New evidence suggests we can learn while we sleep, but do we really want to?
aeon.co
aeon.co
We're getting self driving cars, we carry computers we can use natural language with in our pockets (along with the sum total of all human knowledge, and a communicator that can talk to anyone else on Earth almost instantaneously), we have televisions half the size of a wall regularly in homes, normal computers are getting smaller and more power efficient, and the portable ones have insane battery life compared to just a decade ago, and I can get IEMs for under $300 that sound as good as thousands of dollars of conventional speakers.
So, why does learning while you sleep even sound surprising, yet the rest of this stuff that is clearly from the future doesn't and is now the norm?
In practice, parents will push their kinds into learning while asleep. Millions of Chinese and Indian students will cram while sleeping. Sheryl Sandberg will write a book about how women need to sleep learn with more vigor. Corporations will require workers to do overnight sleep-learning in preparation for tomorrow's meetings. People who don't utilize their sleep time effectively will be outcompeted by those who want to succeed at all costs. Human "rest" will be relegated to the books of history.
Is that really the sort of world you want to live in?
To answer your question: I want to live in a world where humans continue to evolve, yes. I don't want to live in a world where armchair philosophers and do-gooders decide what's best and "proper" for everybody. Their predictions always fall flat in the face of reality's complexity.
Not that there's much risk of them succeeding... nature has built-in ways of bypassing (outcompeting) such regulatory efforts, sooner or later. Still, in my region (eastern Europe, communism) it took a few decades... and their aftermaths are still palpable.
What we really need is to have control over our lives and environments. That means we need to tune the culture away from valuing success at all costs.
Kids of all stripes are forced to study once they get home until they go to bed. Go to bed, wake up and go to school (you better get straight A's) then go home and study. Adding in more time for studying? We'd have numerous studies on the pros and cons of this method.
I'm sure one could point to a time period in our past where people would think that the way we live now is 'dystopia'.
There could also be novel ways to use this time.
For instance, it would be kind of cool to study while sleeping, maybe some math or science or art or history. Then during the waking hours, instead of studying more, I'd love to do something with that knowledge, stuff that you can't do while you are asleep. Like experiments, make a software program that does something, draw some art that mimics a particular period. Utilize that knowledge and expand on it but in a more hands on fun way.
My $0.01.
First, psychologists shows through experimentation that it works, then a neuro scientist show that our current understanding of the brain says that this should be impossible.
Instead of revising our brain-model, we throw out the experimental evidence. But why?
Or maybe they did, but the consensus was to believe a "real" scientist.