Brain-cleaning sleeping cap gets US Army funding
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Pathological profit-based motivation is vastly preferable to pathological death-based motivation.
(which, incidentally, I always took to be a pun on Fruit of The Loom underwear abbreviating their brand as FTL (Faster Than Light in common scifi discussions)).
While the worst cases of that are generally in the Navy (for example, entire ship crews running on 4 hours of a sleep a night as standard practice, serving as a major factor in those lethal collisions back in 2017), it's pretty common for Army grunts to get six hours of sleep a night or less while on deployment.
* group meaning a collection of people, not the occasionally-used military "Group"
Even if your shift ends at, say, 0800, you still have to eat, then attend muster (like a daily standup), then do an hour or so of “cleaning stations”. Afterward you can’t go to sleep yet because the berthing where you sleep is waiting for the XO to inspect. Once that’s all done, you are still up because they planned a General Quarters (GQ) drill or a man overboard at 1000. Two hours later and you are finally free, but it’s lunch so you might as well eat. You have about 8 hours left, but you are also delinquent on 2 or 3 qualifications that require walk-through a or attending trainings which only happen during the day. Maybe you want to send an email home, so you go to the library to wait for a free computer.
By the time that’s all done, you have about 4 or 5 hours to sleep. You might be able to do that without problem for a day or two, but a week later and you are friend.
It is quite something to see that the Army rather than DARPA is working on this project. DARPA works on crazy ideas to see if they work at all, the Army Research Labs only tend to work on things that aren't that crazy.
If true, this would appear to render the military practice of keeping everyone seriously sleep deprived at all times a bit of a strategic cock-up, wouldn't it?
In traditional X-files fashion one of them had gained psychic powers.
It's a good episode.
I just hope these devices are particularly well-regulated for sleep, however, because I imagine sending the wrong signal for even a few nights' sleep could do some serious damage.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-perm...
There has already been great research in this area, so I wish they would describe what else they are doing.
We're stimulating SWOs at our start-up https://soundmind.co in order to improve sleep performance - links to research are on our "how it works" page.
I just read the Oxford paper that you linked to.
It appears to me that your approach is different from that of Dreem who used to provide "pink noise" via their headband.
Doesn't really matter, as it appears they are mostly out of the market now.
We've got a bunch of stuff we're not talking about yet re: our GTM, but we're moving as fast as we can. :)
Does that answer your question?
Do we know how the glymphatic system works in enough detail yet? This sounds like a useful research tool full of interesting sensors. But referring to it as "brain cleaning" strikes me as premature.
Our employers would suddenly expect us to spend that time working for them.
More realistically: it wouldn't be sudden, but we'd still get to the same result eventually, maybe in a couple decades.
https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours#working-hours-per-w...
I see no reason why longer days would reverse the trend. Most countries have legal limits on hours/week, and these would have to be raised, which would be immensely unpopular.
For example, prior to the industrial revolution, people worked roughly 1,440 hours a year[1]. During the industrial revolution, that shot up past 3,200 hours of working a year.
Today, in the US, the number of hours worked per year has stayed relatively stable since the 1970's. People work about 1,800 hours a year which, while lower than during the industrial revolution, is still more than people historically did in the past.
[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...
Makes me wonder how metabolisms would change. Dining, working out, other biological activities- how would they also be impacted?
- There’s a greater argument to be made for binary biological sex, and you can attach obvious descriptions to it to make the two categories distinct. - Gender on the other hand is more fluid (both historically in its expression, and in between cultures). - Biological based terminology can be used historically (e.g. Women’s History)
But this is all off topic, so I’ll stop here.
At least that is the US terminology. I can't speak for other countries.
It is astonishing how much we have learned about the brain and how it works, but there so much to learn I doubt we will ever run out of questions to ask.
With physics, we haven't uncovered anything new that would lead to whole new technologies.
I'm sure the high frequency trading people would love it...
But yeah, I’m mostly joking. Tho you never know with the HFT people.
Neutrino comms would be civilization transforming.
Not, like, even 1% as much as the rest of the consequences of the breakthroughs in practical physics necessary for them would be, I suspect.
I was lead to believe a "brain-cleaning sleeping cap" already exists. It does not. Add "research" after "cap" (or prefix with "Research into" and I would not be lead to believe it already exists.
> It is astonishing how little we have learned about the brain and how it works
?
Thanks for pointing that out!