If I could pick one of the things to optimize all of society around, it would be sleep. I believe that many of society's ills can be traced back to people being sleep deprived on average. Modern society both ignorantly and through sheer foolishness undervalues sleep. I understand the emotional motivation for a statement like, "you can sleep when you're dead," but I do despise this prevelant sentiment which has become a culutre.
Joke's on you, I already feel dead from not sleeping :(
I also don't identify with that statement at all. As someone who doesn't sleep enough, I'd rather quality over quantity - less hours awake but make them more enjoyable.
It is so easy to get stuck in a rut where you barely have the energy to execute your daily loop of necessities and end up making no progress towards longer term goals.
In Australia, stores are typically still open 9am-5pm which is a relic of a time when housewives dropped the kids off and went shopping. Now that many of us have jobs this should be the first and easiest thing to change. Even 10am-6pm would be a massive improvement for both the workers and customers.
In Poland, chain and franchised grocery stores were smart enough to go into two-shift mode, and are generally open from 6am to 10pm. However, most other stores - and more importantly, services sector, banks and government offices - were not. They work 8 hours a day, smack in the middle of everyone else's workday. It's no surprise so many people in their 20s-40s want to do everything on-line, because it's either that, or taking days off at work for errands (and while you can do some things on Saturdays, banks and government offices don't work over weekends).
This is IMO stupid, and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the society should be run in mandatory shifts. I can't understand why the market won't fix that itself? Why leave all that money on the table? There is huge demand for services open outside regular office working hours. For instance, personally, I chose dentists by their opening hours - most of the money I spent on dental was with a place where I could come at 8pm. In pre-Internet banking era, I would've picked the bank that had branches open past 5pm, if any existed. I don't shop at places open 9-5, because I only have time earlier than that, or later than that. Etc.
> I can't understand why the market won't fix that itself?
They are more interested in making LED signs showing temperature and how to squize more money from customers. I call this "PRL" mentality, they want to get money directly, not indirectly by making themselves better for clients. They don't care about clients, because their performance is measured with money and opening for more hours will cost money in short term.
Do they need to be open for more hours? What's the point of being open during hours that nobody but unemployed and retired people can use your business? Instead open at 3pm and close at 11pm. I'd love 6am-9am & 5pm - 11pm but that's probably not practical.
Our society is so focused on productivity that we forget that the foundation for improved productivity is sleep, exercise and diet. Mind & Body, one system.
Personally being a tech worker in Silicon Valley, I’ve found the big barrier to this now to be cultural and personal. All my companies (large and small) have had incredibly relaxed policies around when to arrive, leave, remote work, time off, bereavement. Even in what have been SRE or Software Eng roles with on-call. I get the sense that if I’m doing my work, I could do whatever I want. But I still feel some pressure, some voice in the back of my head that thinks other people will look down on me or I won’t be deserving my high salary. Like anytime I have downtime I feel guilty, and I see others behave the same way.
Am I the only one who feels like a 40 hour work week is excessive? I feel like 8 hours of work in a day is eeking out diminishing returns on a persons productivity.
Secondly, if you account for "productivity" hours instead of "waking" hours. You spend more of your "productive" capable hours in your life working, by a large margin.
Or maybe I was just born with a lazy brain /shrug.
I have noticed that a lot of people treat work as a social event. They spent a significant amount of their day shooting the shit. As an introvert who can't stand smalltalk, I don't. I think 40 hours or more makes sense for employees who spend half of their day chatting or surfing the internet. When I'm at work, I am working. I still do more than 40 hours, but I'm not sure if it's sustainable. I was recently asked to increase to a minimum 48 hour workweek and turned it down because I know it would upset my work life balance and not increase my output.
Like... it is. "Company" has roots in the latin word Pan or Pain, as in bread. Con Pan, literally who you break bread with, as in "we had company for the weekend".
Assuming 8 hours a day you're spending 1/3 of your work week with these people. It doesn't have to be a social bonanza every day but if you dislike making smalltalk with these people, or are actively disdainful of their chatting and web surfing then maybe you should change jobs. Cuz it sounds like you're spending a lot of time around people you straight up don't like.
Nah, they're actually fantastic people, and I don't begrudge them their small talk. I just don't join in, and am noting that it's a difference in time accounting. Our work is fascinating and there's a lot of bigtalk too. And actually I'm totally happy to small talk with them in a social setting, I just don't like to be at the office when I'm socializing.
