The title is somewhat misleading, I think. Nevertheless, this sounds like very interesting research.
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.
Except... we cannot predict how future folks will be able to use e.g. neutrinos to achieve some fantastic future tech. And apart from the sheer desire to 'understand the world', physics research is giving future technologists some phenomena to (possibly) exploit.
I'm skeptical that future technologies will have much use for neutrinos specifically. Facts discovered via the study of neutrinos, that seems quite plausible, but I doubt there will ever be much use for neutrinos directly.
Well, if you want _really_ low latency comms with somewhere approximately on the other side of the world, all you need is a very big particle accelerator, and a neutrino detector :) (or two of each, really).
I'm sure the high frequency trading people would love it...
It would also require no infrastructure between the emitter and the detector. Right now we lay little glass waveguides all over the seafloor to accomplish this, or put satellites in geo synchronous orbit and suffer the latency.
Neutrino comms would be civilization transforming.
What? Like half of all modern tech is built out of weird physics. Photoelectric effect, liquid crystals, transistors, most camera improvements, capacitive touch - all applications of discoveries in physics.
> Brain-cleaning sleeping cap gets US Army funding
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.
I would prefer this to the current situation where the sponsor of the development is doing so in an effort to increase the effectiveness of its staff to commit mass murder under adverse conditions.
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)).
FDA approval for transcranial electric/magnetic stimulation has been around since 2008 for major depression, 2013 for migraines, and 2018 for OCD [0], so it wouldn't surprise me if they hold some therapeutic value for sleep disorders as well.
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.
Is there any evidence that neuromodulation can actually impact the glymphatic system and stimulate the flow of fluids?
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.
Isn't the point that they fund it because they think it might be able to perform "brain cleaning"? If that is the intent then the title that they fund a "brain cleaning" cap is accurate, it might never work though.
I have to wonder how much of this support is the military trying to find a technological workaround so they can keep using schedules that intentionally leave everyone sleep deprived all the time, instead of just adjusting those schedules to let people get enough sleep.
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.
The 15 minute early thing compounds as well: each level of supervision expects their people to show 15min early for a variety of reasons; at the lowest levels it's to take roll and address absences ("send someone to go wake up Smith, NOW!") and to brief individual or small group* responsibilities abd/or meet up points, and might even include travel to an intermediary or ultimate rallying point which itself has a 15 minute early policy. And from there it continues. 15 minutes for each subgroup to arrive at and find their place in the bigger group, repeat until everyone is gathered. Could end up being hours early as an individual in order to account for this. In the end it's nothing really important and your day was "wasted" (cue separate discussion regarding "your" time in a military).
* group meaning a collection of people, not the occasionally-used military "Group"
They actually have training / excercises within the Army (and I assume other branches), where they intentionally sleep deprive you while evaluating you on tasks. It’s assumed there will be points in battle where you can’t sleep. 24hrs without sleep happened fairly often, but the longest training that I can recall with sleep deprivation lasted 72 hours. Most people did manage to “sleep” during that time, but 20 minutes at most, as the cadence of the tasks was designed that you couldn’t sleep at all. I must admit though my platoon could mostly do our jobs in our sleep because the actions had been drilled into us and we had done them so many times with little or no sleep.
There's a significant difference between training to handle sleep deprivation as part of specific operatipns and just being sleep deprived 24/7 for months or years, though, and the US military has a long history of doing the latter.
Most Sailors on ships work in watch rotations. If you’re lucky it’s three shifts, but more often than not it’s “port and starboard” shifts of 12-on/12-off. This is especially hard for those who work nights.
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.
Last time I deployed on a ship (2011-12), the amount of time you had to sleep really depended on the job. Our engineering department on the ship, it was nothing for them to stay up 2 days straight. They had working hours, watch, drill, then maybe 3 hours and had a choice between hitting the rack or taking a shower and eating and chose the later. The IT department most of our deployment worked on 8-hour shifts and did not have watch. Just depends on the job and events of the day. I usually did a 12-on-12-off but I was also the main repairman for my division, so if repairs needed to be made, it ate into my "off shift time" while deployed.
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.
The industrial revolution was an aberration when it comes to how many hours people worked.
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.
