9 ms·

The engineer in me has to wonder: is this something we can synthesize? If it were possible to induce this "dishwasher-like" surge of cerebrospinal fluid in the

The engineer in me has to wonder: is this something we can synthesize? If it were possible to induce this "dishwasher-like" surge of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain during waking hours, would we be able to live off of significantly less (or no) sleep? I'm not saying that it's necessarily a good idea, but it would have a plethora of practical applications -- pilots, truckers, etc. would be able to stay awake in a healthful way, rather than by ingesting stimulants. I've been interested in the science of sleep for a while -- I wrote a side project, http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me, that actually gets quite a bit of traffic -- but neuroscience is mostly lost on me.

Practicality 11y ago
A quote from the article: "It's probably not possible for the brain to both clean itself and at the same time [be] aware of the surroundings and talk and move and so on," So it would be the equivalent of a forced sleep, since you can't be conscious at the same time, but that might still be useful.
- mmastrac 11y ago
  Perhaps we could do a half-brain sleep like Dolphins? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
  - jotm 11y ago
    I wonder how cognitive functions and our personality would be affected? Two halfs make a whole, yin and yang and all that, if half the brain is asleep, would we even be able to think straight?
    - vorg 11y ago
      Maybe that can be the 8 hours a day people do their office jobs.
    - fixermark 11y ago
      So the tradeoff might be that you can operate while half your brain is asleep, but your coworkers might think you're acting a bit crazy? (Not sure precisely how different that is from the experience of most office workers ;) ).
    - qiqing 11y ago
      Hemispherectomy (removal of one half of the brain) is a treatment for Rasmussen's encephalitis when it's sufficiently severe (or the seizures are not responding to drugs). If done very early in life, the plasticity of brain makes it such that those patients grow up to be normally functioning adults. We believe this is because the regions that specialize for different tasks are able to combine their function on the same half. Think of, for instance, the "language" areas (Broca's area and Wernicke's area). (The following over-simplified explanation assumes typical right-hand dominant individuals for the sake of brevity.) If you inactivate that area in the left hemisphere (using drugs or transcranial magnetic stimulation), you'll lose "language" processing of data that occurs around 1 Hz (in English, this corresponds to individual words, phonemes; in tonal languages, this includes tones of lexical significance). If you inactivate that area in the right hemisphere instead, you'll lose "language" processing of data that occurs an order of magnitude slower than that (in most languages, this corresponds to pitch and volume changes over the level of the sentence, and can convey prosody information such as speaker intent as well as speaker identity). Due to specializations like this, hemispherectomies are not performed later in life. You would get symptoms similar to stroke patients. But for all areas, not just language.
      - jotm 11y ago
        So the brain can function normally without a whole half? That's very interesting. Now I'm wondering how much can be removed without adverse effects :-)
        qiqing 11y ago
        A non-precise answer: a surprisingly large amount if you're careful about which parts to remove and if you do it really, really early in life. ;) In adults (or even adolescents) though, not as much luck. In the case of hemispherectomies on Rasmussen's patients, you can analogize it as: people are dual-core by default. If you remove one of the cores early enough in life (like <5 yrs old), you can re-route the wiring so that processing can done by one of the cores, and still be pretty much normal. But whatever subtle thing is lost when if we don't do parallel processing like we usually do -- that things is pretty subtle to test for as well.
    - vidarh 11y ago
      We would be able to think reasonable normally, apparently, assuming the sleeping half doesn't send confusing signals. There have been quite a bit of research on people with severed brain stems, where the brain halves effectively are cut off from each other and limited to communicating through external senses. In those situations the brain halves are actually exceedingly good at trying to obscure that anything is wrong by making inferences of actions carried out by one brain half that the other one could not possibly have knowledge of. The bigger problem is that because the brain halves control different parts of the body, we'd likely lose a lot of our physical function.