Please don't. If you commit to a 48 hour workweek you're taking a loan on your future health. When that due date comes you'll pay it back with interest...
Yeah most studies I've seen shared online put us at about 4-5 hours of useful work a day. This seems to be what I settle into at home when left alone too.
It can of course go higher when you have a specific goal and you're running on adrenaline or are truly enraptured by what you are working on. But a typical 8 hour day is often packed with chitchat, meetings, administrative busywork and so on to help pad out those hours.
I did work one place that stressed to us to allocate no more than 5.5 hours of work-work a day when estimating jobs due to the above, and it seemed roughly accurate.
I agree, I have about 4 - 5 "good hours" a day. But I'm expected to deliver 6 - 6.5 billable hours a day in my job (exluding admin work). It's frustrating as I know that a billable hour before 10am and after 4pm is worth far less than a billable hour between 10am and 3pm. It's especially frustrating when I'm expected to work on something that involves a high cognitive load all day long due to tight deadlines. Account managers, project managers and sales people seem to think that all work is the same and you can work at max capacity all the time, regardless of the complexity of the task.
As a SWE, I have 20 productive hours a week, approximately. The other 20 are wasted, and I would be better off just not being at work and relaxing. Unfortunately, "that's just not how things work".
Same here, software developer. Any code added after 3pm is full of bugs and little mistakes to fix the next morning. Not worth it. Now I just slack off when I feel like it but it's not the way
Sometimes I get more done in 15mins of my personal projects before work than a day of work, due to meetings or being blocked. Companies are usually not nearly as efficient as they could be.
I think 90% of work gets done in the first four hours for me.
This is why I opt into an 8am - 4pm schedule - I can usually squeak out just a bit more productive time if I start before anyone is online or in the office.
For me, I feel like it is highly dependent upon what I’m working on at the time. Some projects are motivating and 40 hours a weeks isn’t enough—I want to work more than that. Other times I work ~40 but a lot of it is wasted by by working inefficiently (when the drive to work on the project isn’t high enough to outweigh fatigue)
I've always wondered why, with all the other emotional dispositions that people accuse pharma companies of "medicalizing" in order to sell them a drug treatment for, we've never seen any attempt to medicalize the Puritan work ethic.
Maybe it's because it'd mean that pretty much every medical doctor would themselves be technically (or not-so-technically) considered mentally-ill?
(Gosh, imagine a world where all the doctors got treatment for their floating guilt, and then suddenly woke up to their severe overwork, and so did a 180 on their previous push to the medical-bar to lower acceptance to increase wages, instead pushing to increase acceptance and lower wages in an attempt to increase the number of doctors a hospital can employ on a given budget, and therefore decrease hours worked per doctor?)
I don’t think a puritanical work ethic necessarily is unhealthy, but in your example I would consider the guilt aspect to be.
In your example puritanical work ethic + (irrational imo) guilt = you exceed your contractual requirements to deliver work to your employer.
Keep the work ethic but take the guilt out and perhaps instead you’d meet but not exceed your contractual obligations to your employer, and then organise the rest of your time around industriously working on something else that you’re personally passionate about.
The second example could be unhealthy depending on how you approached it, but I wouldn’t say that it necessarily is, and I would say that it’s a big improvement over the first example.
"Puritanical" is definitely meant to imply unhealthy, which is why it's got such a negative connotation. I think even in your example, you substitute "wasted" productivity (in the sense of going beyond contractual obligations) with other productivity, albeit towards another direction. I think that's what the parent's post is pointing out: this obsession/compulsion with filling in all time with productivity. Why can't time just be "wasted"?
It's difficult for some managers to measure the productivity of knowledge workers and unfortunately they resort to tracking the number of hours there are "butts in seats". If your organization is like this you'll see people who are at work to be seen being at work, even if they're not being productive.
Japanese salarymen are the pathological example of this but I'm sure it manifests everywhere.
Absolutely, unfortunately taylorism did follow suit into the world of knowledge workers.
In some hostile work environments like banking this is everywhere. Don't leave before your manager, eat lunch at your desk, look busy and stay in the office as long as you can
> Our society is so focused on productivity that we forget that the foundation for improved productivity is sleep, exercise and diet.
I have seen more focus on getting people busy than actual productivity. The video games industry is a good example where the lack of planning and quite often personal maturity of the company leadership cause crunch time and a lack of personal well-being.
