If you have any doubts about sleep quantity and quality, worth reading about the glymphatic nervous system, which is so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school.
In short it explains, mechanistically, why poor sleep affects daily cognition, mental health, and age-related declines. Robust scientific theories explain more of the evidence. The glymphatic nervous system explains why sleep is so key to surviving and thriving. Maiken Nedergaard will end up winning the Nobel for its discovery.
It makes me sad as my SO struggles a lot with sleep. It's been years since she's had a good nights sleep.
Sadly her issues are mostly psychologically rooted due to past trauma, while all the treatments seem to be geared towards "simple" physical issues. She's tried contacting various sleep clinics here and they've all said they can't help.
She struggles a lot with falling asleep, she's exceptionally sensitive to sound and vibration while trying to sleep or sleeping, and if she falls asleep she almost always have nightmares, which significantly reduces the quality of the sleep even if they don't always wake her up.
One issue is that when you're that close to the limit of what is no longer bearable, it's hard to just try things. For example, I've been thinking exposure therapy might help for her sound and light sensitivity, but she's not convinced it'll help and doesn't want to try potentially sleeping even worse for many weeks. Which I understand, but...
I’ve been watching a lot of healthy gamer youtube channel, the host likes to really geek out on brain science. One of the big take aways I’ve gotten watching him, is that sleep serves a layered purpose psychologically (and physically as per this article), that you work through social problems, then physical problems, then consolidating memory, sort of in that order.
One of the study tricks that the host figured out, was that if you want to memorize something, you should get rid of all the other things you don’t want to learn, and that journaling is amazingly good at that. Basically if you write down all the things you don’t want to remember, it sort of leaves space to move things to long term memory.
I say all this, because I’ve been experimenting with journaling at night, and it really helps with some of the restless nights where it feels like something is keeping me awake. It’s not a magic bullet, and it takes effort, but it may help to write down the things bothering your partner prior to sleep to allow for some of the ”less important” processes to happen.
Learning to control your dreams is what I did with my nightmares, at some point it becomes so easy you can do it on command but... It doesn't always work and requires extra energy to stay in control often leaving me falling asleep in my dreams which ironically means I don't sleep well. And there are still nightmares I get, just had one a few days ago that left me too afraid to sleep again. Still, I think it's overall a good long term skill about building mental awareness. I learned it as a child on my own, and I believe adults can also learn it by simply studying their environment often and looking if anything else is amiss or "unrealistic". Sometimes you can also ask yourself questions before bed, and try to use visualization before sleeping or sleeping to sound or audiobooks to help you relax too. My family has a history of being more prone to spiritual and psychology issues so bring aware of family history can also sometimes make you idk feel less alone too. Just being able to shift the narrative can mean a lot and give you power when you feel powerless sometimes, but it can be tough to get there but baby steps can make a huge difference. Something I personally did as a child when I felt afraid was to visualize a golden warm light around me almost like a bubble, it didn't always work but I guess it helped to get away from negative thoughts by trying to focus on something protective for me. Soft repetition also seems helpful because it's predictable so perhaps finding something predictable may help too. And maybe looking into CPTSD.
She should try ketamine. Sounds like it’s exactly what you say, past trauma, that’s holding her back from a good nights sleep. Ketamine has done wonders for someone I love and I would wholeheartedly recommend it. The person in my life who benefited greatly from it only needed one weekend (2 relatively low to medium dose sessions of ketamine) and she was cured of her ptsd.
Also strongly recommend weighted blankets, especially for someone like your SO.
> she's exceptionally sensitive to sound and vibration
I'm assuming you've tried ~everything already, but just in case: Have you tried white noise yet? Your brain is very good at filtering it out after listening to it for a while, but it'll still drown out other noises.
How healthy is she in general? Does she eat well? Exercise? Have a consistent night routing? Has she tried melatonin? What about sleep apnea?
If she's sensitive to sound and light, what has she tried to address that? Like blackout curtains?
I find it a bit odd that sleep clinics would turn her away so readily.
I understand the struggle though which is why I asked so many questions, because all of these things have factored into my quest for better sleep. The psychological stuff is hard.
My suggestion is to try a religious conversion to christianity. I know it sound weird, but we all live in a story and she relive the same story over and over in her dreams and in real life.
Christianity will help her make sense of what happenend and will help her get over it.
She will have a place to put evil and a place to put good and she will be slowly be able to fix the direction of her mind.
She can search for scripture that speak around what happened to her and see what she can do about it. She will ask for help to go past her trauma.
I tought all my life that it was supersitious nonsense (scientific atheist) but I found out that I was wrong. We have no choice, we are religious by nature. Without a solid faith we are free floating, anxious, depressed, confused and stuck in loops.
I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night? Or at least reduce the hours required. If we could solve this we could just stay awake perpetually and instantly gain a 30% longer lifespan as it were.
If there is any magic bullet, it'll be something biological evolution can't easily jump-to or stumble-upon. Otherwise I think it would have happened already, given the risks of sleep and the rewards of an expanded activity (or at least awareness) cycle.
> I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night?
Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain.
I think some types of learning and memory formation also happen during sleep, right?
More efficient sleep is possible with ultrasound. But keep in mind that the glymphatic system seems to expand as other systems contract. The waves are tied to brain activity slowing down, can’t have one without the other. That said, could intersperse active times of the day with naps. But naps alone don’t seem sufficient as good sleep.
Philips has a headband product called DeepSleep. They claim it increases your deep sleep by playing some sort of sound during your sleep that induces more deep sleep. For some odd reason, despite being a Dutch company, the product was only sold in the US. I spent a lot of money having it imported to Netherlands.
Unfortunately I can't tell whether it works. I rely on headphones and earplugs to block out sounds during the night. Sounds such as cars and airplanes outside, or other people in the house going to the toilet, tend to wake me up unless I block out those sounds. And the handband is not compatible with headphones or ear plugs.
There already is constant cleaning, the brain just can’t seem to keep up. Sleep is more efficient at clearance. People are working on making sleep more efficient. As you can imagine, military leading here.
I'm about the median age in the US and wouldn't expect anyone less than a decade younger than me to have been taught it in school unless they went for a degree in a related field, and possibly not even then.
2015 is after I finished grad school and something like a decade after I'd last taken a class where it might have been taught if it had already been around for enough years to make it into the curriculum.
> so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school.
So with the slow pace knowledge makes it into the school curriculum, you likely wouldn't have heard about it in school unless you just left the system a year or two ago (if even then).
You are missing the context of age demographics. For example: in the United States of America about 63% of the population is over the age of 32 which represents roughly 200 million Americans which graduated Highschool before the year 2010.