  - sabarjp 11y ago
    Probably would not be very useful. You would lose motor control of half of your body. When the left half of the brain sleeps, you would be a total mute as well.
- zardo 11y ago
  Sleep has been shown to be a factor in learning, so functions that happen during sleep could be related to learning disabilities. So yeah, being able to induce this state might be very useful for treating some conditions.
- vidarh 11y ago
  If we could accelerate the process and/or control duration and/or induce it at will it would have major implications even if we're unable to remove the need to sleep fully.
ksenzee 11y ago
"The team discovered that this increased flow was possible in part because when mice went to sleep, their brain cells actually shrank, making it easier for fluid to circulate. When an animal woke up, the brain cells enlarged again and the flow between cells slowed to a trickle." So no, probably not.
- amelius 11y ago
  I can't help but wonder if perhaps "dreaming" serves no function but is just a side-effect of our brain-cells shrinking (?)
  - metasean 11y ago
    Or to 'entertain'/'occupy' the still operational brain-cells during the flushing period (like tv shows and movies during long flights or dialysis).
    - Terr_ 11y ago
      Brains are metabolically costly, if it were frivolous is probably wouldn't happen. I'd wager it's more like keeping an engine idling because it's less expensive/dangerous than turning it all the way off and restarting it.
    - Retra 11y ago
      From what I've read, the brain partially 'compartmentalizes' it's communications at regular intervals, and dreaming is what happens when this process finishes: the different compartments start communicating, synthesizing multiple independent thought processes into a cohesive whole. (Which would explain why they can be seemingly random and also relevant of recent events.)
  - qiqing 11y ago
    There is some evidence that dreaming is a side effect of defragging the memories of the day into long-term storage format.
dingbat 11y ago
neurologists at UCLA Alzheimers center have developed a formulation of Curcumin called "Longvida" which appears to reduce the accumulation of this brain plaque: http://alzheimer.neurology.ucla.edu/Curcumin.html http://alzheimer.neurology.ucla.edu/Curcumin.html Curcumin and Alzheimer’s disease. Our group has tested curcumin in several models and found that it not only reduces oxidative damage and inflammation (as expected), but also reduces amyloid accumulation and synaptic marker loss while promoting both amyloid phagocytosis and clearance. In in vitro studies, we found curcumin worked to prevent synaptic marker and cognitive deficits caused by amyloid peptide infusion and abeta oligomer toxicity. Our work on curcumin and AD is discussed in detail in our publications its important to note that it is only the Longvida formulation of Curcumin which effect because it crosses the blood-brain barrier, although other types seem beneficial for other conditions.
- will_work4tears 11y ago
  It seems more that Curcumin that isn't passed into the kidneys can pass the blood-brain barrier[0], and you can help prevent that by taking it with piperine; most formulations, at least on Amazon, have piperine in it, if it doesn't take it with some black peppercorns. It appears the only difference between most formulations and Longvida is that they pair it with coconut oil? That's what I could gather from their formulation, they don't even list piperine. I'm skeptical of the brand in particular, not in the sense that it's bio-available, but their claim that only their brand crosses the blood-brain barrier[1][2]. [0] a lot of sites mention this in passing, but here's a study that shows 7 days of supplementation crosses the blood-brain barrier, at least in mice: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781139/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781139/ [1] http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/01/curcumin%E2%80%99s-ability-to-fight-alzheimer-studied/ http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/01/curcumin%E2%80%99s-abilit... [2] http://www.petesplacenutritionalsupplementblog.com/2014/09/curcuwin-curcumin-vs-longvida.html http://www.petesplacenutritionalsupplementblog.com/2014/09/c...
mbreedlove 11y ago
I use sleepyti.me almost every day, thanks for making it available!
JoshTriplett 11y ago
