Holy crap, you can sleep only one side of your brain?! How would anyone think of even doing this?
Certain species of ducks also sleep with half the brain. They get in a circle, with the awake eye facing out, and the sleeping eye in. (I guess if they have cross visual cortex nerves like we do, it means the brain hemisphere facing out is sleeping).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep
So I guess if there's prior art, it's not a leap to think...maybe humans could try to do it too.
I recently had a mild panic attack in which I became convinced that my subconscious was secretly working against me. It was terrifying, and I couldn't see a way to think myself out of it. In fact I thought the very fact that I was worrying about it proved that my subconscious had planted the idea in my conscious experience specifically to hurt me.
What worked was going for a short walk and physically touching the ground with my hands. "Touch grass" actually works sometimes, I think because if the stimuli of the mind are coming from within, then you have no way to override bad ones and you just get echoes of the same negative thing over and over again. Whereas if you can get stimulus of any kind from the external world, then you have something else to pay attention to, you can turn the focus outwards and the feedback loop subsides.
I no longer believe my subconscious is working against me. But I agreed to try to pay attention to its concerns and take them more seriously in the future, so that it has no reason to work against me.
A major eye-opener for me was learning, awhile ago, that we differ from some other animals in that our limbic system is completely "wrapped" in malleable neurons. Some animals have (as far as we can tell) implastic wiring leading from some stimulus constructs straight into that system: they receive a stimulus, they respond immediately with physiological, emotional change. Ours is far more deeply tied to the plastic layers of the brain; we have a huge capacity to learn very complex stimulus-response ties between the world around us and how we should set our emotional state.
On the one hand, that's great! It's good to think that we can change our responses to stimuli in a way that, say, penguins can't.
On the other hand... "plastic" doesn't mean "you can will yourself to change them willy-nilly." It's more that we're capable of developing "mental allergies." We are unusual in that we can develop things like PTSD: you were shot at the same time you saw a Volkswagen Beetle drive by? Congratulations, you now experience a visceral survival-focused reaction every time you see one of the most classic examples of German engineering, and you can't will that feeling to stop because your brain's physiology changed under the dim hope that somehow avoiding vaguely-round cars avoids bullets, too.
Our brains are wonderful, transcendental things, but they're also machines and they're machines that can malfunction. It's good we have professionals who study this.
When there’s a punch coming straight for your face or you look down to see a long fall below you your mind has little choice but to pull itself together.
Like they take the fact that the brain really has two hemispheres, and make some wildly unscientific claim that this means each person has two beings within it that can be shut off at different times (one side may be good and the other bad, one side may be female and the other male).
I honestly don't see how anyone can into this stuff unless they are on drugs or malnourished.