Could not find any free access to the paper, even though the Univ' says "This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the BJC Investigators Program at Washington University; and the Neuroscience Innovation Foundation."
These kind of grant funded research should be accessible at the least from the Univ' websites.
All NIH funded research is freely open access by law.
In this case it seems the authors didn’t pay the (crazy expensive) Nature open access fee. They will have to upload a free PDF to PubMed manually, but have up to a year to do so, and don’t seem to have done it yet.
Is Nature’s open access fee really that crazy? Last time I checked it was a few thousand dollars.
And it’s paid once, to make the whole thing open perpetually. It certainly seems better than having the people interested in reading it pay $30-40 each.
Of course, this is also based on the few times I’ve heard researchers talk about the ways they could spend their grant money. $2k to Nature sounds like a great deal by comparison.
Jiang-Xie, LF., Drieu, A., Bhasiin, K. et al. Neuronal dynamics direct cerebrospinal fluid perfusion and brain clearance. Nature 627, 157–164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6
Every Uni should have access through your library system.
I think the point was that every member of the public should have access to publicly funded research at least through the university's website, rather than at least everyone currently in universities should have access.
But what stops Univ' site to have original research paper available for download? Nature magazine is just a distribution channel (they did not sponsor the research so should not have exclusive rights on it).
Left college long time ago; and do not have access to any library system.
Is anyone more knowledgeable able to interpret the paper beyond ‘brain waves wash toxins’?
Are they actually responsible for the observed activity, or do they merely trigger some ‘flushing’ mechanism inherent to the cells? Or, are the waves a result of that process?
I can't find free access to the full paper, but here's the abstract (afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to add to or explain any of it):
"The accumulation of metabolic waste is a leading cause of numerous neurological disorders, yet we still have only limited knowledge of how the brain performs self-cleansing. Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create large-amplitude, rhythmic and self-perpetuating ionic waves in the interstitial fluid of the brain. These waves are a plausible mechanism to explain the correlated potentiation of the glymphatic flow1,2 through the brain parenchyma. Chemogenetic flattening of these high-energy ionic waves largely impeded cerebrospinal fluid infiltration into and clearance of molecules from the brain parenchyma. Notably, synthesized waves generated through transcranial optogenetic stimulation substantially potentiated cerebrospinal fluid-to-interstitial fluid perfusion. Our study demonstrates that neurons serve as master organizers for brain clearance. This fundamental principle introduces a new theoretical framework for the functioning of macroscopic brain waves."
>Chemogenetic flattening of these high-energy ionic waves largely impeded cerebrospinal fluid infiltration into and clearance of molecules from the brain parenchyma.
Sounds like unsync'd brain waves, (being awake) impedes cerebrospinal fluid flow through the brain.
When asleep, neurons sync their action potentials, acting like a ionized fluid pump, moving old dirty cerebrospinal fluid out, and allowing new, clean in.
Interestingly, when they synthesize that type of ionization using other means, they saw the same increase in fluid movement.
This is my best attempt at translating. Hopefully within 1-2 football fields. The author leaves choice of American or the rest of the world to the reader to decide.
> Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create large-amplitude, rhythmic and self-perpetuating ionic waves in the interstitial fluid of the brain
This line is the money shot. An action potential is the variable electrical charge of a neuron, and they maintain that charge by containing a certain concentration of ions relative to the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid. This paper proposes that neurons synchonise their charge state, which forces ions to flow in or out of the neurons in bulk, the movement of these ions causing the cerebrospinal fluid to move around, clearing out the accumulated debris.
In another comment I talked about how I observed a phenomena similar to the one described where neuronal activations would create waves, I've quoted it here. I would summarize it as 3D waves of light, resulting in a spherical enamation that readjusts the physical substrate of the mind and body.
""
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
That's been in use for thousands of years already: yoga, pranayama and meditation.
There are courses one can take where one learns this, like Art of Living and any other that follows the same traditions.
Yes, there's research on that, and new studies should absolutely gain from this study. Not entirely sure you'll observe the same effect, that depends on meditator, but you can fall asleep during practice.
I have over a decade experience with it, and have also participated on a study on breathing exercises and epigenetic effects from that versus blind control.
For companies it'd be a dream. 1/4 more awake time is 1/4 more time to buy stuff and watch content and ads. Or work longer hours. Gonna go back to sleep now.
the trigger could be like a sequence of flashes or certain pulsing of sound frequencies, it'd be like hacking the nervous system via unsanitized inputs
The paper shows a correlation between the observed ‘brain waves’ and the ‘toxin removal’. From the abstract:
‘These waves are a plausible mechanism to explain the correlated potentiation of the glymphatic flow through the brain parenchyma’.
I think the main objective of this paper is to justify more funding to explore this phenomenon, to establish causation (beyond correlation).
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about six months ago. Once I started getting treatment for it (losing weight, cutting out caffeine, and an oral appliance) my life started getting dramatically better.
I had never taken sleep very seriously prior to that and I feel extremely foolish for it. Life is 100x better if you get an appropriate amount of sleep. Everything becomes a little easier.
You have dedicated facilities who let you sleep there and monitor you. But apnea can be easily seen, the person has gaps in breathing during some parts of sleep, gasping. Snoring can be one of the symptoms but reverse is not automatically true.
My boss was diagnosed with apnea in his 30s. It was so bad they didn't believe his first test results and had to redo it, off the charts. According to him it literally killed his father. Once he started using the device for sleeping he had 100x more mental and physical energy, everything was just easier.
I was snoring, and in my case my wife told me there would be moments of kind of disturbing moments where I would stop breathing and then gasp multiple times a night.
In my case, I was able to take a sleep test from a doctor which was basically just a pulse oximeter I wore while sleeping.
One of the traits/habits I’ve been fortunate to have/cultivate is daily afternoon napping. I can rest my head and fall asleep in minutes and then wake back up 15 minutes later feeling cognitively refreshed. I’ve done this since my teenage years and throughout adulthood.
Short, intentional, regular napping is associated with a lower risks of dementia. This is different from increased, longer, napping seen in older adults. Longer naps in older adults is associated with Alzheimer’s. See this summary:
It will be interesting to see if further research in humans can pinpoint a plausible causal mechanism in adult for both regular night time sleep and intentional short daytime napping. This might encourage companies to put in ‘sleep pods’ or at least remove the stigma of adult napping.
There is an mri greyscale clip that shows this process I saw a couple of years ago but could never find it back. It showed spinal fluid “washing” the brain. If anyone knows where I can find it, please link.