It seems rather likely that other neurological functions occur during that time as well. Unless we have the ability to simulate all of them, we shouldn't assume that the ones we ignore aren't important. It would be especially harmful if we ended up suppressing the processes that make you feel sleepy when you need sleep, while the harmful effects of sleeplessness remained.
- fapjacks 11y ago
  It makes me wonder then about drugs like Modafinil.
  - mtgx 11y ago
    Or coffee.
    - matznerd 11y ago
      Caffeine directly effects the adenosine receptors [1] which are what regulates sleep and wakefulness [2]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20164566 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20164566 [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030100820400125X http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301008204...
  - matznerd 11y ago
    Modafinil is designed for narcoleptics, people who are theoretically getting too much sleep. It is not actually intended for people to use to stay up beyond the recommended range. If you stay up for multiple days you are increasing the build up of these plaques, because the brain is not able to clear them out while you are awake.
    - qiqing 11y ago
      +1. For some normal* people, taking modafinil increases the risk of major depression as well. * not diagnosed with narcolepsy or depression already
csbrooks 11y ago
It feels like since we evolved under conditions of sleeping for a third of our lives, there are probably lots of other biological mechanisms that depend on sleep happening to work.
- marincounty 11y ago
  I've wondered about that for years. I've always felt the body/mind heals/repairs itself during sleep. It's too bad our economic society doesn't value sleep? Never understood having to arrive at most jobs before 10 a.m. I've had so many jobs that want employees there the job site at 7 a.m.? I show up, but I'm not truly working until afer 10 a.m., and I'm not the only one? Then again--I have honestly never been a morning person.
  - vectorjohn 11y ago
    Seems like a different issue. Nothing about the start time says anything about how much sleep you get. On the other hand people sleep better in the dark so if your start time implies you're going to bed when it's light out it could cause problems. Unless you use a prosthetic night (curtains).
    - developer1 11y ago
      >> On the other hand people sleep better in the dark I don't understand how people manage this. I fall asleep in less than 5 minutes if I lie down while the Sun is up in the morning, and stay solidly asleep until an appropriate number of hours have passed. Going to bed in the dark, I can toss and turn for anywhere from 30-120 minutes before finally dozing off. Night owlism is real, and it's seriously debilitating to be required to conform to working a 9-5/10-6 job. It's Friday night, so I get to live my weekend hours. It's 2:30am now, and I'll be up another few hours. Whenever I am on vacation, or between jobs, I instantly swap to a nocturnal schedule. It is extremely painful to have to work during the day, to the point where I burn out after 12-18 months at a job. For the first time in a decade, I've almost made it 2 years at a single employer. That time is running out. I need a reversion back to my normal hours for a while. :(
jusben1369 11y ago
In general I agree with the other comments that discuss that lack of sleep might have other issues so "work arounds" designed to help pilots and truckers probably aren't a good idea. However and in particular connection to this article there might be people who are at risk for Alzheimer's where it makes sense to "sweep" the brain more than once a day? So normal sleep + another process around 2pm? Not sure if it would work like that but that was what I wondered when reading this/
- qiqing 11y ago
  Like a nap. ;)
  - jusben1369 11y ago
    Hey you don't have to tell me twice! But it sounds like sleeping disorders might make that tough?
    - qiqing 11y ago
      Some people have difficulty falling asleep, and other people have trouble staying asleep (often waking up really early in the morning). The latter is much more common amongst older people, even though the amount of sleep they "need" has not decreased -- they just have a hard time staying asleep for long periods of time. In that scenario (when falling asleep is not the hard part), a nap is probably a pretty good idea.
matznerd 11y ago
