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Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

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Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#151
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a mistake to use the term “hallucinate” in AI. It’s a decent metaphor but it’s best to avoid terms prone to anthropomorphism.

It’s less “hallucination” and more “confabulation”

It's "hallucination" because we got image generation before text generation, but yes this is a better term.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#152

Tangentially related, but very important to me and hopefully helpful to others here: I have sleep apnea. So do most of the men in my family. Though I am overweight, I haven't always been, but I have always had the condition, as have they. For those who don't know, sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing in your sleep, wake up slightly to fix that and start breathing again, and then fall back asleep. It so…

FWIW I had moderate sleep apnea (nowhere near as bad as what you're describing) and I "cured" it by forcing myself to breathe through my nose at least 90% of the time, including when sleeping. Some people tape their mouth shut, but I can't do that - I have a beard. Breathing through the nose seems to have fixed the permanently runny nose as well, I don't know why. I know it's all individual and what worked for me might not work for everyone, but IMO it's worth a try. The downside is, until the corresponding musculature regains strength you will feel like you're out of air. It'll take 3-4 weeks to fully adjust. It'll pass, don't worry.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#153
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy to get, hard to get used to for many. It’s common for doctors to offer little to no support after prescribing the machine.

How would support look like in this situation? Honest question I simply don't know

I think it would be a good case for handing off from the prescribing doctor to some kind of home health aid / respiratory therapist who can make house calls and help make adjustments at the home.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#154
post #17

Whatever sleep does, it's something nature has had a tough time optimizing out despite the extreme vulnerability it creates and the sacrifice of a little under half an organism's waking time. That should tell us it's something incredibly important that's hard to do any other way. Edit: on the other hand... if Earth had two suns and rarely had periods of darkness, you wonder if maybe there would have been more evoluti…

Alternately, sleep is the optimal ultra-high-efficiency survival state and wakefulness only exists to give creatures enough time to get their affairs in order so that they can safely return to dormancy. It's easy to think of sleep as a compromise to be defeated because we're culturally preoccupied with the achievements and pleasures of wakefulness, but that's really just us claiming personal preference for one narrow…

"Hurry up and idle" for CPU design ended up being great for power efficiency. Nature came to the same conclusion for biological organisms a long time ago.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#155
post #79

Running improved my sleep quality dramatically. Now the problem is, that if I take a day off running, my sleeping suffers. Curious if people that do weight lifting (which I'm considering) get great sleeps? Maybe I can alternate between cardio and weight lifting each day?

I bodybuild, and when I'm lifting hard -- especially peaking volume at the end of a mesocycle -- my body CRAVES sleep. I'll fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow and sleep 8 to 9 hours basically straight through.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#156
We work in the neurotech/sleeptech space, specifically with the stimulation which was VERY poorly described in this article where they discuss "pink noise".

They point to one small study in 7 participants, but slow-wave enhancement (increasing slow-wave delta power) has over a decade of research, including 4 recent papers in older adults looking at Alzheimer's both as a preventative measure and as management of symptoms (we can't say treatment yet, that's still many studies away).

We provide our technology to researchers, and are preparing our consumer product.

You can find more on our website, as well as links to a few of the more relevant studies at https://affectablesleep.com

How I describe the technology is that slow-wave activity is the synchronous firing of neurons, the hallmark and defining feature of deep sleep. We can't create slow-waves, but we can increase the electrical activity, increase the synchronous firing of neurons, which is like giving the glymphatic system an extra boost of power. This enhances the restorative function of the brain, without altering sleep time.

I should be completing our whitepaper which provides a more in depth look at the technology, the state of sleep, and a large chronological list of how the research has progressed over the last decade.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#157
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a mistake to use the term “hallucinate” in AI. It’s a decent metaphor but it’s best to avoid terms prone to anthropomorphism.

It’s less “hallucination” and more “confabulation”

It's less "confabulation" than "pattern-based statistical prediction"

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't used an alarm clock in 20 years and wake up within the same 5-10 minute window almost every day. I have a friend that will just sleep through multiple alarms. But he can also just fall asleep in 10 minutes on an airplane and I can't sleep at all on a plane. He also takes lots of naps and I never take a nap unless I'm sick. The worst feeling to me is waking up from some external noise. I just feel so groggy…

Wasn't there supposed to be a smart watch out there you could set a window of time you wanted to wake up like "between 6:30 and 7:00" where it would use the sleep tracking to pick the optimal time to wake you up like at the end of a REM cycle? I feel like I must have hallucinated this because I'm wearing a smart watch (fitbit) now and no such feature exists.

There's an Android app called "Sleep" that does this without the watch. You put your phone on the corner of your bed and it figures out how awake you are with the accelerometer.

Quick edit, I guess the name changed slightly: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#159

Tangentially related, but very important to me and hopefully helpful to others here: I have sleep apnea. So do most of the men in my family. Though I am overweight, I haven't always been, but I have always had the condition, as have they. For those who don't know, sleep apnea is a condition where you stop breathing in your sleep, wake up slightly to fix that and start breathing again, and then fall back asleep. It so…

My hypopnea (pre-apnea) is getting resolved as I have lost a lot of weight by following a program using GLP-1 meds. I also no longer have knee discomfort when hiking or doing long climbs on my bike (used to wear a sleeve beforehand to do that). Not to mention, I just look and feel better.

CPAP is a life-saver for sure, but treating your underlying causes of apnea can often help as well.

Re: Sleep is essential – researchers are trying to work out why

#160

I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's hard to understand why anyone thinks that this mandatory downtime for all animals is just for a special reason. Why wouldn't sleeping be a catch-all window for autonomous maintenance and overall survival? Always take the most likely reason.

It seems that given the options of 1) staying awake and active as normal during the night and 2) using the night period to run various maintenance task but without awareness the second option apparently turned out to be the winner as far as evolution is concerned. What's interesting to me is how many animals beyond humans do it - so it's not purely tied to the human cognitive functions like higher order thinking etc.

I think part of the answer is that our world is just very conducive to hidey-holes. There isn't that much surface area you need to cover in a three-dimensional space to get protection from the elements and other predation, and there's an awful lot of stuff out there (trees, dirt, etc) you could comfortably use to do it.
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