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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!
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. Myself, I only need four to six hours a night and I can function well. I actually natrually wake up after six hours even without an alarm clock. I've always been that way. If I really need to puch myself I can get by with two hours sleep. This is perfectly natural. Back in the 90s I read a book on sleep and it stated that most humans need the typical eight hours of sleep. It also revealed that in a few sleep studies where the subjects are kept from knowing the real time or seeing any cues (daylight), that they tended to sleep more on the order of 10 hours a night with their sleep cycle drifting an hour later each day (ie. they would go to sleep an hour later each day without realizing it). But, they did concede that every human is different and there indeed people who don't need much sleep and others who actualy need a lot more sleep than is culturally possible (13-15 hours a day) to be at their best. Sadly, humans are WAY too flexible in their traits which means that there is no "one size fits all" approach. In the case of this drug however, I'd say that it will be revealed eventually just how detrimental it's effects are while simultaneously being denied by the pharmaceutical companies that produce it.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Not that I necessarily agree with this, but Carl Sagan hypothesized in Dragons of Eden that mammals were originally nocturnal, and evolved sleep so as to be still (and thus more difficult to spot) during the day when the reptiles (which dominated all niches when mammals first evolved) were active.
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
REM sleep can't be necessary for memory consolidation, because monoamine oxidase inhibitors eliminate REM sleep, but not not impair memory even if used for a long time. Furthermore, this is a there is a case of brain injury which eliminated REM sleep but did not impair memory. http://www.npi.ucla.edu/sleepresearch/science/1058 full.html
In fact, there are animals that don't appear to sleep, but actually do (dolphins, for example). What they do is sleep half their body and brain at a time. So there's obviously some benefit, as they've evolved the necessity to remain awake, but still get the sleep they need. (Unless it really happens to be some anomaly of evolution (another strike against creationism), like the appendix or spleen, that affects basically the entire population of living creatures). But I would think the dolphins proved otherwise, since they'd be the first to do away completely with sleep.
But a concern is still the long term side effects. By playing with stuff like this, would it lead to mental insanity later on due to paranoia or schizophrenia? We are, after all, playing with the mental state of mind (I'm sure tired muscles still remain tired even after popping the pills, even though the brain says it's fresh). The fact that the miliary trials concluded that it's only useful to about 48 hours wakefulness seems to imply that it doesn't reduce the need for sleep, just reduces the feelings of the need for sleep/sleepiness. We may end up with a population of zombies in a decade or two's time.
Anyhow, when did pill-popping become fashionable? I fear the day where it's "uncool" to not stick some drug in you as part of your daily routine in order to get through the day (as opposed to treating disease). Or the "there's a drug for everything" mentality.
Actually, you *are* a eukaryote and most of us posting here on Slashdot are with the exception of those that have foed me I suspect. :-)
Seriously though, worms, jellyfish and other "lower" invertebrates do exhibit periods of inactivity as do even prokaryotes such as bacteria. This period of "inactivity" is often crucial for normal physiological processes to occur. The important thing to note here is that through evolution, "higher" organisms appear to have accumulated a number of circadian clocks related to a variety of physiological functions and the "higher" up an organism is, the more clocks for various functions are accumulated.
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But other studies have indicated increased performance in those subjects allowed REM sleep versus those subjects who have been selectively deprived of REM sleep. Other studies still have shown a reduction (higher efficiency) in brain metabolism in those subjects performing tasks who have been allowed REM sleep versus those other subjects who have been selectively sleep deprived. I am on a very narrow connection here and out of time for posting for now or I would find those references for you. But a simple Medline search should bring them up.
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My brother-in-law, in trying to cultivate his superman status, claims that he only needs 4-5 hours of sleep per night. But everyone who knows him knows that he goes into a semi-comatose state for 24 hours once per week. No real savings there:
6 nights x 4.5 hours = 27 hours
1 days x 24 hours = 24 hours
Total = 51 hours/week
51 hours/7 days = 7.29 hours per day (just like the rest of us)
So this pill will surely have some side-effects, and some of them will likely be negative. Fine.
Now think about the value of your time. You get ~100 years here on Earth and that's all. You are wired to spend about a third of that time unconscious. An entire third of your life will be spent not doing or experiencing anything.
How much effort do you expend just to shave ten minutes off your commute? Or to save three minutes standing in line?
What, then, would 33 extra years be worth?
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
The appendix and spleen are NOT vestigial organs. While you can survive without them, your immune system is stronger if you keep them.
You can survive without your right arm, therefore it's vestigial, correct?
Statements like that (e.g., the appendix and spleen do not perform necessary functions) make evolutionists look stupid. Please research physiology before you try to prove evolution with misguided "facts."
