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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!
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.
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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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.
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...
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.
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.