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I feel like I'd want the opposite of this - something that mimics the cleaning process of sleep that you could use in the afternoon for a nap or etc.
by nemomarx 2mo ago
I feel like I'd want the opposite of this - something that mimics the cleaning process of sleep that you could use in the afternoon for a nap or etc.
- strictnein 2mo agoBy mimic do you mean it does the cleaning process or just that you feel like it did? If it was the former, that would be very interesting.
- hamdingers 2mo agoThe latter is how caffeine works. Blocks adenosine receptors so you don't feel tired even though you are.
- Gooblebrai 2mo agoIf you don't feel tired, are you really? I'm curious what are the objective metrics to determine someone is tired
- usui 2mo agoIsn't the answer yes if people still die from overwork despite being caffeined up?
- odo1242 2mo agoCaffeine doesn't actually do any of the things sleep does to your brain. If you drink coffee during a late night, you won't feel as tired, but your brain performs worse, your reflexes are slower, you're less likely to remember things, etc. It's like painting over a rusted car instead of properly maintaining it, basically.
- binary132 2mo agoI think GP was just making a point about the fact that “tired” is a subjective experience, like pain. Arguably, if you’re on pain medication, you’re not in pain, even if your body is sending pain signals that your brain just isn’t receiving or paying attention to.
- Gooblebrai 2mo agoIndeed. Pain is also interesting because chronic pain, AFAIK is sometimes a misfiring of pain signals even when nothing is physically wrong. Turning off that misfiring with drugs would be dangerous (pain is an alert) but also improve the quality of life of so many people!
- npunt 2mo agoTiredness is a signal that the body/brain needs rest so the glymphatic system can go to work. You can lose the signal but still need rest. If your brain doesn't flush metabolic waste periodically you develop brain fog, bad memory, and increased risk of Alzheimer's, and you'll eventually die, as sleep deprivation studies have found.
- jkahrs595 2mo agoIf I’m on morphine is my leg even still broken?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- wmf 2mo agoMichael Jackson is the ultimate case study for this.
- burningChrome 2mo agoYou have the ability to mentally push through a lot of stuff, but there are a host of signals your body will use to warn you such as: cognitive performance (although this is hard for yourself to actually admit its happening), behavioral indicators like yawning, head bobbing, frequent posture changes, and slowed speech are just a few indicators. Irritability is another big red flag. I've only had two instances where I ignored all the signs and continue to push on until my body literally shut down on me. Finals week in college as an architecture student trying to finish a final studio project, and study for four finals. 5 days, 3 hours of sleep. That was one of them.
- baueric 2mo agoso the former then
- baueric 2mo agosorry I'm dumb and read it wrong
- anigbrowl 2mo agoWhat if we just normalized taking naps more often?
- semiquaver 2mo agoNot everyone can nap. Besides, the need to nap is an indicator of poor sleep. Why not just normalize sleeping properly (nb: rhetorical question)?
- rendx 2mo ago> the need to nap is an indicator of poor sleep. Is it? Where do you get that from? I remember the NASA doing extensive sleep studies, determining that the optimal pattern would consist of basically "naps only"? I've been sleeping my adult life in usually 2x3-4h "shifts", which I also remember reading is a historically often used pattern. I do not see any negative effects.
- finalcoalgebra 2mo agoWild to read this about your sleep pattern. Please explain more. I find myself needing to sleep like 12+ hours every day.