This reminds me of the time I tried to stay awake for as long as I could. I hit 93 hours or so. Note that this incident did not involve any drugs. Legal or otherwise.
:-)
I was still fairly young then, at the age of 14 or so. I was out with friends on the final night of my experiment and I started to see things and totally freaked out. One of the hallucinations was indeed a miniature pink elephant. As well I thought a tree was a very large spider. I have a terrible fear of spiders. After my friends managed to get me into the house and calmed me down, I suddenly got up and went out into the back yard to jump on the trampoline. It was -10 degree's Celsius or so and I was just wearing Jeans and a T-Shirt. I couldn't tell the difference. All I remember is having them waking me up and having to be rushed to the hospital. I was jumping on the trampoline and slipped. I flew off and cracked my head on a mound of ice. I'm just glad one of the springs didn't break or on the trampoline and hit me in the ass or something. It was fairly cold.
I stayed in the hospital for the night as the thought I may have had a concussion. I still don't remember any of that week. What I told you now is what my friends have told me. I also heard that earlier on in my experiment [first 24 hours I suppose] I had exclaimed to my friends that my toothpaste had started talking to me the next day at school.
Now I enjoy my sleep.
Pills? No thanks. I prefer the natural method of recovering from a hard days work writing code.
I've wondered about it too, and then I got to wondering just how vulnerable a sleeping animal is. If you're about and about, you're making noise, being visible, creating a scent trail. If you're well hidden, such as in an underground den, you can pretty much go unmolested by any animal that might try to eat you. If an animal tries to dig you out, you have plenty of advance warning. Consider how many animals hibernate during the winter. For a prey animal, being out and about is the vulnerable period.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
In support of the nocturnal mammal evolution theory, our vision system has only three colors whereas most non-mammals have four. Birds that appear dull grey are sometimes brightly colored to others of their speices, because of their superior color vision. Losing a color, however, makes more room for light sensitive, b&w sensing rods.
With respect to the risks of sleep -- perhaps. It may be that specializing for night or day is a better overall strategy than trying to be able to operate around the clock. Maybe you're a daytime animal that relies on speed. If you can't see at night that speed is less useful. Maybe you're a nighttime animal that relies on stealth. That stealth is impaired during the day. So, even without sleep, you'd be looking for a safe place to den up during your off time.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
One thing I've noticed (which may or may not be real) is that my daughter seems to grow in her sleep. She'll enter a period (usually days) of increased appetite and activity, then one night she'll be very sleepy and go to bed early and I'll swear the next morning she's taller. She also has a definite decrease in stomach size, although whether this is related to fat-burning or an overall increase in body size I couldn't say.
Again, all apochyphal information, I haven't actually done before-and-after measurements. Still, there's a noticable difference, and after the growth spurt her appetite and activity level return to normal. So sleep may be a necessary component of the body's growth/repair mechanisms. It would be interesting to see if people who take this sleep-counteracting compound take longer to heal.
Just junk food for thought...
I guess it boils down to this:
Is the requirement of sleep enforced by our brains because it is
(a) an irreducibly necessary part of living for physiological or neurochemical reasons, like breathing, or
(b) a behavior that was evolutionarily advantageous in the wild?
If (a), then these kinds of drugs are very troubling. If (b), then I would probably have no more qualms taking these than, say, a pain-killer.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Exactly. Sleep-cheating drugs are nothing new-- look at methamphetamine. It's about 100 years old and is very effective, moreso than modafinil, for treating narcolepsy. People stay up for over two weeks with it (nevermind 48 hours!) but after a point an interesting thing happens where the brain hemispheres start taking turns shutting down and going into REM sleep. To the user, half their brain is dreaming and the other half awake, leading to an odd fused state of hallucinations that cannot be distinguished from reality. It's interesting to note this same behavior happens in some mammal (I don't recall which) that naturally does not sleep.
Beyond the acute effects though most mammals pushed through drugs like meth to avoid sleep simply die in studies after a month. The circadian cycle is needed for proper homeostasis. Sleep deprivation causes symptoms of ADHD (ironically, treated with stimulants), obesity via lower leptin and higher ghrelin levels, and a very nasty cycle of altered immune, inflammatory and glial response.
One other interesting thing to note is that the human circadian cycle specifically tracks dawn and dusk, via the CLOCK genes mPer1 and mPer2 -- mPer1 being dawn and mPer2 being dusk. If there is no gradual "dusk" period before sleep, direct changes in gene expression -- outside of sleep deprivation -- result in a persistently lowered level of tyrosine hydroxylase, interfering with dopamine levels. Dopamine is of course a neurotransmitter associated with motivation, goal seeking behavior, wakefulness, attention, etc. So therefore perish the dusk, perish the dopamine. And yet this commonly happens -- artificial lighting, computer / TV screens, etc right up to the moment of sleep destroy melatonin production and any sort of proper expression of mPer2 activity. Over time this results in low cortisol and catecholamine levels during the day (fatigue), higher levels at night (as the melatonin/hormonal peaks become disturbed), and increased hunger/activity during the missing dusk period, as you in essence train the natural oscillation to favor alertness at that time -- when it cannot be sustained.
