Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)
npr.org
npr.org
Initially, I held the position that sleep was probably more important than eating food, and that you would die from sleep deprivation before you died from starvation. We looked it up, and learned about a disease called fatal familial insomnia. A mutated protein causes the onset of permanent insomnia, and there is no cure. It affects about 100 individuals worldwide. [1]
The average life expectancy of a patient is 18 months after the onset of symptoms. The first 9 months is a worsening case of insomnia, where the patient will experience paranoia, panic attacks, and hallucinations. Sleeping pills and barbiturates have been shown to worsen the clinical manifestations and hasten the onset of the disease. The individual then becomes completely unable to sleep, and will enter a state of dementia before becoming completely mute and unresponsive. This second state of permanent insomnia lasts for 9 months.
So ultimately, we learned that you can go for 9 months without sleeping before you die. I'm not sure at what point you'll suffer irreversible brain damage, but that was an interesting finding for me nonetheless.
> Non REM Stages 1 and 2: Light sleep NREM-sleep
> Non REM Stages 3 and 4: Deep slow wave sleep (SWS)
> REM-sleep when dreams occur
> FFI patients cannot go past stage 1
It appears they are getting sleep, but only stage 1 sleep. That might be what keeps them alive for 9 months. If stage 1 was blocked, I venture to guess their survival duration would be much lower.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
some would say once experiments were done and over, there isn't much that can be done to countless victims. albeit true, using these further gives some sort of approval on all of it (ie becessary evil BS).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibrodysplasia_ossificans_prog...
Sleep Lets Brain File Memories
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sleep-lets-brain-f...
I've got no clue how people stay awake for more than 48h; just last week I fell asleep in front of the computer after being awake for 24h. For me, it requires mental gymnastics to be able to go beyond that.
Debunked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6568961
A small percentage of people with fatal familial insomnia don't experience insomnia, yet they still die.
In other words, they die from the disease, not the insomnia.
My "high score" is 3 days without sleeping. Think young, healthy, pretty physical, 1st year in university, while red alert 1 was hot. And I "kind of liked" red alert.
Outcome:
After that time, I layed on bed about noon, and woke up next day early afternoon. ~24+h later. Btw, I hadn't eaten the previous time. I managed to go to the uni restaurant with a friend, and there I semi collapsed, laying flat on 2 chairs, closed eyes, open mouth, slow breath. I was half a step from being rushed to the hospital, and one and a half steps from some serious life threatening situations. Didn't even have the energy to eat the food in front of me. What "saved" me, was that a concerned manager came, asked what's going on, and I asked for salted olive oils. He brought them in a hurry. I had barely enough energy to scrap the skin of the first one, and taste the juice. The first, took some time. And the second. After the third, I ate around 10 like there was no tomorrow. And then I had the energy to eat the food in front of me.
So, basically, IMHMO, no way you can survive 9 months without sleeping.
http://www.amazon.com/Krinos-Olives-Italian-Style-Cured/dp/B...
[1] - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_%28record_holder...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Wright_%28sleep_deprivati...
Sometimes my friends say I'm forgetful, but I usually put it down to being trolled because I am sure the event or whatever didn't happen. But I do wonder if I have a random "Alzheimer moment".
It would be interesting to know if my sleeping problems were connected to my potential forgetfulness.
A quick search on YouTube reveals some (somewhat old) videos on the topic of fatal familial insomnia https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fatal+familial+...
I thought this one was particularly good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co94aQDs3ek
Sometimes my friends say I'm forgetful, but I usually put it
down to being trolled because I am sure the event or whatever
didn't happen.
Do you have sibling or other close relative or friend who remembers your life with more clarity than you do?
If so, consider speaking with a medical professional.
It would be interesting to know if my sleeping problems were
connected to my potential forgetfulness.
They may not know shit about programming, but in my personal experience, they tend to know more than me about what's considered "normal."
If it were possible to induce this "dishwasher-like" surge of cerebrospinal fluid in the brain during waking hours, would we be able to live off of significantly less (or no) sleep?
I'm not saying that it's necessarily a good idea, but it would have a plethora of practical applications -- pilots, truckers, etc. would be able to stay awake in a healthful way, rather than by ingesting stimulants.
I've been interested in the science of sleep for a while -- I wrote a side project, http://sleepyti.me, that actually gets quite a bit of traffic -- but neuroscience is mostly lost on me.
