71–80 of 80 posts
A lot of comments here dismiss the study for having a small N. Exploratory research uses small N at the start. This kind of research can have value even if it is not conclusive. Imagine the expense (and dominance of Big Research) if every study needed 100,000 participants to run. If you don’t want to read exploratory studies, ignore them when they hit the headline news. Other criticisms of this study (e.g., participa…
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Perhaps too meta or off topic but I thought it was funny that you thought their n was low and then cited a story about one person.
The way I’m understanding it is that it’s more that if there’s a real population of people like his wife, that is only 5 percent of the actual population or even higher, for example, it may not be caught by such a small sample size.
I grew up in South East Asia with air con running all night, when I moved away I found it hard to sleep in 'quieter' countries
I noticed I'd feel sleepy after more than half an hour in the server room. Likely the fan noise but the lower temperature might influence it as well. Unfortunately too expensive and large to set this up in the bedroom to help me sleep nowadays.
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The thing that stood out more to me than the n being low is "the participants reported not previously using noise to help them sleep or having any sleep disorders." Sleeping with pink noise seems like something that you'd end up getting acclimated to. My n=1 is that I often sleep with a fan on and live in NYC -- whenever I stay in a place where there is no noise I tend to have trouble sleeping, so I end up turning on…
Yeah that seems silly. I was a quiet-room sleeper until I met my wife, who needs some kind of white noise to sleep. I eventually adapted and now sleep much better with noise than without (at least subjectively), but that change took a while, at least several months. I found it quite difficult to sleep with for a while.
study aside, pink noise is awful imo - it's perfect if you're calibrating a PA system and need specific power spectral density properties, but bad for my brain. if sleeping somewhere without a fan or whatever i use brown noise, it's closer to a lower rumbling.
I really like brown noise at night. My immediate thought about this article was that I'd love to see this study on brown noise (albeit, with more participants). Second thought was that, I wonder if some A/B testing with my garmin watch would give signal on this. Life is probably too hectic to get real signal.
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This reminds me of an old Wired interview with Danny Hillis when he developed a system called Babble that used unintelligible vocal bits as background sound to help concentration, too bad it never really went anywhere. https://www.wired.com/2005/06/applied-minds-think-remarkably...
A number of noise generators have that sort of nonsensical babble as a component of the sound. For instance https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerat... Nothing that your mind has enough edges on to try to interpret, but vaguely human-like.
Researchers observed 25 healthy adults, ages 21 to 41, in a sleep laboratory during eight-hour sleep opportunities over seven consecutive nights. Absurdly low n . Additionally, I've become very skeptical of anything coming out of sleep labs after my wife was sent to one (at a prestigious teaching hospital) by her doctor some years ago: the 'sleep opportunity' was lights out at 9pm for 8 hours, and the staff were whol…
That is a low n, but I’m not sure what the alternative is. Surely random anecdotes (n=1) are even less powerful?
Researchers observed 25 healthy adults, ages 21 to 41, in a sleep laboratory during eight-hour sleep opportunities over seven consecutive nights. Absurdly low n . Additionally, I've become very skeptical of anything coming out of sleep labs after my wife was sent to one (at a prestigious teaching hospital) by her doctor some years ago: the 'sleep opportunity' was lights out at 9pm for 8 hours, and the staff were whol…
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I'm not inviting you to draw conclusions from my semi-random (but informed by years of professional thought about why people like different sounds) anecdote.
Personally, I trust the results of a sleep study, or any study on anything, by people I don’t know with questionable incentives than I do anecdotes of commenters I’ve been following for 10 years on HN, especially when they align with my own experiences, and conversations I’ve had over beers with people in industry (whatever that might be). A lot of “science” is junk, not insofar as it’s false, but like water is wet .…