Taking stimulants, be they modafinil, the neurotoxic ampakines, or amphetamine, only partially reverses some of these things. They increase neurotransmitter and cortisol levels -- but also do this when their levels should be lower! Chronic levels of cortisol alters body composition to favor muscle catabolism (breakdown), fat retention, annihilation of the thyroid hormone T3 into reverse T3 thus fucking up thermogenesis and the metabolism, and causing atrophy of the hippocampus and disruption of memory. This also results in suppression of the immune system, increased inflammatory response, increased stress/anxiety, etc etc.
Do any of these things sound like "happiness" you would take a pill for? Shut down the computer and TV, and artificial lighting sources at least an hour before bed. Relax, in dim light. Train yourself with a normal schedule in sync with the sun. You'll have greater alertness during the day, lower hunger, higher energy, better memory, and sleep better.
We are a nation of stimulus junkies, always wanting to be entertained by something novel, with no thought for relaxation, rest, or recovery. When our novelty seeking behaviors disrupts our normal diurnal behaviors, the answer isn't to take drugs and start the cycle anew, but to perform these behaviors in moderation and balance.
Try turning off your electronic shit a bit early tonight and relaxing before sleep at a normal, consistent time. In a week, you'll be surprised at the huge difference it makes.
Anyway the article this drug is about is Modafinil, also known as Provigil, a narcolepsy drug, which I've been prescribed for ADHD. And it does the same damn thing. Your body needs sleep, trust me I know, no matter what it is after two or three days your mind begins to break down. This drug certainly doesn't help with that, and if you RTFA (what are the chances of that?) the software developer in question mentions some of the things I pointed out. This worries me, greatly, because after going through a year of hell I'm now seeing articles like this discussing the potential for a "sleep-free" lifestyle, I have very little doubt in my mind that such a thing is not possible without great damage to the brain.
I am not everyman and I do have an extremely addictive personality, but I've seen friends who don't (have addictive personalities) fall into the same trap as I did under the allusion of "work more, work faster, sleep is for wimps!"
Anyway this is just my experience, but I thought I would share...
What they [dolphins] do is sleep half their body and brain at a time.
There was a post here some years back by someone who claimed to be able to do this. He [?] said he only found it useful for long-distance road trips.
As I recall, his method worked through totally relaxing (via self hypnosis) half the body at a time.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
What's interesting about this drug, is that it seems to do something very similar to what people have been doing with polyphasic sleeping for years now. Basically, you only "need" 2 hours of sleep, but it has to be almost 100% REM. If you can trick your body into denying itself all the rest of the "unnecessary" sleep cycles, you can get by with just those two.
Polyphasic sleeping accomplishes this by limiting yourself to brief 15-20 minute naps, which are far more efficient than sleeping in large blocks because the brain can be trained to go directly into REM. Unfortunately, this training can take weeks or months (depending on how fastidious you are with your schedule), and the adjustment period can be extremely unpleasant.
A drug like this could be very useful for those of us who do don't experience much physical exertion and sleep very little as it is anyways, but couldn't get past the adjustment hump of the polyphasic cycle.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay
Now if you believe (like many) that the brain is no more than a big computing unit, then it must abides by those rules and the sleep is nothing else than the physical manifestation of 'garbage disposal'. Keep it up for too long and it will... crash.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Uh birds sleep too.
;-)
;-), and found that when the birds were in this state, with one eye open and one closed, their brain activity matched the pattern, with one hemisphere quiet and the other one active.
Yeah, but there was the recent research showing that many birds sleep on just one side of their brain at a time.
One thing I thought interesting about the report was that some of their test subjects were cockatiels. We have 'tiels, and we've often seen them apparently asleep, but if you can move to see their other eye, you find it open and alert (while the first one is still closed). Apparently part of what triggered the research was people reporting this sort of thing in their pet birds.
The researchers instrumented the birds' brains (with very light-weight instruments
A curious aspect to this is that birds' eyes are, like ours, wired into both sides of the brain. But the "asleep on one side only" pattern exists, and matches the eyes.
The hypothesis is that birds generally don't need as much sleep as they get, so they stay half-alert to watch out for predators, maintain their grip on their perch, etc. And the alert side can send a wake-up signal to the sleeping side if anything interesting happens.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Agreed. The fact is evolution can explain and predict anything and everything, whether or not it is true (e.g. humans have wings so they can escape predators). The fact that a just-so story comes from (insert famous astrophysicist) means nothing in itself.