Supply and demand suggest that, laws permitting, the new time per day would be split, some of it going to the workplace and the rest not. That would be entirely due to a labor supply shift, i.e a rise in workwrs' willingness to provide hours. If supply somehow did not rise, there would be no change in hours worked, as employers' demand for labor (which is equivalent to the money they expect to earn by employing someone for another hour) would be unchanged by the new tech.
How optimistic of you to assume that you wouldn't just spend another eight or nine hours at your job because if you don't your coworkers will and you'll get fired.
Caloric requirements are higher for someone awake than someone asleep. If the cap allows someone to operate with 20% less sleep you could imagine a small expansion of hours for shopping, venues, restaurants etc, I’d the cap allows for an 80% reduction of sleep the morning bird and night owl crowd would essentially overlap for the majority of the population, and I can imagine morning workout routines that involve dancing at dance clubs that haven’t been closed yet.
Finally our first-world ability to consume calories will match our ability to burn them! The problem isn't that we're eating too much, it's that we're sleeping too much.
Part of the "brain cleaning" they are talking about is the clearing of amyloid plaques, which occurs during Slow-Wave Oscillations (SWOs) during N3/N4 sleep.
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'm not sure it is different. I've always found Dreem really unclear about what stim they are using, and I've heard that stim has only been available in some regions, etc etc.
Doesn't really matter, as it appears they are mostly out of the market now.
Thanks. We've got prototypes built and are measuring sleep state and stimulating SWOs. We've got an industrial design firm working on fit/comfort and helping us move to design for manufacture.
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. :)
Don’t forget ‘houseless’ or ‘transient’ to describe homeless. Or ‘bodies with vaginas’ to describe women. Or ‘latinx’ to describe latinos. Pretty sure all of these are exonyms. The linguistic contortions we have to perform to describe things we already had perfectly acceptable words for is absurd and rarely serves the person or thing being described.
As I understand it, "people with <x> genitalia" is a trans-accepting way of discussing medical issues without rejecting anyone's gender identification. Having a vagina is no longer considered necessary or sufficient to be called a "woman".
Funny how calling women ‘bodies with vaginas’ or ‘menstrators’ isn’t considered offensive, while calling all males ‘men’ will get you fired and potentially in legal trouble. People have lost their damned minds.
I’m not the OP, but I think we deeply erred by conflating gender and biological sex characteristics into a single word. Unfortunately, the solution to retain men/women for gender and use more specific terminology for sex is problematic.
- 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)
Soldier specifically refers to the Army. Marines are called Marines. Naval personnel are called sailors. Air Force personnel were called "airmen" but I assume they've probably come up with something gender-neutral by now. No idea what Space Force settled on but "spacemen" would be hilarious. Warfighter is meant to be a blanket term for all uniformed personnel of the armed forces that doesn't only include the Army.
At least that is the US terminology. I can't speak for other countries.
When one thinks of making 'supersoldiers' the first thing that comes to mind is making soldiers physically stronger, but in modern warfare this offers little benefit. However, decreasing the need for sleep offers a huge benefit according to JASON scientific advisory council[0]. Part of this is that modern warfare doctrine is built around exhausting the enemy. The JASON report stated that "At present there is no clear path to a major breakthrough in [sleep management], but if such a development occurs... it could seriously alter the balance of engagement." Now that we're starting to at least understand the reason why we sleep, we're may be getting close to said breakthrough.
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.
>modern warfare doctrine is built around exhausting the enemy.
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?
There was an x-files episode about how the military had succeeded in making sleepless soldiers, but it was irreversible. The soldiers suffered and longed for death when they came back to the US.
In traditional X-files fashion one of them had gained psychic powers.
Linda Nagata's The Red Trilogy Series (an excellent read, IMO) explores some of the consequences of technologies that help manage a person's brain-state in extreme environments (sleep deprivation, trauma, PTSD, etc.): https://g.co/kgs/HK1KoT
74 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 94.6 ms ] threadIt 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!
Ransomware gang releases man from MyBrain sleeping cap after family pays $10M
CEO: users can opt-out of dream-based ads, monitoring -- but face degraded platform experience
Police use bulk collection of brain data for secretive warrants
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)).
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...
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.
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.
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 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?
- 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 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.
[0]https://irp.fas.org/agency/dod/jason/human.pdf
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.