> Mind & Body, one system.
Exactly this. If , e.g., we run our planes like we run our bodies, they will just fall from the skies.
I enjoy my sleep thoroughly and I sleep 7-8 hours a day. Still, I think it’s a waste of time, and I don’t mean work productivity, but life. You sleep, wake up, and surprise, a third of the day has just gone by and you didn’t even notice.
I recognize the need to sleep, but I personally just wished we could develop a way to keep going with your day without sleeping. If that were physically possible, I’d just meditate some few hours daily instead of sleeping 7-8 hours.
If you factor in that during sleep your body is actively restoring your organs, and mind is flushing/filing the info collected during the wake hours. How many hours needed for that is an intriguing question. But hardly this time is wasted, unless your sleep is ... restless.
I recently watched an episode of "Nova" on the subject of sleep (Mysteries of Sleep), very convincing , even to some toddlers fussy about the sleep as usual :)
Think about it the other way. The optimal, very best way for
any living organism to live the most healthy and longest life possible is to only sleep and never wake up. That is the ideal state for your body and mind.
I recognize the need to eat, detoxicate and reproduce, but wish we could develop a way to keep sleeping while doing it :)
Sleep is so good for the mind and body that unlike almost any medicine, it can not only make you feel better but heal you in ways you otherwise couldn't be. It's pure elixir for humans.
It really is crazy how much some cultures (including mine) neglect it.
I love to sleep and always have, but I've been shamed for it (in the weird way that is North Americans do that sometimes) and felt like I needed to optimise my schedule or sleep less or whatever. It's all crazy. Just sleep! It's nice, it's free, soak it up.
Unless of course you can't. Man, I feel for people with insomnia.
Example of that first point, I woke up one day with extremely dry eyes to the point where it felt like I had a grain of sand in one eye. It was painful every time I blinked. I taped my eye shut to stop blinking which only helped a bit.
I asked if anything could be done other than eye drops which was about 5 seconds of relief but starting to irritate the skin around my eye due to the chemicals.
Optometrist said a full night of sleep. Nothing else will fix it. And he was right.
It's actually somewhat surprising that mire people do not experiment more with their sleep cycles.
I recently had a lot of trouble sleeping due to stress and found a solution whereby I began listening to old TV shows while I sleep with earphones in bed.
It was miraculous. But one odd side effect is that I don't really dream anymore - at least not in the same way. Since the shows are playing, it's almost like they are dreaming for me.
If the phone stops playing the shows for some reason, I'll have dreams again - and often wake up due to some annoying thoughts about work.
I haven't noticed any negative effects. Certainly there was a massive positive benefit of just being able to sleep when I couldn't before.
... but these sorts of things should be avenues of research.
I’m pretty sure dreams correlate with deep sleep and REM, and that being exposed to stimulus with dialogue like TV (ie, not things like constant fan noise, wind, ocean sounds, etc) will keep you from reaching that deep sleep.
I’d be cautious about doing what you’re doing long term. I think you’d be better off learning to let go of stressful thoughts before bed, and to make your bedroom a very calm, peaceful, non work related place where all you do is rest and relax. Watching old tv shows before bed, or while on a timer that will turn off when you’re asleep, sounds like a good way to get you relaxed, but I don’t think it’s great to have that type of stimulation continue during sleep.
I’ve done the same thing you’re describing during high stress periods with podcasts, and while it’s better than letting worries keep you up, I find myself feeling more “shallow” and less insightful/less rested if they stay on throughout the night. When I allow myself to relax and drift off without distraction, I find myself feeling much more “full” and “together” in the mornings, particularly if I take the time to go over and record my dreams.
I am still hitting deep/REM sleep - that isn't changing. If I weren't, I'd feel terrible.
It has been about 6 months of doing this all night, every night. So far, I feel myself.
The key is to use old familiar programs. Things you can visualize even though you're just listening to them. It's that familiarity that allows your brain to have a sense of comfort, while not really being stimulated.
I've been overcome with sleepiness at my desk when watching video games on Twitch/YouTube with a calm narrator (no excitable screaming thanks). Something about it makes my mind wander and generating the visuals but not being in control of them seems to be an important step to falling asleep. Sounds similar to what you are doing and maybe I should try it.
I'm pretty sure there'd be a huge difference between doing this with old TV shows (familiar, no learning, basically structured background noise) and doing it with podcasts (new material, news, etc).