That one is the default google answer, but not the one I saw. Mine had a spine attached and there was no highlighting, the fluid movements were distinguishable in the scans.
Kinda tangential but I've noticed that my most satisfying and restorative sleep is always followed by tons of eye goop the following morning. Maybe a kind of brain-waste?
So, if we could induce those brain waves we wouldn't need sleep? Maybe in the future our AirPods will have a "rejuvenate" feature which plays tones that cause sleep like brain waves to go through and clean out our neurons.
Probably not... I think our brains are like LLMs. We train them on sensory input we perceive over time, building up a data model that is unique to us. The models may generate similar results, but each person's brains are wired as differently as the raw binary data stored in ChatGPT vs Llama or Gemini. Thus the cleaning mechanism is probably unique per person as well.
But I don't really have a clue. It's just a logical inference.
I'd think that the brain isn't the only part of the human body that needs sleep/rest.
Becoming immobile for such a long amount of time must have a much larger systemic purpose given that this is how our bodies evolved.
We don't know how to induce slow-waves yet, but lots of research around how we can increase the function.
The mechanism is very not unique. Unlike other neuronal activity, the slow-waves are synchronous firing of neurons, and almost all brains respond to interruptions 30 degrees off the peak of the wave.
It's much more health engineering than much of the medicine I'm aware of.
induction may cause a feeling of restedness, but unless the actual fluid pumps out the waste, you'd likely get diminishing, perhaps even damaging results if you over use it... like and "sleep spell" it has a cooldown that is needed for actual biological pumping time
It’s not dreaming that is tedious. My understanding is that the brain always dream but that you only remember your dreams if you wake up during them. So, remembering 4-6 dreams would mean that you wake up (probably unconsciously) multiple times per night. It’s probably what is tiring rather than the dream itself.
Disclaimer : I have no source and I may be wrong. It’s my understanding.
I don’t feel physically tired in the mornings. I ran in high school 8-10 miles a day and would collapse, waking up dream free.
Now I wake up refreshed but I’m sick of watching the same rehashed combinations of dreams. I can do lucid dreaming, but I’d just rather not dream at all
I almost never remember my dreams. When I do, it means I had a really bad night's sleep and I don't feel rested.
4 to 6 dreams every night sounds exhausting. You should probably check it out with a doctor, it seems you're subconsciously waking up too often during the night.
After learning this and reading about lion’s mane reversing plaque induced dementia in rats I started taking it as “brain washing detergent” before bed. It gives me some wildly vivid dreams and I always wake up more refreshed.
I wonder if anyone has done a study yet on how the Glymphatic nervous system is impacted by rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) instead of drugs (pharmacological solutions).
We're in the field, but with auditory stimulation, not rTMS.
Glymphatic System activity is linked to the synchronous firing of neurons that define slow-wave sleep.
If you interrupt the brain near the peak of a slow wave, the brain response is to increase this synchronous firing, increasing delta power, and the flushing of the glymphatic system.
Monash University here in Australia is looking into the impact this may have on Alzheimer's prevention.
There isn't a drug that I'm aware of that is as effective.
You can do what we do with rTMS, light stimulation, haptics, etc. it's more about interrupting the brain than it is creating a slow-wave, as far as everything I am aware of in the current literature.
We link to a few studies on our website https://affectablesleep.com - I'll be posting more links soon (we just launched our re-brand 2 days ago).
Your brain is a movie theater. When it's in use it's all bright lights and gripping soundtrack and shiny shiny. But once in a while you have to chase out the Observers and shut down the projector and then go grab a hose and ruthlessly flush out all the tracked-in mud and popcorn remnants and stepped-on gummy bears and who the hell knows what other gunk.
Think of it as whilst awake all the experience and sensory input, nutrients(or lack) you experience throughout the day result in basically the brain doing all its activites and various parts, functions and syncopated waves/rthyms etc get out of phase.
Much like you occasionally reboot your machine to flush and re-align memory etc...
When you sleep, your sensory input systems are handed a surrogate (dreams) whist the rest of your brain gets back into phase with itself, and the idea is that this allows for an 'alignment' of sorts within the brain which allows for the cerberal fluids to more porously flow through the brain and carry away ionic and other molecules which freely float through the brain.
As the rain washes the paths and the streets after a windy, dusty day...
To allow for a fresh path where the previous wake-cycles experiences in molocules can be more properly absorbed into the brain and your neurons can 'take in' what happened all wake cycle.
I'm sorry but your comment is incredibly I'll informed.
Not only because you think Musk is any where near the leader in the implant space, but more so that you don't understand optogenetics. The device referenced here was transcranial (i.e., non-invasive) but regardless optogenetics requires tagging specific neurons with an opsin (usually via viral vector).
I'm sorry for being curt but this is the 4th or 5th neuroscience post in the last 72h that HN have blasted with shit takes. If I wanted misunderstood science I'd revive my Reddit account.
I am very aware how optogenetics works, I wasted some part of my live getting channelrhodopsins into cells to trigger neurons.
Yes you are right one would probably use transient gene therapy tho make a modification like that, but
transcranial methods are afaik for human adults less suitable since the structures lying above the stuff you usually want to stimulate are simply too thick, so a hypothetical sleep replacement machine would probably need to be an implant. That is unless you can use self-refocusing lasers or holograms for stimulation, but I do not see how one would do this unless you replace most of the skull with glass.
The point with Musk was a joke more or less.
Though it’s true that he is probably the only person both morally ambiguous enough to even try to build a dystopian sleep replacement machine and capable of getting funding for it.
HN is great but it's only illusory that it has smarter people than Reddit. We're all just people rising to our incompetence to the limit the system allows.
Brain waves are approximately in the 1hz to 100hz range. While smartphone waves are much higher frequency. AC however is 50/60hz depending on country. Maybe I'm overly cautious, but I have a thick wire that runs right next to the natural spot for my pillow I very intentionally put the pillow on the other side of the bed.
That's a really interesting scientific finding. From a personal experience, once I closed my eyes and actually observed this phenomenon. I could observe many spherical waves of light each pulsating, and not only that but I could feel the effect of each wave viscerally. It definitely felt healing. I wasn't sure what this was, was it the vibes of meditators around the world? Maybe this research finding is what I was observing.
Reflexively, that doesn't make sense. I cannot imagine perceiving ionic CSF flow with my eyes.
But thinking about it more, maybe there is something to it? I'm wholly unqualified to speculate here, but I know computers and computers are exactly the same as everything in the real world, so let's go! ...
