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BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Never sleep again.



Thursday, November 23, 2006  

Never sleep again.


If you've read this blog long enough to know my feelings on sleep, then you'll easily predict my ecstatic reaction to the information found in this news item on New Scientist.
Modafinil is just the first of a wave of new lifestyle drugs that promise to do for sleep what the contraceptive pill did for sex - unshackle it from nature. Since time immemorial, humans have structured their lives around sleep. In the near future, we will, for the first time, be able to significantly structure the way we sleep to suit our lifestyles.

"The more we understand about the body's 24-hour clock the more we will be able to override it," says Russell Foster, a circadian biologist at Imperial College London. "In 10 to 20 years we'll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening." Foster envisages a world where it's possible, or even routine, for people to be active for 22 hours a day and sleep for two.
They say this drug, and others being developed, are just perfect in every way. They let you sleep real sleep; not just the addictive, knock out drug junk on the market now. Other drugs will let you get less rest and still feel refreshed, and the future might even hold implanted knock out switches that would instantly put you to sleep or wake you up.

Sure, it would suck to be the slave laborer hooked up to one of these, as you’re made to work 22 hours a day, but let's just pretend it won't be misused and will actually work as hoped; what a joy it would be to have 20 or more hours a day to do stuff in? Yeah, these drugs will probably take 10 years off your life, but if you get 4-6 hours a day more activity now, in your prime, you'd still come out ahead on total waking time, eh?

The question though, is are they permanent? Can you go off the drugs and get good sleep; 8+ hours if you're on vacation or catching up over a holiday (like say Thanksgiving, as my 10 hours last night attest) or just want to luxuriate one day? Or would you sleep 5 hours and be wide awake at 4am without any chance of sleeping again for at least a day?

I'm certainly not counting on this sort of thing working in the immediate future, but I do love the idea, as much as I dislike the many wasted hours I spend sleeping. Hell, if I had another 2-4 hours every day of waking life, I'd actually find the time to play computer games, or update this blog regularly again!

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and of course 5 years after that they'll find that the excessive amounts of being awake stress the heart an inordinate amount or something like that.


 

Flux, I think you once blogged about polyphasic sleep, but I honestly can't remember. I'm surprised you haven't tried it yourself though--in a nutshell, you sleep in 30 minute spurts every 6 hours, for a total of 2 hours every 24. The trick is training your brain and body to enter REM sleep immediately, so you get the most rest in the shortest amount of time. People whom are on this schedule say they remain very alert despite the low sleep numbers, but it's not been tested long term, so risks like heart disease, cancer, obesity, or any other myriad of crap are fairly unknown.

It also has the problem of a rigid schedule--if you miss one of those 30 minute blocks, you're probably screwed, and not in a good way.

On a side note/fun fact, Batman (the comic hero, not any of the actors that played him) was said to be on a Polyphasic sleep schedule so he could guard the city by night and be international billionaire playboy by day.


 

Never blog again?


 

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