I used to do this exact same thing, until I got my anxiety under control. If your anxiety keeps you from sleeping every night, that's abnormal and treatment can help you, not just with sleep but with your whole day. Treatment doesn't necessarily mean drugs. I'm definitely projecting, and make your own choices obviously, but in your post I definitely see myself a year ago before I started dealing with my underlying problem.
Society demands a sleep schedule, yet the very idea of sleeping on a schedule is newly invented for industrial society.
Having done several years of experimenting on myself, I've come to the conclusion that our sleep needs vary greatly from day to day, circumstance to circumstance, and to sleep the same schedule every day is forcing one's body into a square bowl.
For example, if I am coming down with flu or cold, I may want to sleep as much as 24 hours in a day, maybe 16 if I feel a need to get things done. This allows my body to spend all its energy on mobilizing the immune system, and allows me for a quicker recovery.
If the weather is rainy or gray, I may want to sleep more.
If I'm doing something exciting, like attending a festival or conference, coding, or traveling, I may not want to sleep at all, or get by on a few several-hour naps.
Having adopted a flexible sleeping unschedule, I feel much better than I used to on the office cycle.
>Society demands a sleep schedule, yet the very idea of sleeping on a schedule is newly invented for industrial society.
Umm--- pre-industrial society everything stopped when it went dark. Humans have very poor night vision, we can't function in the dark and so basically everyone went to sleep when the sun went down.
That's not true, people used to wake up for several hours a night. There were also those up through the night tending fire and looking for predators. And darkness does not rule out sleeping during the day.
I absolutely agree. I naturally wake up at 9:30am. And go to sleep at 1:30am. That does not work for a normal 8-5 type job. I know I perform so much better with sleep.
If I was CEO, I would absolutely organized working hours around sleep.
Exactly this. Some people come in early and some people come in late. Meetings are for the middle of the day when every body is there. Mornings and evenings are good for work with minimal interruption.
Only 4 hours worth of meetings allowed per day, 11-3. Bonus side effect of limiting useless meetings and helping morning and night folks avoid heavy traffic.
Honestly, primary care doctors seem to put way too much emphasis on weight and way too little on sleep. Imagine if your doctor bugged you to go to sleep as much as they bugged you to cut down on carbs.
I think a lot of sleep problems are being resolved via CPAP devices.
I know one relative who I'm pretty certain died in her sleep because of unresolved sleep apnea.
When you stop breathing while sleeping, your body adjusts by taking you out of deep sleep towards wakefulness, while your blood pressure rises towards 300. When you finally take a breath -- if the high blood pressure didn't set off a heart attack or stroke -- your restful sleep is ruined.
Sleep anpea also causes other problems. when your throat closes and you try to breath, it's likely you will suck stomach acid out of your stomach into your throat and possibly lungs.
If you snore (not a requirement), wake up during the night with heartburn, or die of a heart attack or stroke in your sleep, you should investigate a cpap.
I have diagnosed OSA but an older unit I tried (Respironics REMstar Pro w/ humidifier) about 15 years ago, I couldn't keep from ripping the mask off. :'(
Also, my insurance is awful so they won't send me to specialist to get a proper CPAP. And I have high-blood pressure, tachycardia, depression, anxiety, and sleep like sh!t.
Anyhow before I whine anymore about personal problems, how's your day?
Sounds like you dont have children. I'm pretty sure for the whole of human history people were crammed in small houses with babies waking everyone up every few hours.
"Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed." (Arthur Schopenhauer )
As an airline employee who sometimes faces large shifts in sleep times, I've become quite worried about brain health. Papers like this and Matthew Walker's recent popularity seem to have brought more attention to the issue. Last week I slept from 9pm - 2:30am, 12am - 7am, 7am - 11am, 9pm - 6am, in that order. The week before I had to wake up at 1am two days in a row. It isn't possible to function normally on such a schedule and it's horrible for your health, yet that fact is completely ignored. I'd be considered alarmist and met with a "suck it up" attitude if I were to take a stand against such things. The FAA wipes their hands of it by saying that it's "your responsibility" to make sure you've gotten adequate rest and to call in fatigued if you haven't, but one would soon lose their job for doing so as often as would truly be required. Flying an airliner is easy, but we have two pilots because one or both are often totally exhausted, whether they realize it or not. Operating on "stem power" is a phrase sometimes used, as in, 'so tired that your higher level functions are shot and you're operating on brain stem power alone'.