"It's probably not possible for the brain to both clean itself and at the same time [be] aware of the surroundings and talk and move and so on,"
So it would be the equivalent of a forced sleep, since you can't be conscious at the same time, but that might still be useful.
(Not sure precisely how different that is from the experience of most office workers ;) ).
Think of, for instance, the "language" areas (Broca's area and Wernicke's area). (The following over-simplified explanation assumes typical right-hand dominant individuals for the sake of brevity.) If you inactivate that area in the left hemisphere (using drugs or transcranial magnetic stimulation), you'll lose "language" processing of data that occurs around 1 Hz (in English, this corresponds to individual words, phonemes; in tonal languages, this includes tones of lexical significance). If you inactivate that area in the right hemisphere instead, you'll lose "language" processing of data that occurs an order of magnitude slower than that (in most languages, this corresponds to pitch and volume changes over the level of the sentence, and can convey prosody information such as speaker intent as well as speaker identity).
Due to specializations like this, hemispherectomies are not performed later in life. You would get symptoms similar to stroke patients. But for all areas, not just language.
In adults (or even adolescents) though, not as much luck.
In the case of hemispherectomies on Rasmussen's patients, you can analogize it as: people are dual-core by default. If you remove one of the cores early enough in life (like <5 yrs old), you can re-route the wiring so that processing can done by one of the cores, and still be pretty much normal. But whatever subtle thing is lost when if we don't do parallel processing like we usually do -- that things is pretty subtle to test for as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellar_hypoplasia#Signs_an...
There have been quite a bit of research on people with severed brain stems, where the brain halves effectively are cut off from each other and limited to communicating through external senses. In those situations the brain halves are actually exceedingly good at trying to obscure that anything is wrong by making inferences of actions carried out by one brain half that the other one could not possibly have knowledge of.
The bigger problem is that because the brain halves control different parts of the body, we'd likely lose a lot of our physical function.
I'd wager it's more like keeping an engine idling because it's less expensive/dangerous than turning it all the way off and restarting it.
http://healthysleep.med.harvard.edu/healthy/matters/benefits...
http://www.psywww.com/intropsych/ch06_memory/studying_before...
Curcumin and Alzheimer’s disease. Our group has tested curcumin in several models and found that it not only reduces oxidative damage and inflammation (as expected), but also reduces amyloid accumulation and synaptic marker loss while promoting both amyloid phagocytosis and clearance. In in vitro studies, we found curcumin worked to prevent synaptic marker and cognitive deficits caused by amyloid peptide infusion and abeta oligomer toxicity. Our work on curcumin and AD is discussed in detail in our publications
its important to note that it is only the Longvida formulation of Curcumin which effect because it crosses the blood-brain barrier, although other types seem beneficial for other conditions.
I'm skeptical of the brand in particular, not in the sense that it's bio-available, but their claim that only their brand crosses the blood-brain barrier[1][2].
[0] a lot of sites mention this in passing, but here's a study that shows 7 days of supplementation crosses the blood-brain barrier, at least in mice: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781139/
[1] http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/01/curcumin%E2%80%99s-abilit...
[2] http://www.petesplacenutritionalsupplementblog.com/2014/09/c...
It would be especially harmful if we ended up suppressing the processes that make you feel sleepy when you need sleep, while the harmful effects of sleeplessness remained.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20164566
[2] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301008204...
* not diagnosed with narcolepsy or depression already
Looking up some primary source just now: http://www.oncologypractice.com/fileadmin/content_pdf/cpn/ar...
(for some reason the UI doesn't let me reply to the reply, so here goes)
Now that I'm looking around at papers, it seems like there is evidence that it helps patients who are already depressed get some energy back.
In my opinion, efficiently using our current methods for deferring sleep boils down to understanding that you're merely deferring it, and using it to "schedule" your most awake/concentrated periods when you need it most, rather than try to force yourself to work well all the time.
Maybe one day we have something that can let us cut sleep entirely, but we're still far away from that.
EDIT: As I've clarified in another comment below, my sleep amounts without anything are already fairly low, and that may certainly affect my ability to push it further down with modafinil over the long term.
It also builds tolerance in a kind of annoying way; it prevents me from napping or sleeping even when it no longer makes me not tired.
Interesting. I can sleep just fine on modafinil, but I still have greatly increased focus if I just choose to stay awake. Also, I've never noticed any increase in tolerance (which I get very quickly with caffeine and alcohol), even taking it every day for two weeks, although maybe that's not very long.