This shows the importance of sleep, but also adds to the question of what we can do to facilitate this process while awake. It seems the best we can do when we are awake, is to use neuroprotective substances to prevent the build-up of the plaques or to sequester them for easier breakdown while sleeping. For example, Noopept, the di-peptide form of the nootropic piracetam, has been shown to lower levels of amyloid plaques via "hydrophobic interactions with toxic amyloid oligomers, [which] prompts their rapid sequestration into larger fibrillar amyloid aggregates." In the linked study, researchers concluded that the "mitigating effect of noopept against amyloid oligomeric cytotoxicity may offer additional benefits to the already well-established therapeutic functions of this new pharmaceutical."[1] The abilities of substances like this to protect the brain as we age, are examples of why we need to move major parts of the medical field to focus on preventative and rejuvenating medicine, instead of just treatment for the final symptoms of a disease that has been in progress for decades... Background info: This is a process of what is now called the glymphatic system. The scientest quoted in the article (M. Nedergaard), previously coined the term "glymphatic" in her paper[2] "The Garbage Truck." She was a follow-on author on the paper referenced in the NPR story, "Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain." It is a pretty interesting paper and I have a full-text copy available in my private research vault [3]. [1] http://nootroo.com/researchvault/neuroprotective-and-nootropic-drug-noopept-rescues-a-synuclein-amyloid-cytotoxicity/ http://nootroo.com/researchvault/neuroprotective-and-nootrop... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749839/pdf/nihms500661.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749839/pdf/nihm... [3] http://nootroo.com/researchvault/sleep-drives-metabolite-clearance-from-the-adult-brain/ http://nootroo.com/researchvault/sleep-drives-metabolite-cle...
api 11y ago
If it were easy, think of the evolutionary advantage: you're never vulnerable to predators and you get twice as much working time per day. The fact that sleep still exists seems to suggest that this is hard and involves some nasty tradeoffs between the "dishwasher mode" and more operational neurological states. It's also likely that more than just this occurs, and that sleep is used to take care of a whole laundry list of housekeeping operations. We have "pausing GC"... heh.
- vidarh 11y ago
  > you're never vulnerable to predators Except prior to artificial light sources, you would still be forced to stay sheltered or spend your time huddled up with weapons at the ready. > and you get twice as much working time per day. Until our work consisted of something other than hunting and gathering this would likely not have been all that much of a benefit. On evolutionary timescales it would seem most of our evolution has happened in conditions where we were severely constrained with respect to what we could safely do during the night anyway, and so there'd be relatively little benefit to working around whatever the problems of avoiding sleep are. I don't doubt that cutting sleep will pose all kinds of challenges we're not even aware of yet, though.
  - themusicgod1 11y ago
    On the evolutionary timescale that modern sleep became available, I don't think we're talking weapons.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  > We have "pausing GC"... heh. :) The evolutionary argument is nice but maybe we're just stuck in an old 'branch' local minima. Think of axolotl limb regeneration. We only have partial regeneration but somehow nature felt it was more efficient not to regenerate full limbs and try to survive crippled. Long sleep may have been necessary, but maybe that's not the case anymore.
profinger 11y ago
I've used sleepyti.me a lot when trying to pick bed times for 1 off events. Thank you for your help in waking up at the proper interval!
etrautmann 11y ago
There's reason to believe that there are other processes that would have to co-occur, like an increase in the extracellular space to allow for clearance of these toxins, AB proteins, etc.
chjohasbrouck 11y ago
This might be a weird compliment but I really like your font color choices.
roflmyeggo 11y ago
It's not so simple as simply increasing the amount of CSF influx into the brain, but also increasing interstitial space via adrenergic receptor inhibition. The clearance of beta-amyloid, etc. is largely linked to the state of sleeping that would be tough to isolate without inducing sleeping itself.
dcgoss 11y ago
Was just about to go to bed, when I saw you mentioned that you wrote http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me. Got up to go to my computer to say that I use it all the time!! Thanks for the awesome tool.
conceit 11y ago
The heart is a muscle that needs rest, as well.