That was me. I'll close one eye for about half an hour, and the effect is as if I've taken a nap. It apparently works by shutting off input to half of the brain, letting that half relax.
:)
It's more effective if I shut the right eye, albeit leading to terror in the passenger seat.
(I also take more-ordinary naps at home, which tend to hover at the edge of sleep. And I'm naturally a *very* light sleeper, and a sunrise person.)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If you talk to an amateur astronomer (like me), he'll tell you that we humans actually have decent, but not great, night vision. There are two problems, though. First, it takes time to acquire. A minimum of 20-30 minutes in very low light is generally needed for good dark adaptation - for some folks it can take as long as an hour. Also, any relatively bright light, even a brief flash, will break down the accumulated rhodopsin in your retinas, destroying your dark adaptation and forcing you to start over. We use red flashlights because the red wavelengths don't break down rhodopsin as readily, and we also throw large, sharp objects at folks who shine white flashlights during a star party.
But once you're dark adapted, you can see well enough to walk around and do quite a lot in conditions that a non-dark adapted person would consider "pitch black". Could you see a black cat sitting still on a black background? Maybe, maybe not. But could you see well enough to run away from a large predator at night without stumbling into a tree? Most likely yes.
I heard once in a psychology class (but have been unable to corroborate) that we too would be able to see in the UV range were it not for our lenses. The human eye lens is apparently slightly yellow and this filters out the UV. Patients who were given early artificial lenses reported being able to see new colours because the artificial lenses were clear.
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
Sleep is NOT behavior that has evolved 'for some reason'. Sleep is a metabolic imperative. It is the 'normal' state of life. Being awake is a temporary state that is actually destructive to the metabolism of cell life. Being awake is necessary to move around and obtain food and to procreate, but being awake is not necessary for anything beyond this. After the food has been obtained and the procreative act is complete then the life form able to end the destructive metabolic state of 'being awake' and return to the constructive metabolic state, otherwise known as sleep. Asking the question why do we sleep is akin to asking the question why do we live. The answer is that we do. Asking the question why do we wake up is a question that actually makes sense and can be answered with ease.
The only way to understand sleep / awake is to first understand anabolism / catabolism, balancing metabolic states. Sleep and Awake are balancing metabolic states, nothing more, nothing less. Just because we can exhibit 'behavior' when we are awake does NOT mean that sleep has anything to do the the notion of behavior. And just because we can measure brain activity during periods when we are awake or asleep does NOT mean that sleep is anything more than a metabolic state. Sleep is the Normal, Natural state of any living organism. Awake is just heightened activity and enhanced skills necessary to obtain food and procreate. Making too much of what being awake is is the source of all the confusion and misunderstanding about what sleep is.
Cones do not detect color, rods do not detect black and white.
.3mm concentration of cones in the center of your eye, thus the center of your eye is completely incapable of helping you in these conditions.
Cones are sensitive to daylight conditions while rods are sensitive to low-light conditions. Your cones are inactive during night lighting conditions and you still construct your visual field in color. As a result of being keyed to daylight, cones are also used for edge perception. As such, you will find it quite impossible to read by moonlight, as reading requires your cones to distinguish very fine edges and your cones are inactive in nigh-light. (regardless of how bright the moon is.)
Rods are particularly good at sensing motion, though not edges. As you may guess, this means humans are better at sensing motion *at night*. As such, you will not be able to tell which claw a bear is swinging at you in your peripheral vision, though you will be able to tell a large object is hurtling toward you. In fact, due to the physical setup of your eye, it is advisable to "look" at objects in night conditions without focusing directly at them. You have a
This setup (being able to distinguish edges and detail better during the day and being better at detecting motion at night) seems to suggest that humans were on the defensive at night and actively engaged in the world during the day.
The human vision system is much more effective (for things that we need to be spending time on) in daylight conditions, I find it *highly* unlikely humans were nocturnal in anything that might resemble recent history.
We also do not detect 3 colors and then construct other colors out of a combination of these. Our S, L and M cones are tuned to respond most agressively to specific wavelengths of light, though they are still responsive to wavelengths that are "near" those. There is even a theory that some women posses a gene (that can only be carried on a second x chromosome) that produces a fourth type of cone. These cones are tuned to detect light in between the wavelengths of the L and M cones, giving these women the ability to distinguish between colors that a tri-chromatic individual would see as identicle. These women are ingeniously deemed "Tetrochromatic superwomen".
Don't be sad if all this contradicts what you were told in high school. High school teachers, by and large, aren't on the bleeding edge of cognitive science.