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REST: Evolved & Modified The Future of Sleep
Contents
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7
Introduction
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No Sleep
31
Nap Map
Doze & Learn
49 54
Snooze Therapy
Conclusion
Sleep Trade
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REM | Introduction
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T
he old cliché that you need eight hours of sleep a night has proved hard to shake over the past century even though it has been consistently challenged. Even as far back as Napoleon—who famously said “six hours for a man, seven for a woman and eight for a fool”—the notion that the human body was designed to rest for a third of the day has been contentious.
The emergence of the smartphone, tablet and e-reader has added further weight to the argument as more and more people have ignored the warnings that those devices are fundamentally changing their sleep patterns. The blue light of the TV was once deemed to be disruptive to our sleep as more people installed sets at the foot of the bed but that now seems quaint with smartphones and tablets, held inches from the face, the new scourge of the insomniac. Yet there is nothing new about technology causing havoc with how we sleep. The invention of the candle and then the powerful street lighting fundamentally changed the pattern of human behavior. Prior to the 17th century, humans were prone to two bouts of sleep.
One initial period immediately after a day’s labor and then another that followed a brief waking period of two hours when people would visit neighbors, copulate, visit the bath house or engage in prayer. The emergence of the candle did not initially change much as few people would want or need to venture into the night where the streets were teeming with criminals and drunkards. It was with the advent of strong street lighting via lamps that evenings became fashionable and thought of lying around in bed all night was seen as a waste. That ushered in a period of the ‘eight hour sleep’ as segmented sleeping disappeared. That did however coincide with the rise of insomnia as a medical condition which academics and circadian specialists attribute to the body’s inability to adapt to one long slumber spell.
REM | Introduction
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SIX HOURS FOR A MAN, SEVEN FOR A WOMAN,
AND EIGHT FOR A FOOL —Napoleon
Many futurists are accustomed to launching headfirst into some very complex subjects, but even the most high-minded and enthusiastic of prognosticators may take a pass when it comes to dealing with the future of sleep. That's no cop out. It’s just that the humans—those in the developed world at least—maintain such a complicated relationship with sleep. We are all taught that we need it, seem to really love it while engaged in it and spend our waking hours moaning to each other about how much more of it we desire. But then we do everything in our power to delay its natural onset each night. “For whatever reason, we humans evolved based on a circadian rhythm, so maybe we should just respect the wisdom of evolution before we push it to its limits,” says Jack Uldrich, the renowned futurist. “Having said that, however, pushing limits is just what evolution is. We conduct experiments to see if we can become more productive, creative, healthier and happier—and maybe even to offer a new human experience” he says. “But we also have to recognize that most of them are going to fail.” Inventors are going at it with all the possibilities the future of sleep holds and maybe in 50 years we will be asking each other about when sleep became so complicated.
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SNOOZE THERAPY 01.
B
eing asleep may seem like the ultimate form of inactivity, but those unconscious hours are actually a time of hard work for your body. Sleeping is one way that your body recovers from damage and protects itself against illness, says Michael Twery, PhD, director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research for the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute. “Sleep is one part of the whole rhythm of life,” he says. “Whenever researchers go in and disrupt that rhythm, the biology becomes less efficient. And that inefficiency basically leads to disease.” Here’s a look at how sleep revives the various parts of your body.
BRAIN HEALTH Surprisingly, most people need only three to four hours of sleep at night to maintain minimal cognitive brain functions, the process responsible for carrying out the everyday things like driving a car or getting dressed. But “If you have to solve a problem that requires attention and focused thinking, that will be difficult” on such little sleep, Twery says. To properly execute difficult projects at work, for example, your brain needs seven to eight hours of sleep. Your brain also needs that much rest to most efficiently carry out ‘automatic’ tasks like hormone secretion. SKELETAL SYSTEM HEALTH Eating calcium-rich foods is not all you need to do to strengthen your bones. Adequate amounts of sleep are necessary for healthy bone marrow, the spongy tissue inside the bones that contains stem cells, which then eventually form blood cells in the body. “We get stem cells and immune cells from bone marrow,” Twery says. “Healthy sleep is part of that.” FACE AND SKIN HEALTH Ever feel ugly after a night with little rest? It might not just be your imagination. Several years ago, a small Swedish study found that the people who were photographed after 31 hours of sleep deprivation were perceived as less healthy and attractive than when they were photographed after a full night of sleep. “If you are deprived of sleep, that is correlated with appearing unwell and tired, which can make you seem less attractive,” says Carl Bazil, PhD, director of the neurology
“Sleep is the best meditation”
—Dalai Lama
division of the Columbia Sleep Disorders Center at the Neurological Institute of New York City. This effect may have something to do with the correlation between sleep deprivation and the elevated levels of stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. “Those stress factors do compromise the health of skin,” Twery says.