Is there any information (affirmative or negative) about Modafinil's effects on this plaque? Considering how recent this whole discovery seems to be, I doubt there's much conclusive info on this specific interaction.
You'll probably fall asleep earlier in the day, but you'll only sleep for 8 hours. This is why it's useful for offsetting your rhythm.
Ritalin/Adderall is very different. If you use it to stay up for 8 hours, you'll sleep for 16 hours the next time you pass out.
Again, though, the data is ambiguous AFAIK.
I tend to prefer to use it to offset sleep for relatively short periods - e.g. get an extra night of work, and then sleep a bit longer for the next couple of nights - as I feel it's more productive to get a longer block of time where I'm fully alert, and give up late evenings when I'd feel tired anyway to recover.
From my subjective experience, this isn't necessarily true. All-nighters with modafinil vs. all-nighters with adderall require the same amount of catch-up sleep for me. Modafinil just gives me a less jittery wakefulness.
Now here's the kicker. When your body builds 'tolerance' for caffeine, what this usually means* is the post-synaptic cell adjusts how much adenosine it's pumping out so that the "I'm tired" signal can cut through the caffeine. And when you go through caffeine withdrawal, it takes a while for those levels to re-adjust to normal.
* in the brain. Caffeine also has effects on your digestive tract, blood pressure, and some other non-brain parts. :)
Edit: corrected cAMP -> adenosine (simple recall error from a lecture that was 9 years ago). The gist of the reply remains the same.
In moments of weakness and pushing a deadline, I have sometimes rationalize the trade-off of future time/health to present time, and sometimes, that sticks me with tolerance that it takes time to wean off. I have made a conscious effort to quit caffeine dozens of times in my life, and the most recent time it has stuck, and I plan to stick with it. The thing is, when I gain "time" with caffeine, it's not necessarily time with high-quality cognition or productivity compared to my well-rested self, and it's easy to forget to take that into account when you're making trade-off decisions when tired. You still perform like a tired person, you're just not subjectively feeling the tiredness.
FWIW, drinking decaf gives you the health benefits of coffee with 5% (kinda negligible) amounts of caffeine.
That said, a lot of the risky solvents used in the usual methods of making decaf are no longer commercially used these days, so I don't think there's a serious health risk in drinking any ol' decaf you want.
Notes for below:
* CHB/CHC -> chronic hepatitis B/C
* NAFLD -> Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease
When discussing possible mechanisms for their findings:
"We postulate that the observation of the benefit of coffee on the progression of liver disease may be due to its effects on the oxidative stress/lipotoxicity pathway, which underlie the pathogenesis of cirrhosis related to alcohol, NAFLD and possibly, in part, CHC. However, since oxidative stress is not the predominant mechanism of injury seen in CHB, coffee has no beneficial effect. Polyphenols and melanoidins, which are major components of coffee, have been shown to mediate multiple protective mechanisms in a rat model of steatohepatitis, ranging from increased fatty acid β oxidation, mitigating oxidative stress and curtailing liver inflammation (47). The other components of coffee, cafestol and kahwoel, can induce phase II detoxifying enzymes, including sulfotransferase, UDP-glucuronosyl transferase, glutathione transferase and peroxidase, and thus contribute to the anti-oxidant properties of coffee (14, 48). In addition, chemicals in coffee such as polyphenols and the diterpenes have been shown to down-regulate proinflammatory, fibrogenic cytokines such as transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) and its downstream modulator, connective tissue growth factor (CTGF), collagen and stellate cell activation (13–16).
Epidemiologic studies on caffeine have been inconsistent in demonstrating a protective effect in liver disease since other caffeine-containing beverages such as tea have not shown to be protective (19–21). Similarly, in our study, the inverse association with caffeine became null after adjustment for coffee, suggesting that ingredients of coffee other than caffeine appear to be responsible for this beverage’s effect on risk reduction. Furthermore, other caffeine-containing beverages like green tea and black tea had no significant effects with cirrhosis mortality in this study."
Caffeine is more like an adenine analog, not a cAMP (3'-5' cyclic adenosine monophosphate) analog. It binds adenosine receptors, not primarily cAMP receptors. It has indirect effects on cAMP, but I am not aware of direct ones. Also, your description of cAMP signaling sounds confused, since cAMP is an intracellular second messenger. I am not aware of an extracellular retrograde signaling process for this molecule.