Practicality 11y ago

A quote from the article: "It's probably not possible for the brain to both clean itself and at the same time [be] aware of the surroundings and talk and move and so on," So it would be the equivalent of a forced sleep, since you can't be conscious at the same time, but that might still be useful.

mmastrac 11y ago
Perhaps we could do a half-brain sleep like Dolphins? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
- jotm 11y ago
  I wonder how cognitive functions and our personality would be affected? Two halfs make a whole, yin and yang and all that, if half the brain is asleep, would we even be able to think straight?
  - vorg 11y ago
    Maybe that can be the 8 hours a day people do their office jobs.
  - fixermark 11y ago
    So the tradeoff might be that you can operate while half your brain is asleep, but your coworkers might think you're acting a bit crazy? (Not sure precisely how different that is from the experience of most office workers ;) ).
  - qiqing 11y ago
    Hemispherectomy (removal of one half of the brain) is a treatment for Rasmussen's encephalitis when it's sufficiently severe (or the seizures are not responding to drugs). If done very early in life, the plasticity of brain makes it such that those patients grow up to be normally functioning adults. We believe this is because the regions that specialize for different tasks are able to combine their function on the same half. Think of, for instance, the "language" areas (Broca's area and Wernicke's area). (The following over-simplified explanation assumes typical right-hand dominant individuals for the sake of brevity.) If you inactivate that area in the left hemisphere (using drugs or transcranial magnetic stimulation), you'll lose "language" processing of data that occurs around 1 Hz (in English, this corresponds to individual words, phonemes; in tonal languages, this includes tones of lexical significance). If you inactivate that area in the right hemisphere instead, you'll lose "language" processing of data that occurs an order of magnitude slower than that (in most languages, this corresponds to pitch and volume changes over the level of the sentence, and can convey prosody information such as speaker intent as well as speaker identity). Due to specializations like this, hemispherectomies are not performed later in life. You would get symptoms similar to stroke patients. But for all areas, not just language.
    - jotm 11y ago
      So the brain can function normally without a whole half? That's very interesting. Now I'm wondering how much can be removed without adverse effects :-)
      - qiqing 11y ago
        A non-precise answer: a surprisingly large amount if you're careful about which parts to remove and if you do it really, really early in life. ;) In adults (or even adolescents) though, not as much luck. In the case of hemispherectomies on Rasmussen's patients, you can analogize it as: people are dual-core by default. If you remove one of the cores early enough in life (like <5 yrs old), you can re-route the wiring so that processing can done by one of the cores, and still be pretty much normal. But whatever subtle thing is lost when if we don't do parallel processing like we usually do -- that things is pretty subtle to test for as well.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    We would be able to think reasonable normally, apparently, assuming the sleeping half doesn't send confusing signals. There have been quite a bit of research on people with severed brain stems, where the brain halves effectively are cut off from each other and limited to communicating through external senses. In those situations the brain halves are actually exceedingly good at trying to obscure that anything is wrong by making inferences of actions carried out by one brain half that the other one could not possibly have knowledge of. The bigger problem is that because the brain halves control different parts of the body, we'd likely lose a lot of our physical function.
- sabarjp 11y ago
  Probably would not be very useful. You would lose motor control of half of your body. When the left half of the brain sleeps, you would be a total mute as well.
zardo 11y ago
Sleep has been shown to be a factor in learning, so functions that happen during sleep could be related to learning disabilities. So yeah, being able to induce this state might be very useful for treating some conditions.
vidarh 11y ago
If we could accelerate the process and/or control duration and/or induce it at will it would have major implications even if we're unable to remove the need to sleep fully.

ksenzee 11y ago

"The team discovered that this increased flow was possible in part because when mice went to sleep, their brain cells actually shrank, making it easier for fluid to circulate. When an animal woke up, the brain cells enlarged again and the flow between cells slowed to a trickle." So no, probably not.

amelius 11y ago
I can't help but wonder if perhaps "dreaming" serves no function but is just a side-effect of our brain-cells shrinking (?)
- metasean 11y ago
  Or to 'entertain'/'occupy' the still operational brain-cells during the flushing period (like tv shows and movies during long flights or dialysis).
  - Terr_ 11y ago
    Brains are metabolically costly, if it were frivolous is probably wouldn't happen. I'd wager it's more like keeping an engine idling because it's less expensive/dangerous than turning it all the way off and restarting it.
  - Retra 11y ago
    From what I've read, the brain partially 'compartmentalizes' it's communications at regular intervals, and dreaming is what happens when this process finishes: the different compartments start communicating, synthesizing multiple independent thought processes into a cohesive whole. (Which would explain why they can be seemingly random and also relevant of recent events.)
- qiqing 11y ago
  There is some evidence that dreaming is a side effect of defragging the memories of the day into long-term storage format.

dingbat 11y ago

neurologists at UCLA Alzheimers center have developed a formulation of Curcumin called "Longvida" which appears to reduce the accumulation of this brain plaque: http://alzheimer.neurology.ucla.edu/Curcumin.html http://alzheimer.neurology.ucla.edu/Curcumin.html Curcumin and Alzheimer’s disease. Our group has tested curcumin in several models and found that it not only reduces oxidative damage and inflammation (as expected), but also reduces amyloid accumulation and synaptic marker loss while promoting both amyloid phagocytosis and clearance. In in vitro studies, we found curcumin worked to prevent synaptic marker and cognitive deficits caused by amyloid peptide infusion and abeta oligomer toxicity. Our work on curcumin and AD is discussed in detail in our publications its important to note that it is only the Longvida formulation of Curcumin which effect because it crosses the blood-brain barrier, although other types seem beneficial for other conditions.