I feel your pain... Reminded me how quite similar it seems to be for hospital staff: alternating night and day shifts, extra long shifts like 24hr of continuous work. When asking "but how can you deal with it and know you keep working properly at all time?", answers consistently seemed to dismiss it being an issue like "oh, you get used to it..." but I must admit I'm still having a hard time believing it...
I was in a car accident once and injured my neck. I got a lot of mental fatigue afterwards and in particular the angle of my neck can trigger a lot of tiredness very quickly and reliably. It comes with a swooshing squirting sound in the back of my head... iirc other people can hear it too when it happens.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s related to this rinse system in some way. Luckily it has improved a ton over the years but a bent neck still triggers it and I never found out why
You could have some kind of malformation or inflammation from your injury causing a build up of cerebral fluid, so when you move it's able to rush past into the spine and make the funky fluid noises. In perfectly healthy people, the flow is controlled by a sort of tonsil, and during movement or laughing/coughing it is able to escape into the spine as well. In people who have a malformation from birth, it can cause all kinds of physical developmental issues like lopsided muscle reactions, scoliosis and such. It also gets worse and worse, not better.
I'm not a doctor, just had a close family member with a malformation there which was corrected with surgery. You should really see a specialist!
In my family members case, an orthopaedic surgeon diagnosed the issue, but a neuro surgeon was required to confirm the diagnosis and eventually perform the surgery.
The issue they had is known as a Chiari Malformation.
When I have a migraine, and the excedrin (migraine medication) begins to kick in, I also notice this exact sensation/"sound", like a draining, as a pressure in my skull begins to be relieved.
Obviously this is purely anecdotal and not scientific at all, but it's fun to speculate. I like concepts that are intuitive, and this one seems pretty intuitive to me.
Can't comment on the whooshing issue. But, I got hit hard in the head by a frisbee and had concussion like symptoms.
Both my neck and visual system got thrown off by it it turns out. I went to someone who does therapy for that, and with work on my neck + eye tracking the symptoms went away. Mental fatigue was a big symptom.
However, I did not have fatigue due to a particular angle, so that sounds different. But, I suspect you might have the issues I had as an additional factor.
What you're describing sounds similar to a Craniocervical Instability (CCI).[1] It can be confused with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I learned about the condition through Jeff Wood's blog posts.[2]
After hearing Michael Pollan's interview on NPR and hearing about caffeine's 6 hour half life, I stopped cold turkey. It really has done wonders for my middle-aged insomnia.
It depends on how fast a caffeine metabolizer you are. I've been classified in genetic testing (whatever the reliability of that is) as a fast metabolizer, and I can have a full cup of coffee 2-3 hours before bed and not stay up. Other folks who I know that got slow metabolizer on the test can't have caffeine after noon without it affecting their sleep (maybe this is the case for you).
Drug metabolism is often better modeled by two (or sometimes more) different half-lifes for different stages of metabolism. So typically plasma concentration will diminish quickly but be followed by a long tail. In the case of caffeine I think this is due to enzymatic saturation.
It seems that this second half-life must be the difference for people who have more trouble sleeping long after caffeine intake. I wonder if this implies that their bodies have different maximum attainable amounts for the proper enzyme. I'm curious if anyone knows more detail about how the interplay between enzymatic saturation and genetics / gene expression works here.
I used to be able to do this - take a double espresso, wait an hour, and sleep through the night. But as I've gone through my 40's, insomnia's been a problem.
Further, Pollan's interview suggested that even if I could sleep, caffeine was interfering with "deep wave sleep" - so I gave it a shot. I consider myself lucky that none of the headaches or [extra] irritability kicked in, so there's that.
I've read that one of the symptoms of ADD is the reaction to stimulants. Specifically, they tend to have a calming effect instead of the typical jolt of awareness.
I'm not the parent, but I drink light or light-medium roast coffee only, black, and I can take a nap (edit: or just go to bed for the night!) any time after it with no problems. The only thing caffeinated coffee does for me at this point is make me poop and keep me from blinding headaches.
I think the awake/alert factor I get from having my morning coffee at this point is a learned response, not a chemical one; a decaf coffee is just as good at perking me up in the morning as a non-decaf. If it weren't for the headache spikes hurled straight through my brain by satan himself I wouldn't even bother.
