Engineering Sleep
minjunes.ai
Engineering Sleep
1–10 of 205 posts
Re: Engineering Sleep
#2How about — instead of making sleep more "efficient" — we engineer our lives to provide decent amount of sleep and not stress over having more and more of the waking hours to do stuff.
After all, we live in the age of abundance.
(Though I admit I might not be the best person to ask for this as I am on the lower end of how much sleep I need)
Re: Engineering Sleep
#3I read nancy kress / beggars in spain as a teenager and get such an eerie vibe from short sleeper research
but also let's go, if a giraffe can sleep 2 hours so can I
Re: Engineering Sleep
#4How about — instead of making sleep more "efficient" — we engineer our lives to provide decent amount of sleep and not stress over having more and more of the waking hours to do stuff. After all, we live in the age of abundance . (Though I admit I might not be the best person to ask for this as I am on the lower end of how much sleep I need)
[deleted]
Re: Engineering Sleep
#5Why is it not a survival advantage? Probably because we didn't work 18 hour days, the extra wakeness would just be used for rest.
Night shifts that anyone can do are still needed if you need tribal watchers, and normal 8hr sleeping people can wake upnand fight when needed.
In terms of the gene, I am suprised how rare it is (90 families?) given I have met someone who needs only 4hr sleep.
Another point is less sleep doesn't mean you can do 2 more hours work a day. That is another vector: how much work per day (physical, mental) can be done.
Re: Engineering Sleep
#6For the afficionados, there's an excellent paper titled "The neurobiological basis of narcolepsy" published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience which examines the relationship between orexin and sleep as it relates to narcolepsy patients: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6492289/
In narcolepsy type 1 (NT1), patients have severely diminished orexin levels. This appears to cause them to inappropriately enter REM sleep.
OP notes that the mutation lowering the sleep requirement causes an increase in orexin. I wonder whether the increased orexin could be inhibiting REM and perhaps facilitating a more restful architecture of sleep. Alternatively, perhaps elevated orexin levels during the day cause wakefulness such that you just don't need as much sleep, regardless of how efficient the sleep is.
It would be interesting to compare sleep tracking data of people with and without this mutation to see if there are significant differences in time spent in different sleep stages.
Re: Engineering Sleep
#7If there was in fact a safe pathway to only needing 2 hours of sleep I would 100% use it and consider it a zero to one innovation. Although I think it would also come with a lot of pushback. One of my favourite questions to ask people is "if there was a way that allowed you to not sleep and be completely fine, would you take it?". Surprisingly (or maybe not) most people will answer no and say they like sleep to much.
I think most people aren't trying to squeeze the maximum amount of time efficiency from their day. They don't like sleep because they need it, they like sleep because its synonymous to relaxing. So less sleep means less relaxing.
Re: Engineering Sleep
#8How about — instead of making sleep more "efficient" — we engineer our lives to provide decent amount of sleep and not stress over having more and more of the waking hours to do stuff. After all, we live in the age of abundance . (Though I admit I might not be the best person to ask for this as I am on the lower end of how much sleep I need)
How about engineering the society/civilization(?)/world so that "all can" work hard (8hrs), rest hard (8hrs), live hard (8hrs) and die hard when the eventuality arrives?
Re: Engineering Sleep
#9How about — instead of making sleep more "efficient" — we engineer our lives to provide decent amount of sleep and not stress over having more and more of the waking hours to do stuff. After all, we live in the age of abundance . (Though I admit I might not be the best person to ask for this as I am on the lower end of how much sleep I need)
Not sure why almostlit’s reply is grey and dead (sorry I can’t even ote to resurrect it).
Re: Engineering Sleep
#10I wonder if this would give full energy/mental capacity with 4 hours sleep after drinking alcohol