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HEART HEALTH Consistently skimping on needed rest can have very detrimental effects on the old ticker. Sleep deprivation can send a body’s sympathetic nervous system into overdrive, causing the release of greater amounts of the hormone adrenaline. “This tells the body’s tissues to be prepared to take immediate action. It also makes the heart work harder.” People who are sleep deprived are at greater risk for developing hyperlipidemia, or high cholesterol, which can lead to a heart attack or strokes. So do your heart a favor and get to bed early tonight.
IMMUNE SYSTEM HEALTH If you don’t get adequate sleep, you could find yourself sick a lot more often. Research has found that people are more likely to catch the common cold when they are behind on their rest. “We worry about colds more from a convenience standpoint, but there’s concern that for more serious infections, the same thing may be going on,” Dr. Bazil says. Researchers have also discovered that rest can help you get more benefits from preventive vaccines—a study published Sleep found that people produced more antibodies in response to the Hepatitis B vaccine when they had adequate sleep.
REM | Snooze Therapy
BECAUSE OF A SLEEPLESS NIGHT..
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31%
have been late to work for more than 15 minutes
74% have fallen behind on household chores
* According to a survey of 1000 Americans aged 18+ conducted in 2012 by Braun Research.
HEALTHY WEIGHT People often consume too many calories when they are sleep deprived, which can lead to weight gain. Why? Being behind on sleep can disrupt the body’s balance between ghrelin and leptin, two hormones that stimulate and suppress our appetites, respectively. “Sleep deprivation contributes to moving that ratio towards the direction of increasing appetite,” Twery says. “It is like you are attempting to compensate for the stress [of being tired].” The lesson? Aim for a full night’s sleep every night and be mindful of the food intake on the occasions when you don’t get enough shut-eye.
50%
28%
have performed poorly
of Americans have fallen
at work
asleep at work
38% have missed important appointments
LIVER HEALTH Like the rest of your body, your liver—the largest internal organ, is attuned to a certain rhythm that varies with the time of day. For example, the liver produces most cholesterol in the evening hours. Being behind on sleep can throw off this rhythm, making it less able to efficiently carry out functions like detoxifying, breaking down adrenaline, and managing blood sugar levels. “It doesn’t respond well when the liver clock is desynchronized,” Twery says. Yet one more reason to get your rest in abundance tonight.
SEXUAL HEALTH AND FERTILITY If you’re chronically shorting yourself on sleep, you could find that your sex life suffers. “People who don’t sleep enough are going to have less interest in sexual activities and decreased performance,” Bazil says. This could be because of sleep’s ability to keep the body hormones in balance—a lack of sleep can throw these hormones, including those related to sexual function, out of whack. For example, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that a week of restricted sleep (five hours a night) led to a reduction in testosterone levels.
THE AMOUNT OF SLEEP REQUIRED BY THE AVERAGE PERSON IS —Wilson Mizener
FIVE MINUTES MORE!
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02.
No Sleep Eight hours. That’s the nightly sleep recommendation you hear most frequently, the gold standard for a healthy sleep routine. But what if it isn’t? Many articles point to recent research that suggests that the eight-hour model may not be the ideal one for most healthy adults.
Although eight hours is the number most often associated with a full night’s sleep, sleep experts know that there is some degree of variation when it comes to individual sleep needs. Most often, the recommendation for sleep times comes in a range of seven to nine hours, depending on the individual. The National Sleep Foundation currently recommends this seven-to-nine hour range as ideal for healthy adults. But there is a growing body of research that suggests the ideal amount of sleep may in fact be at the low end of that range. A number of studies indicate that seven hours—not eight—may be the most healthy amount of nightly sleep. There’s no broad consensus about this among sleep experts, but there is an increasingly compelling case that’s being made by studies that for many people, eight hours may be more sleep than they need. We hear a lot more about the dangers of too little sleep, but a lot of sleep can be hazardous to your health as well. Both too little sleep and too much sleep are associated with greater mortality risks and understanding as much as we can about the overall “best” amount of sleep has real importance.