Edit: That's not true, I actually do love the taste and ritual of making coffee too; it's a whole thing to me. It's like a Japanese tea ceremony, but with coffee.
Im just like you minus the headaches. I could drink coffee and nap right after and the morning jolt is a learned experience since decaf and non decaf has the same effect. I drink coffee to enjoy its taste manly. Acutally i used to drink 5 coffees a day and at the 5th i’d feel the unpleasant jitter in my body so cafeine does seem to have an effect in large quantities but I could still nap in those conditions as well
I feel that, I've gone through entire pots by myself before and that's when I started seeing colors and smelling shapes (not really, but it was a distinctly disorienting and uncomfortable experience). I tend to limit myself to 2 cups a day since I know I do have a caffeine dependence and I don't want to spend the entire day strengthening that - it would mean EVERY day would have to be like that, and I don't want to be that much a slave to my bodies caffeine requirements for a baseline, you know?
But sometimes, when no one is looking? I make a third cup.
this is me. ritual induced learned responses aside, keeping "regular" is the only noticeable outcome from drinking coffee. but I very much enjoy the taste -- the lighter and funkier the better. I'm ADD inattentive, as are some of my kids. Kid's doctor actually suggested we start giving black coffee to one and I kinda got excited to introduce the ritual to them.
I'm getting there fast. As a young man I could drink caffeine any time, and it didn't really seem to have any effect on my sleep. Nowadays I'm seeing a very strong, definite correlation. Just this morning I told myself that it might be time to pull the trigger and drop caffeine altogether. Getting old sucks ;-)
Reducing coffee helps for sure. Some of the best sleep of my life has been the week I went off coffee.
But the best sleep by far has been the last month, when I've reduce alcohol to 0 for 6 nights a week, just once on the weekend.
Using AutoSleep on Apple Watch you can see the insane differences. My deep sleep is often over 2 hours, which is when I literally feel like my brain has been rinsed. Got 4 hours of deep sleep last night which is a bit high.
When tracking on nights after alcohol, deep sleep is often just 15-30 minutes. Focus is all out of whack the next day after alcohol too.
Interestingly, if drinking during the day and I stop drinking alcohol by like 5pm (day drinking) such as on the weekend, the impact is not nearly as bad.
How do you like AutoSleep? I’ve been interested in finding a decent Apple Watch solution for sleep tracking but it’s been a few years since I’ve tried those apps.
I don’t suffer from insomnia but I imagine it to be torturous. I have to say I find it shocking that cutting out stimulants like coffee isn’t one of the first things people try when suffering insomnia with or without a doctor telling them too.
As a solo developer of my own company I pay the price of my own bad decisions every day. A night with proper sleep opens the deepest parts of the brain with strong executive thinking, ability to see alternative solutions to problems, and better personality and attitude. I’ve come to a point where I wouldn’t let myself code if I catch myself wanting to watch movies (hint that my mind needs sleep) and would take a quick nap instead. Even 20 minutes of extra sleep when sleep deprived brings a different mind to the table. There are plenty of times when long coding sessions are necessary, but if you’ve had one sleep debt is the first that needs paid so your brain can actually move your codebase forward instead of introducing more problems.
"The discovery of CSF is attributed to Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688-1772), who had graduated from
the University of Upsala, Sweden, with a degree in
mining and engineering (Fig. 1), Working as a
mining engineer, Swedenborg often came across an
underground stream of water that lead him to search
for its source. As a religious man and a teacher of
theology, he took upon himself to search for the seat
of the soul. His search for the soul brought him into
contact with anatomists in France, Germany, and
Italy. Having observed and participated in numerous
dissections between 1736 and 1740, he felt prepared
to engage in original medical investigations of the
brain, which seemed a likely seat of the soul."
If he had known what we know now, for example the amount of energy the brain uses, it would have seemed like an even more fantastic device to him (and clearly the seat of the soul).
I've always wondered why we need to be unconscious for our brains to recover? Seems like a huge weakness to let your defenses down for so long. And all animals do it! You'd think there would be a huge evolutionary incentive to find a workaround.
The body and mind need to slow down to free up time slices for cleaning up the waste. Humans "in wild" are mostly daytime creatures, that's when they're supposed to actively look for food, deal with danger, maybe compete for mates, handle the offsprings. So not much safety to slow down in daytime.
On the other hand, nighttime affords this naturally, though modern society arguably blurrs the utility and safety aspect of nighttime.