Sorry, and your implication that cAMP is a byproduct of ATP consumption is totally wrong. cAMP is synthesized directly from ATP, a reaction catalyzed by the regulated enzyme adenylate cyclase.
(My thesis was on auditory cognition and I haven't touched ion channel biophysics in that long. I have a long-ago memory that adenosine (now corrected) operated as a retrograde transmitter, though since I'm probably not going to spend my afternoon looking for the citations, I'll delete as well for now. Not because I believe it's wrong, just that I can't immediately back it up.)
Are you still doing research yourself or have you left for startup land like most of HN?
since bioscience isn't on my radar i'm not sure if you'd find anything useful there, however, it feels like a more concentrated version of HN which specializes in some of the other stuff that interests you (e.g. learning algos, data analysis, etc.).
"Caffeine competitively inhibits phosphodiesterase, the enzyme that degrades cyclic AMP...By blocking the degradation process of cyclic AMP, caffeine indirectly affects regulation of cAMP-dependent protein kinases". TIL.
It's too bad our economic society doesn't value sleep? Never understood having to arrive at most jobs before 10 a.m. I've had so many jobs that want employees there the job site at 7 a.m.? I show up, but I'm not truly working until afer 10 a.m., and I'm not the only one?
Then again--I have honestly never been a morning person.
On the other hand people sleep better in the dark so if your start time implies you're going to bed when it's light out it could cause problems. Unless you use a prosthetic night (curtains).
I don't understand how people manage this. I fall asleep in less than 5 minutes if I lie down while the Sun is up in the morning, and stay solidly asleep until an appropriate number of hours have passed. Going to bed in the dark, I can toss and turn for anywhere from 30-120 minutes before finally dozing off.
Night owlism is real, and it's seriously debilitating to be required to conform to working a 9-5/10-6 job. It's Friday night, so I get to live my weekend hours. It's 2:30am now, and I'll be up another few hours. Whenever I am on vacation, or between jobs, I instantly swap to a nocturnal schedule. It is extremely painful to have to work during the day, to the point where I burn out after 12-18 months at a job. For the first time in a decade, I've almost made it 2 years at a single employer. That time is running out. I need a reversion back to my normal hours for a while. :(
"Although the average adult human brain weighs about 1.4 kilograms, only 2 percent of total body weight, it demands 20 percent of our resting metabolic rate (RMR)—the total amount of energy our bodies expend in one very lazy day of no activity."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thinking-hard-calo...
1. What makes you so sure you learn nothing during sleep? All the articles I've read about sleep's role in learning have indicated that it helps us process what we pick up during the day.
2. Why is 'progress' so important? Progress towards what? What are we chasing after?
Whilst I realise you were only questioning sleep from the point of view of its utility, for me utility alone kind of misses the point. For me the rituals around sleep are some of the best parts of daily life. I love drifting off to sleep, I love dreaming (when I'm lucky enough to remember it at least), I love waking up without any great urgency, slowly coming to my senses, wrapped in the warmth of a comfortable bed. Whilst I appreciate it wasn't your intention, I dislike the notion that our time must be spent on making ourselves better people, if we aren't causing great harm isn't enjoying what we do reason enough to do it?
For example, Noopept, the di-peptide form of the nootropic piracetam, has been shown to lower levels of amyloid plaques via "hydrophobic interactions with toxic amyloid oligomers, [which] prompts their rapid sequestration into larger fibrillar amyloid aggregates." In the linked study, researchers concluded that the "mitigating effect of noopept against amyloid oligomeric cytotoxicity may offer additional benefits to the already well-established therapeutic functions of this new pharmaceutical."[1]
The abilities of substances like this to protect the brain as we age, are examples of why we need to move major parts of the medical field to focus on preventative and rejuvenating medicine, instead of just treatment for the final symptoms of a disease that has been in progress for decades...
Background info:
This is a process of what is now called the glymphatic system. The scientest quoted in the article (M. Nedergaard), previously coined the term "glymphatic" in her paper[2] "The Garbage Truck." She was a follow-on author on the paper referenced in the NPR story, "Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain." It is a pretty interesting paper and I have a full-text copy available in my private research vault [3].
[1] http://nootroo.com/researchvault/neuroprotective-and-nootrop...
[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3749839/pdf/nihm...
[3] http://nootroo.com/researchvault/sleep-drives-metabolite-cle...
