A future without sleep?

I've seen a lot of people all over the internet responding to this article, with the title of "Snorting a brain chemical could replace sleep".

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/12/sleep_deprivation

I don't believe this is the case. The function of sleep, which comprises at least half of most our lives yet isn't even fully understood scientifically, seems to be a lot of theories. Most of these theories involve the process of sleep and dreaming in the formation of long-term memory, which gets disrupted along with sleep disruption. I'm sure anyone can relate here - Try doing anything that you need your long-term memory for, like school, with very little sleep. Good luck! Long-term memory, dreaming, and keeping all these things constant and regular are all part of keeping our sense of reality constant and regular.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_learning



To conclude this post, here's something else I posted on a forum where somebody posted the link:

"We have these other precedents, and it's not clear that you can't use orexin A temporarily to reduce sleep," said Siegel. "On the other hand, you'd have to be a fool to advocate taking this and reducing sleep as much as possible."

Okay, try this. Set your alarm clock to wake you up at, say, 3:00 in the morning every night, to interrupt your REM sleep and drop your sweet dreams.

Guess what eventually happens? That's right, psychosis! This is half of the reason that people with amphetamine problems develop psychosis, and I'm sure you can all think of at least one person in your life that ended up like that at least for a short period of time with speed or coke (If it were true that speed -> psychosis by itself we'd have tons of people being treated for "adhd" really quite fucked up all the time and it wouldn't be a med for that). As far as I can tell, dreaming (And, of course, sleep which you need for dreaming) has a LOT to do with how we develop our own sense of reality. I remember reading in this berenstein bears book [I think that's what it was] when I was a little kid, and mama bear said something like "our memories of the past day are in our heads like a scrambled jigsaw puzzle, and when we dream it's like putting the jigsaw puzzle back together". Makes sense, right?

Wake me up to sleep replacement when we find a way to also replace the functions of sleep ;)

Wed, Jan 2, 2008  Permanent link