- When restful and with my eyes closed, I definitely "see" waves move across my field of vision. My eyes see "black" (or dark gray) with slightly lighter edges that move and act like a wavefront in a fluid. There's distinct flow, and (minor) swirling and interference. I've seen these since I was very young, and I have no idea if it's a common thing or if it has a name. It must. I've mentioned it to a very small number of other non-experts but no one has ever recognized it. (I also sometimes see tiny colored tiles that light up in moving masses -- again rarely mentioned but never recognized, probably an unrelated phenomenon...)
- I do not think these are simply phosphenes, because there is no external proximate stimuli. Though I suppose we all live in environments saturated with EMF, most of the time, and a proper test would require being in a very remote area (and that's probably not enough). Though if I can "see" the presence of EMF, I'm totally making some phone calls to Charles Xavier's people.
- I've theorized that this was fluid in my eye (eyelid is too thin) moving around and refracting what little light is getting through in a dark room. But it also happens when I am completely still (though nothing in the body is ever completely still), and it also happens in complete darkness.
- The "shape" of the waves does not resemble anything that could be related to blood vessels in the eyelid. And again, complete darkness.
- So, is it possible that it's actually this ionic flow of CSF through the vision-sensing part of the brain? Not actually light coming through my eyeballs at all, but fluidlike electrical variations in the parts of the brain itself which are sensitive to the electrical signals normally coming from the optic nerves?
I have no idea. But it's an fun new angle to consider in the idle moments while I watch the waves flow before I fall asleep.
(That said, please feel free to correct my wild speculation if there's an obvious explanation that has not intersected my completely-unrelated fields of study! :)
I deliberately didn't use the word "see" when phrasing my response. I used the word observed because it was an observation, not a seeing. And I'm not describing a flow of vague amorphous whitish material, I know what you're talking about and I'm not describing that.
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
I was slightly disappointed to see my comment down voted but I'm not too surprised. I stand by my description as an accurate and well considered, rational description of what I had observed in the past.
Ok, I have never told anyone this, but I also sometimes wake up and “see” like a waterfall effect over my vision. It only happens very rarely and only for less than a minute after I get woken from a deep sleep. It is not unlike a moving sensation or water moving over my eyes. I realized that it is probably fluid moving over my visual cortex and being interpreted as vision. Seems weird and I have nothing to back it up on, but it has happened multiple times over my lifetime and the sensation is exactly the same every time.
Perhaps it's how meditation balances the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. But yeah, I know when my mediation is deepening because the rhythmic pulsation up my spine into my base brain begins.
I'm not talking about the general effect of meditation which is to relax the body and increase the flow throughout the body. I was talking very specifically about this concept of spherical expanding waves of light. To make an analogy, it resembles a moderately white light expanding from a centre. See my other comment where I describe how such a phenomena could be healing and restorative using a physical analogy.
If you have any doubts about sleep quantity and quality, worth reading about the glymphatic nervous system, which is so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636982/
In short it explains, mechanistically, why poor sleep affects daily cognition, mental health, and age-related declines. Robust scientific theories explain more of the evidence. The glymphatic nervous system explains why sleep is so key to surviving and thriving. Maiken Nedergaard will end up winning the Nobel for its discovery.
It makes me sad as my SO struggles a lot with sleep. It's been years since she's had a good nights sleep.
Sadly her issues are mostly psychologically rooted due to past trauma, while all the treatments seem to be geared towards "simple" physical issues. She's tried contacting various sleep clinics here and they've all said they can't help.
She struggles a lot with falling asleep, she's exceptionally sensitive to sound and vibration while trying to sleep or sleeping, and if she falls asleep she almost always have nightmares, which significantly reduces the quality of the sleep even if they don't always wake her up.
One issue is that when you're that close to the limit of what is no longer bearable, it's hard to just try things. For example, I've been thinking exposure therapy might help for her sound and light sensitivity, but she's not convinced it'll help and doesn't want to try potentially sleeping even worse for many weeks. Which I understand, but...
I’ve been watching a lot of healthy gamer youtube channel, the host likes to really geek out on brain science. One of the big take aways I’ve gotten watching him, is that sleep serves a layered purpose psychologically (and physically as per this article), that you work through social problems, then physical problems, then consolidating memory, sort of in that order.
One of the study tricks that the host figured out, was that if you want to memorize something, you should get rid of all the other things you don’t want to learn, and that journaling is amazingly good at that. Basically if you write down all the things you don’t want to remember, it sort of leaves space to move things to long term memory.
I say all this, because I’ve been experimenting with journaling at night, and it really helps with some of the restless nights where it feels like something is keeping me awake. It’s not a magic bullet, and it takes effort, but it may help to write down the things bothering your partner prior to sleep to allow for some of the ”less important” processes to happen.
Learning to control your dreams is what I did with my nightmares, at some point it becomes so easy you can do it on command but... It doesn't always work and requires extra energy to stay in control often leaving me falling asleep in my dreams which ironically means I don't sleep well. And there are still nightmares I get, just had one a few days ago that left me too afraid to sleep again. Still, I think it's overall a good long term skill about building mental awareness. I learned it as a child on my own, and I believe adults can also learn it by simply studying their environment often and looking if anything else is amiss or "unrealistic". Sometimes you can also ask yourself questions before bed, and try to use visualization before sleeping or sleeping to sound or audiobooks to help you relax too. My family has a history of being more prone to spiritual and psychology issues so bring aware of family history can also sometimes make you idk feel less alone too. Just being able to shift the narrative can mean a lot and give you power when you feel powerless sometimes, but it can be tough to get there but baby steps can make a huge difference. Something I personally did as a child when I felt afraid was to visualize a golden warm light around me almost like a bubble, it didn't always work but I guess it helped to get away from negative thoughts by trying to focus on something protective for me. Soft repetition also seems helpful because it's predictable so perhaps finding something predictable may help too. And maybe looking into CPTSD.
I know you've probably already tried lots of things, and you're also inundated with ideas from others, but:
Here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving insomnia: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/
And here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving nightmares: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-nightmares
Prazosin is the standard drug for PTSD-related nightmares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin
1 reply →
She should try ketamine. Sounds like it’s exactly what you say, past trauma, that’s holding her back from a good nights sleep. Ketamine has done wonders for someone I love and I would wholeheartedly recommend it. The person in my life who benefited greatly from it only needed one weekend (2 relatively low to medium dose sessions of ketamine) and she was cured of her ptsd.
Also strongly recommend weighted blankets, especially for someone like your SO.
All the best eh
6 replies →
Sounds so hard.
I’ve experienced that a moderate or intense exercise regimen can help a lot with sleep.