will_work4tears 11y ago
It seems more that Curcumin that isn't passed into the kidneys can pass the blood-brain barrier[0], and you can help prevent that by taking it with piperine; most formulations, at least on Amazon, have piperine in it, if it doesn't take it with some black peppercorns. It appears the only difference between most formulations and Longvida is that they pair it with coconut oil? That's what I could gather from their formulation, they don't even list piperine. I'm skeptical of the brand in particular, not in the sense that it's bio-available, but their claim that only their brand crosses the blood-brain barrier[1][2]. [0] a lot of sites mention this in passing, but here's a study that shows 7 days of supplementation crosses the blood-brain barrier, at least in mice: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781139/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781139/ [1] http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/01/curcumin%E2%80%99s-ability-to-fight-alzheimer-studied/ http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/01/curcumin%E2%80%99s-abilit... [2] http://www.petesplacenutritionalsupplementblog.com/2014/09/curcuwin-curcumin-vs-longvida.html http://www.petesplacenutritionalsupplementblog.com/2014/09/c...

mbreedlove 11y ago

I use sleepyti.me almost every day, thanks for making it available!

JoshTriplett 11y ago

It seems rather likely that other neurological functions occur during that time as well. Unless we have the ability to simulate all of them, we shouldn't assume that the ones we ignore aren't important. It would be especially harmful if we ended up suppressing the processes that make you feel sleepy when you need sleep, while the harmful effects of sleeplessness remained.

fapjacks 11y ago
It makes me wonder then about drugs like Modafinil.
- mtgx 11y ago
  Or coffee.
  - matznerd 11y ago
    Caffeine directly effects the adenosine receptors [1] which are what regulates sleep and wakefulness [2]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20164566 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20164566 [2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030100820400125X http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301008204...
- matznerd 11y ago
  Modafinil is designed for narcoleptics, people who are theoretically getting too much sleep. It is not actually intended for people to use to stay up beyond the recommended range. If you stay up for multiple days you are increasing the build up of these plaques, because the brain is not able to clear them out while you are awake.
  - qiqing 11y ago
    +1. For some normal* people, taking modafinil increases the risk of major depression as well. * not diagnosed with narcolepsy or depression already

csbrooks 11y ago

It feels like since we evolved under conditions of sleeping for a third of our lives, there are probably lots of other biological mechanisms that depend on sleep happening to work.

marincounty 11y ago
I've wondered about that for years. I've always felt the body/mind heals/repairs itself during sleep. It's too bad our economic society doesn't value sleep? Never understood having to arrive at most jobs before 10 a.m. I've had so many jobs that want employees there the job site at 7 a.m.? I show up, but I'm not truly working until afer 10 a.m., and I'm not the only one? Then again--I have honestly never been a morning person.
- vectorjohn 11y ago
  Seems like a different issue. Nothing about the start time says anything about how much sleep you get. On the other hand people sleep better in the dark so if your start time implies you're going to bed when it's light out it could cause problems. Unless you use a prosthetic night (curtains).
  - developer1 11y ago
    >> On the other hand people sleep better in the dark I don't understand how people manage this. I fall asleep in less than 5 minutes if I lie down while the Sun is up in the morning, and stay solidly asleep until an appropriate number of hours have passed. Going to bed in the dark, I can toss and turn for anywhere from 30-120 minutes before finally dozing off. Night owlism is real, and it's seriously debilitating to be required to conform to working a 9-5/10-6 job. It's Friday night, so I get to live my weekend hours. It's 2:30am now, and I'll be up another few hours. Whenever I am on vacation, or between jobs, I instantly swap to a nocturnal schedule. It is extremely painful to have to work during the day, to the point where I burn out after 12-18 months at a job. For the first time in a decade, I've almost made it 2 years at a single employer. That time is running out. I need a reversion back to my normal hours for a while. :(

jusben1369 11y ago

In general I agree with the other comments that discuss that lack of sleep might have other issues so "work arounds" designed to help pilots and truckers probably aren't a good idea. However and in particular connection to this article there might be people who are at risk for Alzheimer's where it makes sense to "sweep" the brain more than once a day? So normal sleep + another process around 2pm? Not sure if it would work like that but that was what I wondered when reading this/

qiqing 11y ago
Like a nap. ;)
- jusben1369 11y ago
  Hey you don't have to tell me twice! But it sounds like sleeping disorders might make that tough?
  - qiqing 11y ago
    Some people have difficulty falling asleep, and other people have trouble staying asleep (often waking up really early in the morning). The latter is much more common amongst older people, even though the amount of sleep they "need" has not decreased -- they just have a hard time staying asleep for long periods of time. In that scenario (when falling asleep is not the hard part), a nap is probably a pretty good idea.