The fact that sleep still exists seems to suggest that this is hard and involves some nasty tradeoffs between the "dishwasher mode" and more operational neurological states. It's also likely that more than just this occurs, and that sleep is used to take care of a whole laundry list of housekeeping operations.
We have "pausing GC"... heh.
Except prior to artificial light sources, you would still be forced to stay sheltered or spend your time huddled up with weapons at the ready.
> and you get twice as much working time per day.
Until our work consisted of something other than hunting and gathering this would likely not have been all that much of a benefit.
On evolutionary timescales it would seem most of our evolution has happened in conditions where we were severely constrained with respect to what we could safely do during the night anyway, and so there'd be relatively little benefit to working around whatever the problems of avoiding sleep are.
I don't doubt that cutting sleep will pose all kinds of challenges we're not even aware of yet, though.
:)
The evolutionary argument is nice but maybe we're just stuck in an old 'branch' local minima. Think of axolotl limb regeneration. We only have partial regeneration but somehow nature felt it was more efficient not to regenerate full limbs and try to survive crippled. Long sleep may have been necessary, but maybe that's not the case anymore.
The clearance of beta-amyloid, etc. is largely linked to the state of sleeping that would be tough to isolate without inducing sleeping itself.
Many of these metabolic degradation products (not just beta-amyloid) of neuronal cell activities should readily be cleared quickly and efficiently from the interstitial space of the brain due to the highly sensitive nature of neuronal cells to their environment.
Some negative effects documented from these byproducts include: negatively effecting synaptic transmission[1], decreasing cytosolic Ca2+ concentrations[2] (Ca2+ is one of the final players in the triggering the release of neurotransmitters into the synapse between neurons to facilitate messages), and irreversible neuronal injury[3].
[1] - K. Parameshwaran, M. Dhanasekaran, V. Suppiramaniam, Amyloid beta peptides and glutamatergic synaptic dysregulation. Exp. Neurol. 210, 7–13 (2008)
[2] - K. V. Kuchibhotla, S. T. Goldman, C. R. Lattarulo, H. Y. Wu, B. T. Hyman, B. J. Bacskai, Abeta plaques lead to aberrant regulation of calcium homeostasis in vivo resulting in structural and functional disruption of neuronal networks. Neuron 59, 214–225 (2008)
[3] - M. P. Mattson, Calcium and neuronal injury in Alzheimer’s disease. Contributions of beta-amyloid precursor protein mismetabolism, free radicals, and metabolic compromise. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 747, 50–76 (1994)
http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/heres-why-your-brain-s...
http://nautil.us/issue/27/dark-matter/the-neurons-secret-par...
I have a serious incurable condition that interferes with, among other things, oils and salts in my body. What I have figured out over the past 14-ish years (since getting diagnosed) is that hydration is not just about how much fluid you take in. Just like you can oil something to protect it from water, oil in the body helps keep water in. And salt and other electrolytes also matter.
There are also other brain chemicals involved in helping modulate the waking and sleeping cycle of the brain, chiefly melatonin and co-q-10. I took lots and lots of co-q-10 to heal my sleep disordered brain after getting off the boatload of prescription drugs that fried it and messed up my ability to sleep.
I sleep a lot better than I used to. I am better hydrated than I used to be. But hydration is not merely a matter of drinking water. There are a lot of other chemical things going on there. But I would agree that proper hydration helps (with sleep, brain function, and general lymphatic processes). Water alone does not get you to proper hydration.
Another paper by the author cited in the NPR story, is my favorite paper on the system: "The Glymphatic System: A Beginner’s Guide" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25947369
In it, they do not mention melatonin or CoQ10, but norepinephrine as a major regulator of wakefulness. (Although I do take 400 mg a day of the reduced form of Coq10 called Ubiquinol).
Effects of changes in water intake on mood of high and low drinkers: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24728141
Beverage consumption habits "24/7" among British adults: association with total water intake and energy intake: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23305461
Nothing specific to sleep I could find.
I was working on a robotics paper to present at a conference. My first. It was a massive project and things had fallen behind schedule. With just three days left until I was supposed to be on a plane I had no choice but to work on the thing continuously and get it done.
It was a solid three days of writing code and building/testing boards. I got done and packed with a couple of hours to spare before having to go to the airport. For some reason I could not sleep on the flight from Los Angeles to Seattle.
Once I got to the room at the hotel I pretty much collapsed on the bed. My talk was scheduled for the next morning. I figured I could sleep a solid 12 hours and have a couple to get ready for the talk/presentation.