If she hasn’t tried therapies directed at trauma and recovery that may also be helpful.
1 reply →
> she's exceptionally sensitive to sound and vibration
I'm assuming you've tried ~everything already, but just in case: Have you tried white noise yet? Your brain is very good at filtering it out after listening to it for a while, but it'll still drown out other noises.
4 replies →
Sounds too simple but high doses of vitamin C before sleep removed all of my stress induced nightmares.
1 reply →
How healthy is she in general? Does she eat well? Exercise? Have a consistent night routing? Has she tried melatonin? What about sleep apnea?
If she's sensitive to sound and light, what has she tried to address that? Like blackout curtains?
I find it a bit odd that sleep clinics would turn her away so readily.
I understand the struggle though which is why I asked so many questions, because all of these things have factored into my quest for better sleep. The psychological stuff is hard.
2 replies →
Bad gut health screwed up my sleep, after working on it it got better. But if im not careful with what I eat, my sleep quality is screwed again
1 reply →
Promethazine (1) helps some people, myself included (UK Sominex). And occasionally, phenibut.
(1) https://www.inhousepharmacy.vu/p-1189-phenergan-tablets-25mg...
6 replies →
Has she tried cannabis? It prevents dream memory formation and can help with nightmares
8 replies →
If the problem is psychological trauma, wouldn’t therapy be the obvious solution?
7 replies →
If she falls a sleep then can she have the expected sleep length when not interrupted?
1 reply →
Edibles have been a godsend to me. Have you guys tried them?
Has she considered PTSD? It sounds a lot like it and there has been promising work around PTSD from what I have seen in passing.
Psychoanalysis might be useful, it is my understanding that it can deal with complex issues where simpler forms of therapy fails
My suggestion is to try a religious conversion to christianity. I know it sound weird, but we all live in a story and she relive the same story over and over in her dreams and in real life.
Christianity will help her make sense of what happenend and will help her get over it. She will have a place to put evil and a place to put good and she will be slowly be able to fix the direction of her mind.
She can search for scripture that speak around what happened to her and see what she can do about it. She will ask for help to go past her trauma.
I tought all my life that it was supersitious nonsense (scientific atheist) but I found out that I was wrong. We have no choice, we are religious by nature. Without a solid faith we are free floating, anxious, depressed, confused and stuck in loops.
I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night? Or at least reduce the hours required. If we could solve this we could just stay awake perpetually and instantly gain a 30% longer lifespan as it were.
If there is any magic bullet, it'll be something biological evolution can't easily jump-to or stumble-upon. Otherwise I think it would have happened already, given the risks of sleep and the rewards of an expanded activity (or at least awareness) cycle.
2 replies →
> I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night?
Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain.
I think some types of learning and memory formation also happen during sleep, right?
8 replies →
More efficient sleep is possible with ultrasound. But keep in mind that the glymphatic system seems to expand as other systems contract. The waves are tied to brain activity slowing down, can’t have one without the other. That said, could intersperse active times of the day with naps. But naps alone don’t seem sufficient as good sleep.
3 replies →
Philips has a headband product called DeepSleep. They claim it increases your deep sleep by playing some sort of sound during your sleep that induces more deep sleep. For some odd reason, despite being a Dutch company, the product was only sold in the US. I spent a lot of money having it imported to Netherlands.
Unfortunately I can't tell whether it works. I rely on headphones and earplugs to block out sounds during the night. Sounds such as cars and airplanes outside, or other people in the house going to the toilet, tend to wake me up unless I block out those sounds. And the handband is not compatible with headphones or ear plugs.
I wish there is a better solution.
1 reply →
Check this out, I just saw a reference to this recently:
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/noninvasive-brain-wave-treatmen...
There already is constant cleaning, the brain just can’t seem to keep up. Sleep is more efficient at clearance. People are working on making sleep more efficient. As you can imagine, military leading here.
I must be spending too much time on HN. I recognize this exact comment from a month ago.
I was thinking the same thing, but I wasn't sure how long ago it was.
1 reply →
I’m thinking it should be pinned to the top of any sleep post!
> which is so newly discovered
It says that it was published in 2015, or am I missing something?
Am I missing something? 2015 for a paper feels relatively new enough that people might not know about it and it might not be in school books.
7 replies →
I'm about the median age in the US and wouldn't expect anyone less than a decade younger than me to have been taught it in school unless they went for a degree in a related field, and possibly not even then. 2015 is after I finished grad school and something like a decade after I'd last taken a class where it might have been taught if it had already been around for enough years to make it into the curriculum.
1 reply →
> so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school.
So with the slow pace knowledge makes it into the school curriculum, you likely wouldn't have heard about it in school unless you just left the system a year or two ago (if even then).
2 replies →
You are missing the context of age demographics. For example: in the United States of America about 63% of the population is over the age of 32 which represents roughly 200 million Americans which graduated Highschool before the year 2010.
1 reply →
More details at Washington Univ' site: https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/neurons-help-flush-waste-out...
Could not find any free access to the paper, even though the Univ' says "This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the BJC Investigators Program at Washington University; and the Neuroscience Innovation Foundation."
These kind of grant funded research should be accessible at the least from the Univ' websites.
All NIH funded research is freely open access by law.
In this case it seems the authors didn’t pay the (crazy expensive) Nature open access fee. They will have to upload a free PDF to PubMed manually, but have up to a year to do so, and don’t seem to have done it yet.
Is Nature’s open access fee really that crazy? Last time I checked it was a few thousand dollars.
And it’s paid once, to make the whole thing open perpetually. It certainly seems better than having the people interested in reading it pay $30-40 each.
Of course, this is also based on the few times I’ve heard researchers talk about the ways they could spend their grant money. $2k to Nature sounds like a great deal by comparison.
Note: Worked for Nature in the past.
3 replies →
More discussion about this paper on ALZ forum:
https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/do-sleep-rhythms...
Checked and it was published through Nature:
Jiang-Xie, LF., Drieu, A., Bhasiin, K. et al. Neuronal dynamics direct cerebrospinal fluid perfusion and brain clearance. Nature 627, 157–164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6
Every Uni should have access through your library system.
I think the point was that every member of the public should have access to publicly funded research at least through the university's website, rather than at least everyone currently in universities should have access.
12 replies →
Yes, it was published through Nature.
But what stops Univ' site to have original research paper available for download? Nature magazine is just a distribution channel (they did not sponsor the research so should not have exclusive rights on it).
Left college long time ago; and do not have access to any library system.
11 replies →
Is anyone more knowledgeable able to interpret the paper beyond ‘brain waves wash toxins’?