matznerd 11y ago

This shows the importance of sleep, but also adds to the question of what we can do to facilitate this process while awake. It seems the best we can do when we are awake, is to use neuroprotective substances to prevent the build-up of the plaques or to sequester them for easier breakdown while sleeping. For example, Noopept, the di-peptide form of the nootropic piracetam, has been shown to lower levels of amyloid plaques via "hydrophobic interactions with toxic amyloid oligomers, [which] prompts their rapid sequestration into larger fibrillar amyloid aggregates." In the linked study, researchers concluded that the "mitigating effect of noopept against amyloid oligomeric cytotoxicity may offer additional benefits to the already well-established therapeutic functions of this new pharmaceutical."[1] The abilities of substances like this to protect the brain as we age, are examples of why we need to move major parts of the medical field to focus on preventative and rejuvenating medicine, instead of just treatment for the final symptoms of a disease that has been in progress for decades... Background info: This is a process of what is now called the glymphatic system. The scientest quoted in the article (M. Nedergaard), previously coined the term "glymphatic" in her paper[2] "The Garbage Truck." She was a follow-on author on the paper referenced in the NPR story, "Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain." It is a pretty interesting paper and I have a full-text copy available in my private research vault [3]. [1] http://nootroo.com/researchvault/neuroprotective-and-nootropic-drug-noopept-rescues-a-synuclein-amyloid-cytotoxicity/ http://nootroo.com/researchvault/neuroprotective-and-nootrop... [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749839/pdf/nihms500661.pdf http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749839/pdf/nihm... [3] http://nootroo.com/researchvault/sleep-drives-metabolite-clearance-from-the-adult-brain/ http://nootroo.com/researchvault/sleep-drives-metabolite-cle...

api 11y ago

If it were easy, think of the evolutionary advantage: you're never vulnerable to predators and you get twice as much working time per day. The fact that sleep still exists seems to suggest that this is hard and involves some nasty tradeoffs between the "dishwasher mode" and more operational neurological states. It's also likely that more than just this occurs, and that sleep is used to take care of a whole laundry list of housekeeping operations. We have "pausing GC"... heh.

vidarh 11y ago
> you're never vulnerable to predators Except prior to artificial light sources, you would still be forced to stay sheltered or spend your time huddled up with weapons at the ready. > and you get twice as much working time per day. Until our work consisted of something other than hunting and gathering this would likely not have been all that much of a benefit. On evolutionary timescales it would seem most of our evolution has happened in conditions where we were severely constrained with respect to what we could safely do during the night anyway, and so there'd be relatively little benefit to working around whatever the problems of avoiding sleep are. I don't doubt that cutting sleep will pose all kinds of challenges we're not even aware of yet, though.
- themusicgod1 11y ago
  On the evolutionary timescale that modern sleep became available, I don't think we're talking weapons.
agumonkey 11y ago
> We have "pausing GC"... heh. :) The evolutionary argument is nice but maybe we're just stuck in an old 'branch' local minima. Think of axolotl limb regeneration. We only have partial regeneration but somehow nature felt it was more efficient not to regenerate full limbs and try to survive crippled. Long sleep may have been necessary, but maybe that's not the case anymore.

profinger 11y ago

I've used sleepyti.me a lot when trying to pick bed times for 1 off events. Thank you for your help in waking up at the proper interval!

etrautmann 11y ago

There's reason to believe that there are other processes that would have to co-occur, like an increase in the extracellular space to allow for clearance of these toxins, AB proteins, etc.

chjohasbrouck 11y ago

This might be a weird compliment but I really like your font color choices.

roflmyeggo 11y ago

It's not so simple as simply increasing the amount of CSF influx into the brain, but also increasing interstitial space via adrenergic receptor inhibition. The clearance of beta-amyloid, etc. is largely linked to the state of sleeping that would be tough to isolate without inducing sleeping itself.

dcgoss 11y ago

Was just about to go to bed, when I saw you mentioned that you wrote http://sleepyti.me http://sleepyti.me. Got up to go to my computer to say that I use it all the time!! Thanks for the awesome tool.

conceit 11y ago

The heart is a muscle that needs rest, as well.