Somewhere in the middle of the night I woke up. I have no clue how long I slept up to that point. I had lost all sense of time. I went to the bathroom. And that's when the nightmare started.
I washed my face and almost immediately my ears started to buzz. It was something like a 1kHz sine wave. It started at a low level and got louder and louder. Scary.
At a certain point, my field of vision started to turn milky white. The tone got louder and all I could see was a bright white light engulfing my entire field of view.
I was blind and deaf and in the worst possible circumstances I could imagine.
I have no clue how long it all lasted. It felt like somewhere around 15 minutes. It could have been just thirty seconds but I had no sense of time and I was freaking out. All I could do was sit on the bathroom floor, hold on to something and think through the worst possible scenarios.
After what I guess was about fifteen minutes my vision started to slowly come back and the tone started to fade away. That must have taken another 5 to 15 minutes. I was drenched in sweat and scared like I had never been in my life. I've never done drugs or alcohol. I imagined this had to be like a grade-A drug addict overdose experience, or worst.
All I could do was go back to sleep after that. I was exhausted.
The next day I asked to have my talk re-scheduled and went to see a doctor. He told me I was an idiot and lucky not to have ended-up in the ER with brain damage.
That was the last time I worked on anything overnight.
I know tech companies have a culture of working long hours to get things done. Be sure you are not killing yourself to crank out another 100 lines of meaningless code. The world can wait. And if your VC's don't understand you'd like to live a long an healthy life, well, fuck them.
I often feel just as refreshed from meditating briefly as I do from a quick nap.
In any case, it appears that the blame for the suspect terminology lies primarily with the NPR writer, not the researchers. For example, the word "toxin" does not actually appear in the paper[1], which is titled "Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain".
More particularly, it sounds like brain cells (At least in mice) shrink during sleep and then enlarge during wakeful consciousness. That shrinking mechanism may play a role in the cerebrospinal fluid recycling/cleaning process, which itself may play a role in ridding the brain of harmful plaques. Does an Alzheimer's patient not show the same level of growth and shrinkage? Could forced sleep improve their outcomes? (IE: Could forced sleep lead to a more normal growth/shrink cycle?)
I am, unfortunately, ignorant on most of the medical science at play here. Any biologists, doctors or hobbyists have any thoughts?
Anesthesia and sleep are different states, though there are some similarities. Here's a figure that illustrates what 'typical' EEG looks like in these various states: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3162622/figure/F...
A smattering of other differences off the top of my head: you can feel pain when you're asleep, but not under anesthesia. It is possible to wake up a sleeping subject or patient with sounds or shaking, but not one under anesthesia. Also you'll feel refreshed after you sleep, but not after anesthesia.
When I had general anesthesia for my wisdom teeth I definitely felt refreshed afterwards. I'm wondering if this idea isn't so well grounded, since we mostly anesthetize and then do violent surgery on people - and so you mostly wake up feeling that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid#Circulatio...
Could these toxins be related?
Wake me up when they publish that paper.
Why would such a preposterously dangerous state, complete defenselessness, not be engineered around by darwinian pressure?!?
Somewhat off-topic, but how could anyone possibly argue this is not torture?
My question was more hypothetical. That seems like the very definition of torture.
"As the American Psychological Association copes with the damage reaped by an independent investigation that found it complicit in US torture, the group announced on Tuesday that its chief executive officer, its deputy CEO and its communications chief are no longer with the APA.
All three were implicated in the 542-page report issued this month by former federal prosecutor David Hoffman, who concluded that APA leaders “colluded” with the US department of defense and aided the CIA in loosening professional ethics and other guidelines to permit psychologist participation in torture."
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jul/14/apa-senior-of...
The actual q is, how isn't this torture?
And the answer is, of course it is.
On the other hand, once you have teenagers you discover that they would claim confiscating their iPhone for an entire weekend is torture.
And you do that, because evolutionarily, you kind of like your kids. Like a lot.
But without kids, under duress, try to not sleep for 3+ days.
Not funny at all.
> True, anyone can argue anything, but getting punched in the face is pretty low on the pain scale once you start boxing. You discover that your sessions on the ring will bring punches to your face for months on end. But, it isn't torture, because this is what you signed up to do. You volunteered to get punched.
Ergo, using your logic, punching prisoners in the face is not torture !
If they were keeping prisoners up for 24-36 hours, I could see that potentially being argued as not torture, if not done frequently. Anything beyond that is cruel.