REM | No Sleep
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Crazy as it sounds to civilians, the military has long sought to create soldiers who fight without fatigue. A new drug, modafinil, has been shown in clinical studies to increase the hours of wakefulness among pilots and infantrymen without reducing their cognitive abilities. And what used to be considered normal—the requirement of an eight hour sleep is starting to be seen as a flaw that needs to be corrected. Most research into modafinil is funded by not only the American Department of Defense, but also the militaries of China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, India, and France. Seems like there’s a new race toward sleepless soldiers. The drug recently become widely popular among investment bankers, soldiers and students, and with the surge of in interest of delaying or eliminating sleep entirely, researchers are wringing their hands over the dilemmas this trend could bring: what happens when a workplace encourages, or even requires these enhancements? As man becomes busier and busier with his daily life, the need to rest will diminish. Our bodies will slowly but surely adapt to working all the time without slowing down. These advancements will surely and completely eradicate sleep and we will have all 24 hours of the day available to us. Drugs like these are only the beginning to what future technology will bring and it will lead to deadlines being met, work being competed on time, round the clock security as well as an increased rate of productivity in every field imaginable.
“You can sleep when you’re dead” —The Internet
The question is whether the strangeness of the idea will keep us from accepting it. If society rejects sleep curtailment, it will not be a biological issue; rather, the resistance will be cultural. The war against sleep is inextricably linked with debates on human enhancement, because an 8 hour consolidated sleep is the best cognitive enhancer. Sleepiness and a lack of mental focus are indistinguishable, and many of the pharmaceutically based cognitive enhancers on the market work to combat both. If only it were possible for the restorative functions that happen during sleep to occur simply during waking hours instead.
One reason why we need to shut down our conscious selves to perform our routine maintenance is that our visual system is so greedy. Glucose metabolism is zero-sum game, and functional MRI studies show a radically different pattern of glucose metabolism during sleep, with distinct regions activated either in active or sleep states but not in both. As soon as we close our eyes for sleep, a large proportion of all available energy is freed up. Just as most jets must be grounded to refuel, we must be sleeping to restore our brains for the next day. A radical sleep technology would permit the equivalent of aerial refueling, which then extends the range of a single waking day.
HOW MUCH SLEEP DO WE ACTUALLY NEED? Most of us know that getting a good night’s sleep is important, but too few of us actually make those eight or so hours between the sheets a priority. For many of us with sleep debt, we’ve forgotten what ‘being really, truly rested’ feels like. To further complicate matters, stimulants like coffee and energy drinks, alarm clocks, and external lights—including those from electronic devices—interferes with our circadian rhythm or natural sleep and wake cycle. Here is how much sleep needs vary across different ages.
TEEN
14-17 years
ADULT
26-64 years
YOUNG ADULT 18-25 years
OLDER ADULT
8-10
65 and up
HOURS OF SLEEP
7-8
7-9
7-9
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REM | No Sleep
Recommended
NEWBORN 0-3 months
Minimum required
INFANT
4-11 months
TODDLER
14-17
1-2 years
PRE-SCHOOL 3-5 months
11-14
SCHOOL AGE 6-13 years
12-15
10-13
HOURS OF SLEEP
9-11
No Sleep
REM | No Sleep
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Such attempts are likely to meet with powerful resistance from a culture that assumes that ‘natural’ is ‘optimal’. Perceptions of what is within normal range dictate what sort of human performance enhancement is medically acceptable, above which ethics review boards get cagey. Never mind that these bell curves have shifted throughout history. Never mind that we are to speak of maintaining natural sleep patterns, that ship sailed as soon as artificial light turned every indoor environment into a perpetual mid-afternoon in May. Our contemporary sleeping habits are not in any sense natural and ancestral human sleeping patterns would be very difficult to integrate into modern life. In the 90s, the psychiatrist Thomas Wehr of the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland put subjects on a natural lighting schedule and observed complex sleep rhythms. Falling asleep at dusk and waking at dawn, volunteers experienced sort of anti-nap in the middle of the night—a two-hour period of quiet and meditative repose during which prolactin levels spiked. This is backed up by historic records from the pre-industrial times: early modern English households observed ‘first’ and ‘second sleep’, with the time in between used to pray or socialize with family members.
Should technologies prove to be safe and become widely available, they would represent an alternate route to man’s longevity, extending our conscious life by as much as 50 per cent. Many of us cherish the time we spend in bed, but we don’t consciously experience most of our sleep hours—if they were reduced without extra fatigue, we might scarcely notice a difference except for all those open, new hours in our night time existence. Lifespan statistics often do adjust for time spent disabled by illness, but they rarely take into account for the ultimate debilitation: lack of consciousness. Now a life lived at 150 per cent might be within our grasps. But are we brave enough to choose it?