Counterexample is some marine mammals, like dolphins and seals, which can shutdown half of their brain for sleep, while the other one is active for safety reasons.
This points to it being impractical or even being impossible for relatively big-brained creatures to avoid.
My guess: trying to flush the brain garbage while the brain is conscious would damage it, or interfere with conscious thought in a way that's worse than being asleep.
> The findings [...] are the first to suggest that the brain’s well-known ebb and flow of blood and electrical activity during sleep may also trigger cleansing waves of blood and CSF
Oops, I guess the article or researchers missed the prior work on this subject... here's a TED Talk from 6 years ago about this exact mechanism (much more informative than the article): https://youtu.be/b8uvrdBrdR4
Gotta say though, I'm ecstatic more research is being done in this area and I wholeheartedly support their efforts!
> By studying 11 people as they slept, Lewis and her team identified three parts to the rinse cycle. First, there is electrical activity that’s definitive of slow wave sleep. Then neurons “go quiet” as Lewis puts it, blood volume within the brain decreases, and cerebral spinal fluid flows upwards. This flow happens about every 20 seconds during slow wave sleep, according to the study.
You can find some good discussions about this by Dr. Matthiew Walker on Youtube. He has done some talks at Google, with Joe Rogan and Dr. Rhonda Patrick.
I would expect it to happen in the deepest sleep cycle with the lowest brain activity. I picture REM more as a testing environment run of higher level brain functions. Some things are stubbed out (voluntary muscle control and long term memory generation) but most brain activity is functioning like awakeness during REM.
Well, the introductory section implies that the author (a) knows Walker's aim in his book, (b) receives direct emails about the book, (c) "very much appreciates" learning about errors in the book, and (d) knows what is planned in future editions of the book. The author's name is "sleepdiplomat"—it's odd that he doesn't explicitly give his name—but it turns out that (1) sleepdiplomat.com claims to be Matthew Walker's web site, and (2) @sleepdiplomat appears to be Walker's Twitter handle. Either someone has faked up an entire online presence for Walker, or the Wordpress post is indeed Walker himself.
Yea, I've wondered this exact thing. My guess is yes, but it depends on grade of incline. You also need to compare to supine and if there are other dramatic sleep interferences due to GERD or sleep apnea that would make supine worse in other ways.
Besides for the headline, there is no mention of this "rinse cycle" only happening if sleeping during night. People sleeping the entire day instead, also experience the "rinse cycle".
One anecdote you keep hearing about some very advanced practitioners is that they sleep less, with no apparent ill effects. Perhaps that's worth investigating.
I have noticed this. Meditation slowly seeps outside of the time you devote to it and it colors everyday existence. I first started noticing in my twenties that I could spend an entire night awake, in bed, even sometimes out of it, and not feel deprived in the morning. It's not something I can do every day, and stress has an effect, and my activities are very constrained, bright light wrecks it so I can't use computers or phones. But when the factors all line up, nighttime becomes my favorite part of the day. :-)
People on a Ketogenic diet report need only 6 hours of sleep with no adverse effects. I am on Keto plus I also meditate, and I currently sleep 4-5 hours a night, but I'm feeling awake and refreshed. This is both awesome as I used to be an owl, and it freaks me the hell out. This is completely unreal, and I wonder if its going to last or if it is just the usual temporary keto insomnia due to disrupted melatonin synthesis. It needs glucose and takes a while to adapt (Glucose -> L-Tryptophan -> Serotonin -> Melatonin).
Anecdotally, I experience the same thing when I'm on keto. I have much more energy during the day and I'm not groggy in the morning. Otherwise, it's nearly impossible for me to wake up even if I've had 8+ hours of sleep, and I often sleep through my alarm.
I'm more of a low carb person rather than keto, but I can anecdotally confirm that how many carbs and/or sugar I have the day before does impact my alertness the next day regardless of sleep.
I also do time restricted feeding and skip breakfast. If I load up on carbs (particularly crappy ones) the day before, I feel hunger much more the next morning than if I ate clean during my feeding window.
The article mentions its difficult to find people that can sleep with an EEG cap inside a loud MRI machine. I'd assume the same would be true for meditation as well.
it would seem likely that if they discover a physical mechanism at work in select individuals brains (electric waves followed by rhythmic waves of fluid) that the mechanism exists in some form in all individuals. I agree it does make for a clear follow up question: "could this mechanism be altered in some ways in people who experience sleep problems?"