Are they actually responsible for the observed activity, or do they merely trigger some ‘flushing’ mechanism inherent to the cells? Or, are the waves a result of that process?
I can't find free access to the full paper, but here's the abstract (afraid I'm not knowledgeable enough to add to or explain any of it):
"The accumulation of metabolic waste is a leading cause of numerous neurological disorders, yet we still have only limited knowledge of how the brain performs self-cleansing. Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create large-amplitude, rhythmic and self-perpetuating ionic waves in the interstitial fluid of the brain. These waves are a plausible mechanism to explain the correlated potentiation of the glymphatic flow1,2 through the brain parenchyma. Chemogenetic flattening of these high-energy ionic waves largely impeded cerebrospinal fluid infiltration into and clearance of molecules from the brain parenchyma. Notably, synthesized waves generated through transcranial optogenetic stimulation substantially potentiated cerebrospinal fluid-to-interstitial fluid perfusion. Our study demonstrates that neurons serve as master organizers for brain clearance. This fundamental principle introduces a new theoretical framework for the functioning of macroscopic brain waves."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38418877/
>Chemogenetic flattening of these high-energy ionic waves largely impeded cerebrospinal fluid infiltration into and clearance of molecules from the brain parenchyma.
Sounds like unsync'd brain waves, (being awake) impedes cerebrospinal fluid flow through the brain.
When asleep, neurons sync their action potentials, acting like a ionized fluid pump, moving old dirty cerebrospinal fluid out, and allowing new, clean in.
Interestingly, when they synthesize that type of ionization using other means, they saw the same increase in fluid movement.
This is my best attempt at translating. Hopefully within 1-2 football fields. The author leaves choice of American or the rest of the world to the reader to decide.
12 replies →
> Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create large-amplitude, rhythmic and self-perpetuating ionic waves in the interstitial fluid of the brain
This line is the money shot. An action potential is the variable electrical charge of a neuron, and they maintain that charge by containing a certain concentration of ions relative to the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid. This paper proposes that neurons synchonise their charge state, which forces ions to flow in or out of the neurons in bulk, the movement of these ions causing the cerebrospinal fluid to move around, clearing out the accumulated debris.
3 replies →
In another comment I talked about how I observed a phenomena similar to the one described where neuronal activations would create waves, I've quoted it here. I would summarize it as 3D waves of light, resulting in a spherical enamation that readjusts the physical substrate of the mind and body.
""
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we could periodically trigger waves like this to refresh the brain and maybe require less (or no) sleep!
I have no expertise in this area I’m just a dreamer :)
That's been in use for thousands of years already: yoga, pranayama and meditation.
There are courses one can take where one learns this, like Art of Living and any other that follows the same traditions.
Yes, there's research on that, and new studies should absolutely gain from this study. Not entirely sure you'll observe the same effect, that depends on meditator, but you can fall asleep during practice.
I have over a decade experience with it, and have also participated on a study on breathing exercises and epigenetic effects from that versus blind control.
12 replies →
For companies it'd be a dream. 1/4 more awake time is 1/4 more time to buy stuff and watch content and ads. Or work longer hours. Gonna go back to sleep now.
3 replies →
Dreamers have no problems here :)
the trigger could be like a sequence of flashes or certain pulsing of sound frequencies, it'd be like hacking the nervous system via unsanitized inputs
1 reply →
Meditation?
The paper shows a correlation between the observed ‘brain waves’ and the ‘toxin removal’. From the abstract: ‘These waves are a plausible mechanism to explain the correlated potentiation of the glymphatic flow through the brain parenchyma’. I think the main objective of this paper is to justify more funding to explore this phenomenon, to establish causation (beyond correlation).
I was diagnosed with sleep apnea about six months ago. Once I started getting treatment for it (losing weight, cutting out caffeine, and an oral appliance) my life started getting dramatically better.
I had never taken sleep very seriously prior to that and I feel extremely foolish for it. Life is 100x better if you get an appropriate amount of sleep. Everything becomes a little easier.
How did you recognize that it was sleep apnea? Have you snored at night?
You have dedicated facilities who let you sleep there and monitor you. But apnea can be easily seen, the person has gaps in breathing during some parts of sleep, gasping. Snoring can be one of the symptoms but reverse is not automatically true.
My boss was diagnosed with apnea in his 30s. It was so bad they didn't believe his first test results and had to redo it, off the charts. According to him it literally killed his father. Once he started using the device for sleeping he had 100x more mental and physical energy, everything was just easier.
I was snoring, and in my case my wife told me there would be moments of kind of disturbing moments where I would stop breathing and then gasp multiple times a night.
In my case, I was able to take a sleep test from a doctor which was basically just a pulse oximeter I wore while sleeping.
One of the traits/habits I’ve been fortunate to have/cultivate is daily afternoon napping. I can rest my head and fall asleep in minutes and then wake back up 15 minutes later feeling cognitively refreshed. I’ve done this since my teenage years and throughout adulthood.
Short, intentional, regular napping is associated with a lower risks of dementia. This is different from increased, longer, napping seen in older adults. Longer naps in older adults is associated with Alzheimer’s. See this summary:
https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/can-nap...
It will be interesting to see if further research in humans can pinpoint a plausible causal mechanism in adult for both regular night time sleep and intentional short daytime napping. This might encourage companies to put in ‘sleep pods’ or at least remove the stigma of adult napping.
I find that even just 2 or 3 minutes unconscious still helps a lot. The Minimum Viable Nap is pretty minimal.
In case you didn't know, sleeping on your right side maximizes the clearance effect, while sleeping on your stomach minimizes it.
Citation? I've always read that for humans it's better to sleep on the left, for digestion anyway.
[in mice]
I'm imagining a row of little mice sleeping on their right side in a lab experiment
In some branches of yoga, they strongly encourage you to sleep on your right side. I always thought it was nonsense...
And yet sleeping on your back contributes to snoring and sleep apnea.
Humans. Just can't win can they.
Could you point us to the source?
The Effect of Body Posture on Brain Glymphatic Transport
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524974/#!po=72...
Wait.. was that in the paper or is there a different source for this?
There is an mri greyscale clip that shows this process I saw a couple of years ago but could never find it back. It showed spinal fluid “washing” the brain. If anyone knows where I can find it, please link.
There’s this one I just found - [https://player.vimeo.com/video/370150539?background=1](https...
That one is the default google answer, but not the one I saw. Mine had a spine attached and there was no highlighting, the fluid movements were distinguishable in the scans.
Thank you for trying.
