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Theses on Sleep

guzey.com

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Re: Theses on Sleep

#81

Post by groby_b »

Claims of the nature "the entire field is wrong, I propose to change everything" are deserving of a bit more basis in fact than this.

There is neither supporting evidence, nor even plausible models that go beyond the clearly superficial.

I don't know if the author is right. But Occam's Razor implies that simply ignoring this as, well, yet another person positing vague claims on the Internet, is probably the right answer.

To be fair, they did claim this to be theses. I am looking forward to them proving or disproving those theses. I will not lose much sleep until then.

Re: Theses on Sleep

#82

Post by abecedarius »

quacked wrote: post #10

Irrelevant to the post, but relevant to sleeping--I fixed my trouble sleeping with candles. Right before I want to go to sleep, I darken the whole house, light one or two candles, and read a slow-paced book. 15 minutes to drowsiness, 5 minutes to sleep, every time. I'll even look at a blue-light screen right up until candle-time.

I can recommend a tablet set to a black background for this, sans candles.

Re: Theses on Sleep

#83

Post by Terry_Roll »

No mention of the CO2 buildup in a bedroom or buildings in general.

When I camp in a tent, more airflow, I sleep better. In a bedroom, the air is stale after a few hours, the UK has small houses unlike Europe and US.

Plenty of discussions on CO2 levels on here already: Higher Levels of CO2 May Diminish Decision Making Performance (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14738010

Literally Suffocating in Meeting Rooms, A Little https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21237875

On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18959796

Is Conference Room Air Making Us Dumber? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19845029

No mention of Tryptophan intake, tryptophan into the brain can become serotonin and melatonin.

Blue light stimulates serotonin production in the brain, a jap study on school kids found when all things equal including diet, they found those with highest serotonin levels walked to school and got more blue light from the sun than those driven to school.

Melatonin has an antioxidant effect 4x greater than vit c, it also increase the release of mesenchymal stem cells so the body can repair itself better, which is important when thinking about plastic molecules in the body, because a study suggests plastic binds to stem cells and inactivates the cell making it harder for us to repair.

Light pollution within the bedroom from clocks, phones etc can also reduce melatonin compared to a completely blacked out bedroom.

The serotonin hypotheses about sleep duration ie little sleep mania, more sleep depression didnt look at CO2 levels.

The author needs to be careful what scientific studies are selected and ignored, sleep is massively complex, but I am also aware even google scholar doesnt always present the links to everything on a topic. Just like SEO can manipulate business website ranking, scientific study ranking can also be manipulated!

Re: Theses on Sleep

#84

Post by Terry_Roll »

novok wrote: post #80
guzey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously arguing that sleeping out in the nature, potentially with dangerous animals around you, on bear skins, with several friends (on the same bear skin?) is as comfortable as sleeping on a modern mattress in your home?

I knew of an old thai man who's face looked like he was 80 and his body looked cut and jacked. He also preferred to sleep with a thin mat on a hard tile floor with his wife in a house where there were multiple clean, usable beds to easily sleep on instead. So if your body adjusts to it, it's definitely possible to actually prefer it.

Hard perfectly flat sleeping surfaces with just a simple blanket for warmth can stimulate the lymphatic system much like a massage can.

The worst is when you have an uneven surface, like when camping and there is a rock which even your (inflatable) roll mat cant dampen out, that makes sleep difficult.

Re: Theses on Sleep

#85

Post by Arubis »

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #57

> Think about sleep 10,000 years ago. You sleep in a cave, in a hut, or under the sky, with predators and enemy tribes roaming around. You are on a wooden floor, on an animal’s skin, or on the ground. I would argue that some of my best nights were during outdoor survival situations where I slept in small shelters that kept my warmth and on a hard surface. Personally, the sound of a familiar bird species will lull me…

Climate-wise, this applies to hot places as well. I spent a few years in upcountry subsaharan Africa. Sleeping indoors was suggested and encouraged because it made it easier to set up anti-mosquito bed nets, but actually doing so was a challenge, and virtually impossible when it was humid. Much more comfortable to lay out on a bamboo frame with a sheet and hope not to get malaria that night.

Re: Theses on Sleep

#87

Post by porknubbins »

gexla wrote: post #77
guzey wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously arguing that sleeping out in the nature, potentially with dangerous animals around you, on bear skins, with several friends (on the same bear skin?) is as comfortable as sleeping on a modern mattress in your home?

My anecdote is that when I get migraine headaches, I have to lay down and try to sleep. I have to lay on hard ground. I can't stand being on a mattress for some reason. Maybe it's about feeling more control over the position of my body.

To me there is something deeply comforting about inertness. I hate the springyness in matresses so much I got a natural latex mattress, which I found out most people get because of allergies, but to me its like a kinetic sensory deprivation chamber- just absorbs all movement and doesn’t reflect it back.

Re: Theses on Sleep

#88

Post by James_Henry »

waterhouse wrote: post #76

> Modern sleep, in its infinite comfort, is an unnatural superstimulus that overwhelms our brains with pleasure and comfort Would you expect this to generalize to other animals? For example, if you gave ultra-comfortable beds to dogs, mice, etc., would you expect them to spend longer times asleep? And I think we should specify "asleep, not merely resting" here.

This is an interesting question.

Though it's not really an answer to that specific question, Jerome Siegel in one paper says: "although animals in the wild are usually healthier that those confined to laboratories and zoos, animals in the wild often have less sleep that those in zoos. Sloths in the lab average 15 h/day of sleep, but they sleep 9 h/day in the wild. Frigate birds in cages sleep 9.3 h, but when flying over the ocean for 10 day periods they sleep 0.7 h/day, without rebound. Fur seals have 80 min of REM sleep/day on land, but in water, where they spend >70% of their life, they average 3 min of REM a day. They have no REM “rebound” when they return to land."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8180237/pdf/nih...

We need to put soft mattresses out in nature and document what happens.

Re: Theses on Sleep

#89

Post by jafitc »

RandomThrow321 wrote: post #22
guzey wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious - what do you believe I should've done? How do you discredit a p-hacked small-n experiment, aside from noting that it should not be trusted a priori due to the extreme bias of the results expected from such kind of studies?

Is all sleep science based p-hacked small-n experiments? To your point - I probably would have tried to rely on research that supports your points (which you've got me interested in now). I probably wouldn't have included a handful of anecdotes in the the appendix (including your own and Elon Musk's!), as well as 8 replies from a reddit thread as a supporting section. I probably also wouldn't equate "a person with an…

“This guy fucks”

Re: Theses on Sleep

#90

Post by Zababa »

RandomThrow321 wrote: post #68
Zababa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the experience of drinking water has not changed much compared to before. However, if you take all beverages, you'll see that lots of people drink too much soda, and it's not to quench their thirst.

Water has changed dramatically. Think of all that goes into modern sedimentation, filtration, and disinfection - not to mention treatments for hard water or additives like fluorine. The taste is better because of the mineral content, and we can even add carbonation!

That still doesn't make it a superstimulus. The difference is not that big in terms of stimulation.
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