This was not true in my case. I cannot meditate easily if I hear conversations or erratic noises, but the steady rhythmic nature of the MRI machine integrated effortlessly with my meditation. The staff thought I was sleeping, and said they'd never seen someone sleep through such noise.
For me it is fairly straight forward to meditate even in noisy environments where I could not sleep. But I have no idea how prevalent that is. Certainly many people meditate in dark and quiet spaces (I worry I would fall asleep in such spaces but again, that's just me)
If someone could make a machine that allows us to only sleep 4 hours per night but provides the same benefit of a full rested 8-hour sleep, I'd shout TAKE MY $$.
I envy those who can actually pull this out due to some genes. Lucky bastards...
i don't trust this plane at all and can barely trust boeing's other planes now. i certainly don't trust the FAA or beoing themselves. this essentially amounts to a government bailout by the FAA. from their language on their own website, the FAA seems to be minimizing the widely publicized internal issues at boeing that led to the 737 max. is there a way to submit complaints or comments to this process, given the FAA is a public, government organization?
I'm surprised to see no mention of the recently discovered glymphatic system[0] which is responsible for this rinsing. Very much looking forward to research into drugs which modulate the function of the glymphatic system, as they could potentially solve one of my most difficult life problems, sleep.
It's crazy that we only recently discovered such a critical and [physically] widespread biological component. Makes me wonder what other "obvious" things we've yet to stumble upon.
This is just a guess, but speculative, radical stuff seems risky from a career point of view.
You're going to give up years of your life and work your ass off tirelessly toward the PhD that is necessary to open other doors. Do you bet it all on a far-out idea that might not pan out? You don't want to get too conservative, but you don't want to go wild either.
Then the same thing repeats when you're working on research or directing research. You need to get grant money. You need to publish.
You want to advance yourself within the field, and the way to do that is with either one amazing breakthrough or (more likely) a string of solid, significant work.
And once you've built a reputation, which is important, you can lose it all by venturing too far out.
Thus, while it's not necessarily that people are closed-minded, there are incentives for most people to take a middle road, which means a lot more evolutionary progress than revolutionary progress.
There definitely is, as academics life work and achievements are often tied to specific concepts and therefore they resist new ideas.
See what happened with Alzheimers, where as specific theory that is probably wrong dominated for years and received most funding, sending a cure back years as well.
It might be a self-reinforcing cycle? To get funding researchers write grant proposals to target the most trendy research topics, which when funded lead to more research papers and momentum around those topics. Speculative research is thereby forced to survive more as side projects than the primary research areas of successful labs.
while technology is very advanced it still has a lot of limits. Watching what is happening in someone's brain without damaging them is quite difficult. From the article "Currently, people who volunteer for such experiments have to be able to fall asleep while wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap inside of a noisy MRI machine—no easy feat." So it would seem that studying internal brain activity during healthy sleep is indeed a challenge.
Imagine some years into future we will find that sleep does not work the way we thought because all data was from selected few unnormal enough to be able to sleep inside mri machine.
and EEG is noisy as shit (SNR wise) and fMRI has a 2-second lag and MEG's ill-posed spatially and repeatability is hard and imaging only gets you a few hundred microns into the grey matter and you can't do it in humans and "single units" usually aren't and you can't do that in humans either anyway and and and ...
I think it's less culture and more specifically that humans are squishy and wet and incredibly complicated and hard to separate into obviously separate pieces. The body has a kind of almost fractal complexity that makes it devilishly hard to cleanly separate things from each other in many cases.
Also dead bodies (easier to study and dissect) are very different from live bodies (you can get a quick look during surgery, but that's nothing like detailed dissection).
I suspect it's because there are a lot of wrong new concepts constantly fighting established ones, both from scientists who are sloppy or misguided and from total crackpots, and it's hard to tell in all that noise when something new is actually worth considering.
Some folks are raising the headboard end of their beds a few inches for improved nocturnal glyphic drainage - something coined as "inclined bed therapy."
I did something similar to reduce my snoring. Many people do it to help prevent heartburn at night. Makes one wonder how humans slept in nature before beds became a thing.
Your comment prompted me to look for images of chimpanzees sleeping on google. A lot of them are putting their arms under their head just like we would because of their shoulders. Others find a root or rock to rest their head on (and they are also able to build temporary beds/nests in the tree at an incline). So I figure it'd be mostly the same for us.