- rendx 2mo agoWhat do you want to know? I do not track my sleeping hours. I guess it started in school, where I always stayed up way too late, so I used an afternoon sleep to catch up. I continued like that. I despise alarm clocks, I think it goes against natural sleep rhythm and is bad for mental and physical health. We should ban them in civilized societies. I see it as one of the biggest luxuries of my life that I only have to use them on very limited occasions. I also never grasped the concept of "every Monday at 10 am, you have to be willing and able to work". I don't understand how that can be done without messing you up after a few years. I made it a necessity to only work jobs where I can decide on my hours with sufficient flexibility. Some weeks I work 80 hours if I feel it, some weeks I work only 10 if I don't. I co-founded a couple of projects, rarely had a boss to report to, and if I did, they cared about results and not when. People are always more than happy with my 'productivity' and amazed at my flexibility. For clients/business partners, I actually seem to be available more often in terms of time slots than others with fixed "day" hours. I also mostly work(ed) in international teams, so people are all over the place in terms of timezone anyway (and a few at a time traveling around to conferences etc). In my relationships, we either cuddle and I stay around until my partner sleeps and I quietly get up again to enjoy the quiet late hours (some of the best productivity, if I feel it!) and then come back later, or I sleep for a few hours next to them, and wake up early. I can then use early quiet hours for myself or for work, and then without stress prepare our breakfast. My second sleep shift is flexible, sometimes as early as 8 or 9 am, sometimes as late as 4pm - but usually within a certain more limited range for some months at a time. As long as I feel it. I actually consider this to be "normal/natural", and what most other people seem to be doing "wild". :)
- volkercraig 2mo agoIf you want something that displaces adenosine from your neurons you are in luck, because it already exists and is very easy to get; It's called methamphetamine
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoSleep isn't about cleaning. It might include cleaning, but I don't believe for a second that cleaning is the main function. Why? Cleaning is easy to optimize yet sleep is evidently hard to optimize. Going unconscious for a big chunk of the day in a world where everything wants to eat you is a crazy price to pay, yet sleep is highly conserved across species under this extreme selective pressure. Even the animals famous for avoiding sleep don't really avoid sleep so much as bend the rules! Seals partially wake up to breathe, migrating birds sleep a hemisphere of their brain at a time, but they all sleep. This didn't happen because "pumps are slow" or "filtering is hard." Biology is excellent at copy-paste-reinventing that stuff. Optimizing the pumps and filters is not something evolution would have struggled to do if it could have meant not going unconscious for a third of the day. Especially for organisms with small brains where the transport logistics are trivial. IMO the much more likely explanation is that the brain uses contrastive learning somewhere. We know animal brains don't use backpropagation to train and contrastive learning is one of the biggest competing family of techniques. Instead of using calculus and outer products to calculate derivatives, you feed real data and false data forward through the network and each neuron tracks and trains on the difference. This can be batched -- many CL techniques could handle 16 hours of real data followed by 8 hours of false data -- but the false data can't be put off forever, or the contrast signal goes away. Also, you probably want to inactivate I/O while the false data is flowing through. In other words: sleep emerges from first-principles on the category of neural network learning techniques that the brain probably uses. I don't think anyone was seriously about to shoot up with sleep-replacement peptides, but also: don't. Let someone else figure this out the hard way.
- redox99 2mo agoI think you overestimate the disadvantages of sleep. It's very species dependent, for some it might be a disadvantage because you're more vulnerable to predators, for others it's an advantage because you spend less energy. If you're safe you really only need enough wake time to eat and reproduce.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoIf you're safe.
- smallnix 2mo agoIt's in the article no? > Orexin antagonists (which block the molecules’ actions rather than mimicking it, and thus promote sleep), have been available since 2014 as treatments for insomnia. They work differently from conventional sleeping pills, which enhance GABA, one of the brain’s main inhibitory neurotransmitters. Birgitte Kornum, an expert on orexins at the University of Copenhagen, says such pills induce sedation rather than natural sleep and often lose effectiveness with continued use. Orexin antagonists instead turn down the brain’s wakefulness signal, letting its sleep-promoting systems take over. Evidence suggests this produces better sleep, with less risk of dependence and fewer long-term problems.
- nemomarx 2mo agoThat's just a sleep med, right? I mean something to let you get the repair and cleaning faster, not just induce sleep.
- vrc 2mo agoI’ve used both Belsomra (suvorexant) and Quviviq (daridorexant) and compared to the litany of other sleeping aids, Quviviq in particular is great for me in terms of not being groggy, not knocking me out standing up in case I somehow don’t sleep or need to do something. No rebound on days I run out or if I stop. Feels quite natural—I imagine it feels like what most normal sleepers feel like every evening. It’s nearly impossible for many to get them, tho… Edit: To add some academic merit — there’s been research for its use for cognitive decline [0] [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s44323-025-00025-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s44323-025-00025-5
- bluemoonx 2mo agoThis would be incredible. The closest thing now is amphetamine but it turns people into maniacs - presumably the action here is not actually the brain cleaning function of sleep, rather just preventing reuptake of neurotransmitting chemicals that would cause it, if allowed. Would be nice to truly provide the mechanism in a synthetic form - I wonder what it would feel like to have the brain “slept” while awake.
- normalaccess 2mo agoSounds like the plot to a horror movie.
- gizajob 2mo agoThis will likely turn them into a different flavour of maniac. Just go to bed.