crazy experiments?) were plotting against me.
I've done drugs since then, and I would really equate sleep deprivation to magic mushrooms in terms of the sheer depth of hallucinations - we're talking some deeply weird, very convincing stuff here. Fortunately I've always been aware that I was hallucinating because I had a pretty good idea what I was getting into - so it didn't actually turn my mind into slushie (permanently).
I needed about 1 and a half days' sleep afterwards, by the way, and woke up pretty groggy but triumphant, ate a little, played a few games to wind down again, went back to sleep for another half day, then I was pretty much back to normal.
(Posting anonymously, for obvious reasons, but this really happened (in 2001). I am not as insane as I used to be, but, as many do, had a wild experimental phase in university. Do not try this at home. You might die.)
In my own musings, I'd figured sleep was just an energy-saving mode (yes, we are all computers). When we sleep, our body temperature lowers and we're not running around at a relatively unproductive time of the day. Especially when no food is available, a power-saving mode would be a great advantage in waiting out the bad circumstances (think hibernation, listlessness in famines, or siestas b/c it's too hot to work). If you look at reptiles as always being in low-power (cold-blooded) mode, the increased sleep trade-off for mammals and birds seems reasonable.
Of course, you don't need to be asleep to lower your body temperature and save energy. All you need to do is turn down the heat and sit down.
Sleep is a bit more than that. The problem is it's still not well understood. But in REM sleep, your mind is actually incredibly active, not passive or at rest. What it's actually doing and why is what we don't really know yet. What we do know is that people who go for just a few days without sleep often undergo profound, permanent personality changes (and those who go for more than a couple weeks or so without sleep die). There was a famous radio DJ in the 1950's that went without sleep for several days on air - by about the 4th day, he reportedly was seeing spiders everywhere and was babbling pretty much incoherently. His family and friends reported that he was never the same again, and he lost his job and faded into obscurity shortly afterwards.
I'm no scientist, and for all I know these new drugs could prove to work just fine. But from what I do know about sleep, I'm pretty skeptical of the long-term effects of taking these drugs. There is obviously something necessary about sleep that regulates our personalities, maintains our memory and keeps us from literally going nuts - and also that keeps us alive. As we still haven't identified exactly what the mechanism is that does that, I don't really see how all of that could be boiled down into pill form. We've taken an unknown and claimed to have replicated it. Something is missing here.
My sense is these drugs just cover up the symptoms of sleep deprivation, but the effects are nevertheless still there and are cumulative.
I have been studying dreams for a couple of years now, and for me sleep is vital. I record my dreams after I wake up and use their symbolism to better understand what my unconscious is trying to help me understand. I believe that the unconscious mind uses dreams to send messages to the conscious mind to help humans become more successful and live longer.
If that were removed I can imagine our psychology would find another way to send messages to the conscious mind while we were awake, which might me much more dangerous and stressful on our biology.
This drug really sounds pretty dangerous if someone were to use for extended periods of time.
With all the sleep issues starting to come to the front of medical science lately, it's amazing ANYBODY is allowed to publish this research! OF course, look at how the "professionals" in medicine run their lives... you'd think DOCTORS would also focus on getting proper nutrition, sleep, exercise to improve themselves during internships and such...yet they are famous for 36-48 hour shifts with minimal sleep!!! Sleep researches have a steady stream of third shifters in their clinics... right about the time they start having serious physical issues like heart trouble, and anxiety attacks... due to the messed up sleep cycles. OUR 24x7 society doesn't work... it breaks tons of people. You'd think for being SMART beings we'd work WITH our biological necessities to be productive, not AGAINST them.