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Comment by jawon | Hacker News Reader

"The team used mice that develop a form of Alzheimer's. They exposed these mice to bursts of sound and light that occurred 40 times a second.

The stimulation induced brain waves in the animals that occurred at the same, slow frequency.

Tests showed that the waves increased the flow of clean cerebrospinal fluid into the brain and the flow of dirty fluid out of the brain. They also showed that the fluid was carrying amyloid, the substance that builds up in the brains of Alzheimer's patients."

Does this mean we might be able to use something like TMS instead of sleeping?

And could a failure or reduced functioning in this system explain those people "allergic" to electromagnetic radiation?

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Cleaning the brain is one function that is fulfilled during sleep, but it isn't the only function. Even if you can artificially induce this you would probably need to sleep for other things such as physical recovery(which intensifies during sleep). There may be a chance that it helps lessen the need for sleep or maybe even remove some of the deleterious effects of sleep deprivation

I volunteer to try it out. I have idiopathic hypersomnia and if I get even a few minutes short of what I’m supposed to it (seems to) hit me like when most people get a few hours short.

Seriously. Anyone in HN know how I could replicate this?

Expose yourself to lights and sounds turning on and off at 40hz?

Here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine (from 1959). There's a link at the bottom for one that will run in your browser.

Re idiopathic hypersomnia: have you ruled out upper airway resistance syndrome (UARS)? Most standard sleep studies will miss it. It's often misdiagnosed as idiopathic hypersomnia or chronic fatigue syndrome.

FWIW, I have both IH and sleep apnea.

The CPAP helped a great amount, but even with CPAP and meds (Solriamfetol for fatigue/sleep inertia, Daridorexant for insomnia) I'm not very energized.

I'll look into it, although my issues seem to have started after a brain injury back when I was 12, so it's doubtful.

Here's a good rule of thumb: any time you try to undo a billion years of evolution, there will probably be unintended side effects. Go to bed.

Yea… um, also… I like sleeping. I find it a nice change of pace compared to the rest of my day.

New daily/weekly schedule based on tracking animals to exhaustion:

1) Walk for a day or two, with naps during afternoon heat. 2) Eat absolutely enormous meal. 3) Sleeeep. 4) Repeat.

"Go to bed" is useless advice. Some of us are unable to sleep longer than about 5 hours. Room darkening, white noise, complete silence, 8Sleep mattress pad, extended release melatonin, caffeine abstinence, going to bed later, going to bed earlier, nothing works. We just naturally wake up after 5 hours, no matter what, ready to go.

there’s always exceptions, but most people are capable of getting more, good sleep.

Not giving out generally useful advice just because an extremely small minority can’t use it is just silly. And giving it out is certainly useful to most people who hear it.

Just because you can’t use it, doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t give advice. There are other humans in existence.

mice models are notoriously known for being bad to predict anything related to the actual disease pathways

“Humanized mice”… yea, still mice though.

I’m kind of not joking that I think asking for medical study volunteers from prison populations in exchange for time served would put us way ahead.

Or instead of the death penalty, we try some things out that maybe might not work.

We would have cured for colds, cancers, and hair loss in a few years of human testing.

This is a bad idea, because it would incentivize channeling even more people into the prison system in order to have test subjects.

Instead of more cures for diseases, we would get an equilibrium-finding economy of live human bodies, where most of the net gain is diverted to middlemen and administrative overhead. And don't forget the incomprehensible horror.

This is voluntary though. Sure the odds of more volunteering increases with the total number of bodies, but I don't think it'd be actually significant.

“in exchange for time served”

Sure. There isn't an inherent financial incentive here for the prison system (though an illegal one could easily develop, as it does with all else). It really boils down to the type of study and how much time gets exchanged: I'd assume the more dangerous something is, the more "time served" it's worth, for example. And of course there are all the usual caveats of determining a fair rate, ensuring informed consent, etc.

Didn't this already happen repeatedly in US history? Legislation was passed preventing human testing in the early 90s

Truly monstrous idea. It alarms me that you can't immediately identify several massive problems with this idea

What I like it that you don’t think this is already being done, just probably not in the US a lot.

Why do you like that?

If 40 times a second is 40 Hz, than this frequency is pretty high for a deep sleep (in humans), 40Hz would mean some intense pattern recognition/focused attention.

"Does this mean we might be able to use something like TMS instead of sleeping?"

The trillionaires will greatly benefit from our new 20 hour work days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVne_84qZkA

That noise gave me cancer. Thank you.

You might be confusing medicine with pleasure.

I hope the patient's suffering is worthwhile.

Alzheimer seems worse to me. Although a daily recommended 1-1.5h dose of this might make me reconsider ;-) Whenever I do 30 minutes I can hear it in my ears for the next 10 minutes.

Sleep is about more than waste removal. You cant really learn new things without sleeping on it.

That's making an assumption that the two aren't actually entirely linked phenomena.

coinciding sure, but waste removal is highly unlikely to be the basis of learning. It is likely that 'updates' if you will are best performed during this maintenance period.

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