1 reply →
Kinda tangential but I've noticed that my most satisfying and restorative sleep is always followed by tons of eye goop the following morning. Maybe a kind of brain-waste?
This has probably way more to do with how much REM sleep you get, which is said to be the most restorative sleep.
So, if we could induce those brain waves we wouldn't need sleep? Maybe in the future our AirPods will have a "rejuvenate" feature which plays tones that cause sleep like brain waves to go through and clean out our neurons.
Probably not... I think our brains are like LLMs. We train them on sensory input we perceive over time, building up a data model that is unique to us. The models may generate similar results, but each person's brains are wired as differently as the raw binary data stored in ChatGPT vs Llama or Gemini. Thus the cleaning mechanism is probably unique per person as well.
But I don't really have a clue. It's just a logical inference.
I'd think that the brain isn't the only part of the human body that needs sleep/rest. Becoming immobile for such a long amount of time must have a much larger systemic purpose given that this is how our bodies evolved.
Your spine contracts during the day and releases while you sleep at night.
I have an idea: if you induced those brain waves, you would technically be asleep. So you would not actually be magically given more awake time.
We don't know how to induce slow-waves yet, but lots of research around how we can increase the function.
The mechanism is very not unique. Unlike other neuronal activity, the slow-waves are synchronous firing of neurons, and almost all brains respond to interruptions 30 degrees off the peak of the wave.
It's much more health engineering than much of the medicine I'm aware of.
We've been working on this for the last 4 years at https://affectablesleep.com
induction may cause a feeling of restedness, but unless the actual fluid pumps out the waste, you'd likely get diminishing, perhaps even damaging results if you over use it... like and "sleep spell" it has a cooldown that is needed for actual biological pumping time
Would be interesting to know if the waste that gets cleared out is similar to the wastes eliminated by autophagy.
We need to figure out what activity or thought creates waves most similar to the cleaning function.
Maybe it’s dreaming? Dreaming by my experience is tedious and not restful… I have 4-6 dreams every night and never feel like I’m truly asleep.
Shouldn’t be hard to figure out with an EKG and a decent graph to see what your aiming for.
It’s not dreaming that is tedious. My understanding is that the brain always dream but that you only remember your dreams if you wake up during them. So, remembering 4-6 dreams would mean that you wake up (probably unconsciously) multiple times per night. It’s probably what is tiring rather than the dream itself.
Disclaimer : I have no source and I may be wrong. It’s my understanding.
I don’t feel physically tired in the mornings. I ran in high school 8-10 miles a day and would collapse, waking up dream free.
Now I wake up refreshed but I’m sick of watching the same rehashed combinations of dreams. I can do lucid dreaming, but I’d just rather not dream at all
2 replies →
I almost never remember my dreams. When I do, it means I had a really bad night's sleep and I don't feel rested.
4 to 6 dreams every night sounds exhausting. You should probably check it out with a doctor, it seems you're subconsciously waking up too often during the night.
It is not dreaming.
The "waves" don't exist in the brain - which is why I'm surprised this title survived publication.
The wave is the electrical activity we measure as a result of the synchronous firing of neurons which is the hallmark of deep sleep.
The slow-wave is linked to the glymphatic flush.
We can't create slow-waves, however, we can increase their power (more synchronous firing).
This is known science, and we've been working to commercialize it for the last 4 years. Getting close. https://affectablesleep.com
Modafinil does exactly this.
Huh? It cleans the brain? Care to elaborate or provide a source?
2 replies →
meditation
After learning this and reading about lion’s mane reversing plaque induced dementia in rats I started taking it as “brain washing detergent” before bed. It gives me some wildly vivid dreams and I always wake up more refreshed.
I take herb pills, and I get crazy dreams if I don't drink enough water with them. Try chugging more water before bed or when you take the pills.
How much?
I scoop about 2-3 grams
I wonder if anyone has done a study yet on how the Glymphatic nervous system is impacted by rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) instead of drugs (pharmacological solutions).
Anyone deep into this field around?
We're in the field, but with auditory stimulation, not rTMS.
Glymphatic System activity is linked to the synchronous firing of neurons that define slow-wave sleep.
If you interrupt the brain near the peak of a slow wave, the brain response is to increase this synchronous firing, increasing delta power, and the flushing of the glymphatic system.
Monash University here in Australia is looking into the impact this may have on Alzheimer's prevention.
There isn't a drug that I'm aware of that is as effective.
You can do what we do with rTMS, light stimulation, haptics, etc. it's more about interrupting the brain than it is creating a slow-wave, as far as everything I am aware of in the current literature.
We link to a few studies on our website https://affectablesleep.com - I'll be posting more links soon (we just launched our re-brand 2 days ago).
Sounds like the brain is doing garbage collection during sleep.
Try this metaphor:
Your brain is a movie theater. When it's in use it's all bright lights and gripping soundtrack and shiny shiny. But once in a while you have to chase out the Observers and shut down the projector and then go grab a hose and ruthlessly flush out all the tracked-in mud and popcorn remnants and stepped-on gummy bears and who the hell knows what other gunk.
Simulation confirmed.
could someone eli5 this for me pls.
Think of it as whilst awake all the experience and sensory input, nutrients(or lack) you experience throughout the day result in basically the brain doing all its activites and various parts, functions and syncopated waves/rthyms etc get out of phase.
Much like you occasionally reboot your machine to flush and re-align memory etc...
When you sleep, your sensory input systems are handed a surrogate (dreams) whist the rest of your brain gets back into phase with itself, and the idea is that this allows for an 'alignment' of sorts within the brain which allows for the cerberal fluids to more porously flow through the brain and carry away ionic and other molecules which freely float through the brain.
As the rain washes the paths and the streets after a windy, dusty day...
To allow for a fresh path where the previous wake-cycles experiences in molocules can be more properly absorbed into the brain and your neurons can 'take in' what happened all wake cycle.
Thank you.
Any recommendations on how long should I sleep for this process to kick off and get completed? Or does it happen all the time I am sleeping?
1 reply →
I recall a study a while back that suggested sleep flushing toxins was the reason lack of sleep was fatal; and that they prevented it with some drugs
In rats or something
Rapid eye movement (REM) phase is particularly important for brain function. Deep phase is crucial for the body repair.
Notably, synthesized waves generated through transcranial optogenetic stimulation substantially potentiated cerebrospinal fluid-to-interstitial fluid perfusion.
No wonder Musk is interested in this area of research.
This line indicates that with an optigenetic implant you can substitute sleep with something more efficient.
I'm sorry but your comment is incredibly I'll informed.
