“How To Hack Your Brain”
June 26th, 2009 @ 11:49
Posted by: John
It seems that all you really need to survive and feel rested is the REM phase, which is only a tiny portion of your actual sleep phases at night. You only spend 1-2 hours in REM sleep during any given night, and the rest is wasted on the other seemingly useless phases. This is where the opportunity to hack the brain presents itself. What if you could find a way to cut out the other phases and gain 4-5 more hours of productive wakeful time?
hacking your brain doesn’t sound too good but this is an interesting article on sleep. I don’t know if all of you know but David Priest is in the sleep business. He’ll tell you that surprising little is known about sleep. Many people believe that the reason we sleep during all the dark hours is a leftover instinct to be laying down quietly when predators are prowling. I pointed out to him once that that doesn’t quite fit with the theory of natural selection because humans still snore. You would think the lions and bears would have easily found and eaten all the snorers, removing that trait from the gene pool. He and I agree that we wish snoring had been eradicated by bears. Some wives snore and even turn and face you at night and snore really loud in your ear. And you stare at them, wide awake, and wonder if you opened a door would a bear come in. Our clinical trials indicate no but we feel it’s because there aren’t sufficient bears in our yards. We would like to improve the test conditions and that’s why we keep suggesting these camping trips.
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[smiley]
how can you afford to do that without any ads?
Are you going to go?
June 28th, 2009 16:49
Well I read the blog link on polyphasic sleep and all I can say is:
No no no no no no no no!!!!!!
There is actually a great deal of very exciting and amazing data about the neurological basis of sleep. Recent experimental results indicate that Stages 1 and 2 are very essential for problem solving and thus for survival. REM is now known to be several processes, including consolidation of short term to long term memory. And lot’s of tissue repair is now thought to take place in Stage 3 sleep. Also, growth hormones are secreted at specific times of the night in growing kids.
So trying to run on REM only would only work by building up REM pressure through sleep deprivation, which can also result in waking hallucinations (REM breakthrough while awake) and micro sleeps (involuntary lapses into sleep).
In other words, “Don’t try this at home kids!”
That said, I strongly support the bears in the woods experiment, as long as I am the observer and not the subject. And what about our catapult project?
June 28th, 2009 18:09
Yes, I understand the benefits of the catapult project – clean. But the benefit of the bear method is that the bear would wander off under it’s own steam but the catapult would just sit there and have to covered with a tarp. We’d have to stand it front of it and say “what catapult?” “Oh, so trailing off into the distance the neighbors heard, “I’m gonna get you Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavvvvvviiiiiiiidddd! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”