Not only because you think Musk is any where near the leader in the implant space, but more so that you don't understand optogenetics. The device referenced here was transcranial (i.e., non-invasive) but regardless optogenetics requires tagging specific neurons with an opsin (usually via viral vector).
I'm sorry for being curt but this is the 4th or 5th neuroscience post in the last 72h that HN have blasted with shit takes. If I wanted misunderstood science I'd revive my Reddit account.
I am very aware how optogenetics works, I wasted some part of my live getting channelrhodopsins into cells to trigger neurons.
Yes you are right one would probably use transient gene therapy tho make a modification like that, but transcranial methods are afaik for human adults less suitable since the structures lying above the stuff you usually want to stimulate are simply too thick, so a hypothetical sleep replacement machine would probably need to be an implant. That is unless you can use self-refocusing lasers or holograms for stimulation, but I do not see how one would do this unless you replace most of the skull with glass.
The point with Musk was a joke more or less.
Though it’s true that he is probably the only person both morally ambiguous enough to even try to build a dystopian sleep replacement machine and capable of getting funding for it.
Maybe a Reddit account is a good idea.
HN is great but it's only illusory that it has smarter people than Reddit. We're all just people rising to our incompetence to the limit the system allows.
I thought this was the prevailing theory anyway? Is this just confirming that?
that explains why my brain is full of trash and I love sleep but rarely get it
I immediately start to think about the effect of smartphone related waves in the room while sleeping.
Brain waves are approximately in the 1hz to 100hz range. While smartphone waves are much higher frequency. AC however is 50/60hz depending on country. Maybe I'm overly cautious, but I have a thick wire that runs right next to the natural spot for my pillow I very intentionally put the pillow on the other side of the bed.
I read about it few years ago in Matthew Walker's book "Why we sleep".
Imagine I said this in a nice way. Haven't we known this for a while? Specifically during deep non rem sleep. For the lazy, what's new here?
Is this news? Lookup glynphatic system. I thought it was known that it flushes out waste products during sleep.
Same, but the way I read it is that now we know the “how”.
Only commenter mentioning the glymphatic system, and spelled it wrong.
Gonna say it's still news!
[dead]
So garbage collection is not such a bad idea after all...
1/3 of compute time spent on garbage collection is pretty inefficient!
Well if it gives you an uptime of 80-110 years, that’s pretty useful.
What if it's garbage collection and NN training/backprop time?
Then it starts sounding like a great deal to me at least.
Only in f it's exclusively for GC.
If it's opportunistic GC, then it's simply running when nothing else is.
IOW, we may need the sleep for a different reason, and that is when the load is low enough to allow the GC to run.
Assume that we can trigger this while awake. This doesn't mean that we don't need to sleep for some other reason.
Maybe it's comforting to think that the time is not only spent with garbage collection. That's one part of sleep, but by far not the only one.
Have you seen this volume of garbage?!
It didn't get the memo on big 'O'.
GC with a time window. Maybe there's a paper there.
Where sleeping is an acceptable cost.
Great, now how do I sleep inside a mouse?
That's a really interesting scientific finding. From a personal experience, once I closed my eyes and actually observed this phenomenon. I could observe many spherical waves of light each pulsating, and not only that but I could feel the effect of each wave viscerally. It definitely felt healing. I wasn't sure what this was, was it the vibes of meditators around the world? Maybe this research finding is what I was observing.
Reflexively, that doesn't make sense. I cannot imagine perceiving ionic CSF flow with my eyes.
But thinking about it more, maybe there is something to it? I'm wholly unqualified to speculate here, but I know computers and computers are exactly the same as everything in the real world, so let's go! ...
- When restful and with my eyes closed, I definitely "see" waves move across my field of vision. My eyes see "black" (or dark gray) with slightly lighter edges that move and act like a wavefront in a fluid. There's distinct flow, and (minor) swirling and interference. I've seen these since I was very young, and I have no idea if it's a common thing or if it has a name. It must. I've mentioned it to a very small number of other non-experts but no one has ever recognized it. (I also sometimes see tiny colored tiles that light up in moving masses -- again rarely mentioned but never recognized, probably an unrelated phenomenon...)
- I do not think these are simply phosphenes, because there is no external proximate stimuli. Though I suppose we all live in environments saturated with EMF, most of the time, and a proper test would require being in a very remote area (and that's probably not enough). Though if I can "see" the presence of EMF, I'm totally making some phone calls to Charles Xavier's people.
- I've theorized that this was fluid in my eye (eyelid is too thin) moving around and refracting what little light is getting through in a dark room. But it also happens when I am completely still (though nothing in the body is ever completely still), and it also happens in complete darkness.
- The "shape" of the waves does not resemble anything that could be related to blood vessels in the eyelid. And again, complete darkness.
- So, is it possible that it's actually this ionic flow of CSF through the vision-sensing part of the brain? Not actually light coming through my eyeballs at all, but fluidlike electrical variations in the parts of the brain itself which are sensitive to the electrical signals normally coming from the optic nerves?
I have no idea. But it's an fun new angle to consider in the idle moments while I watch the waves flow before I fall asleep.
(That said, please feel free to correct my wild speculation if there's an obvious explanation that has not intersected my completely-unrelated fields of study! :)
I deliberately didn't use the word "see" when phrasing my response. I used the word observed because it was an observation, not a seeing. And I'm not describing a flow of vague amorphous whitish material, I know what you're talking about and I'm not describing that.
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
I was slightly disappointed to see my comment down voted but I'm not too surprised. I stand by my description as an accurate and well considered, rational description of what I had observed in the past.
2 replies →
Ok, I have never told anyone this, but I also sometimes wake up and “see” like a waterfall effect over my vision. It only happens very rarely and only for less than a minute after I get woken from a deep sleep. It is not unlike a moving sensation or water moving over my eyes. I realized that it is probably fluid moving over my visual cortex and being interpreted as vision. Seems weird and I have nothing to back it up on, but it has happened multiple times over my lifetime and the sensation is exactly the same every time.
2 replies →
Perhaps it's how meditation balances the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. But yeah, I know when my mediation is deepening because the rhythmic pulsation up my spine into my base brain begins.
I'm not talking about the general effect of meditation which is to relax the body and increase the flow throughout the body. I was talking very specifically about this concept of spherical expanding waves of light. To make an analogy, it resembles a moderately white light expanding from a centre. See my other comment where I describe how such a phenomena could be healing and restorative using a physical analogy.
Are you perhaps describing phosphenes?
No I'm not. Please see my other comment where I make a physical analogy to why spherical expanding waves of light may be healing and restorative.