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—FRAN LEBOWITZ
Life is something to do when you can’t get to sleep.
LIVING IS A DISEASE FROM WHICH SLEEP GIVES US RELIEF EIGHT HOURS EVERYDAY. —Chamfort
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03.
NAP TRIP
FLYING WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED
REM | Nap Trip
Did you ever have a dream where you know you are dreaming, and can decide what happens to you? Some scientists may have worked out how to reliably control your dreams; if you’re willing to pulse low levels of electricity through your scalp. Researchers in Germany last year found they were able to induce lucid dreaming by sending around 40 hertz of electricity to the frontal-temporal lobe during a snooze. While this might sound a little like science for its own sake, a future where devices like these are readily accessible would have very positive effects for people suffering from abnormalities like nightmares, PTSD, and related disorders.
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The onward march of Google Streetview gave travelers a virtual eye on places from the Pyramids of Giza to remote Svalbard, and tourism boards have clamored to make virtual spaces to lure more visitors. But fears of a dystopian future, where travelers plug into a headset rather than hitting the road, are unfounded. Glimpsing a virtual
world or exploring on Google Streetview acts as a catalyst for a generation of travelers itching to explore for themselves. And the past century’s great strides in transportataion and new technology have shaped a global community of many explorers who are bolder and more curious than ever.
It is tempting to think that the real world and the world of our dreams are totally separate. Some of the experiments already mentioned show that there is no absolute dividing line. There are also many stories showing the penetrability of the boundary. Alan Worsley describes one experiment in which his task was to give himself a prearranged number of minute electric shocks by means of a machine measuring his eye movements. He went to sleep and began to dream that it was raining and he was in a sleeping bag by a fence with a gate in it. He began to wonder whether he was dreaming and thought it would not be accurate to activate the shock if he was awake. Then, while making the signals, he worried about the machine, for it was out there with him in the rain and might get wet.
This kind of interference is amusing, but there are dreams of confusion that are not. The most common and distinct are called false awakenings. You dream of waking up but in fact, of course, are still asleep. Van Eeden (1913) called these ‘wrong waking up’ and described them as ‘demoniacal and uncanny, and very vivid and bright, with a strong diabolical light.’ The French zoologist Yves Delage, writing in 1919, described how he had heard a knock at his door and a friend calling for his help. He jumped out of his bed, went to wash quickly with cold water, and when he woke up he realized he had been dreaming. This sequence repeated four times before he finally actually woke up—still in bed. A student of mine described her infuriating recurrent dream of getting up, cleaning her teeth, getting dressed, and then cycling all the way to the medical school at the top of a long hill, where she finally would realize that she had dreamed it all, was late for lectures, and would have to do it all over again for real.
The one positive benefit of these false awakenings is that they can sometimes be used to induce out of body experiences (OBE). Indeed, Oliver Fox (1962) recommends this as a method for achieving the OBE. For many people these OBEs and lucid dreams are very indistinguishable. So if you ever dream of leaving your body, the experience is much the same. Also recent research suggests that the same people usually tend to have both lucid dreams and OBEs.
REM | Nap Trip
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“In bed my real love has always been the sleep that rescued me by allowing me to dream.” —Luigi Pirandello
All of these experiences have something in common. In all of them the “real” world has been replaced by some kind of imaginary replica. Celia Green, of the Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford, refers to these as ‘metachoric experiences.’ Jayne Gackenbach, a psychologist from University of Alberta, Canada, relates these experiences to UFO abductions and near death experiences (NDEs). The UFO abductions are the most bizarre but are similar in that they too involve the replacement of the world by a hallucinatory replica.
There is an important difference between lucid dreams and these other states. In the lucid dream one has insight into the state (in fact that defines it); in a false awakening, one does not. In typical OBEs, people think they have really left their bodies. In UFO ‘abductions’ they believe the little green beings are ‘really there’; and in NDEs, they are convinced they are rushing down in a real tunnel toward a real light and into the next world. It is only in the lucid dreams that one realizes it is a dream.
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MOST PEOPLE DON’T CONSIDER DAWN TO BE AN ATTRACTIVE EXPERIENCE— UNLESS THEY ARE STILL UP. —Ellen Goodman
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Doze & .Learn
04.
CAN WE ACTUALLY LEARN SOMETHING NEW IN OUR SLEEP? The only way to answer this question right now is maybe. It has long been known that sleep is essential to the learning process. While our bodies are tuned down for eight hours of rest, our mind is hard at work, taking the information we’ve learned throughout the day and storing it within our mind’s bank of knowledge and memories. Just what mechanisms are involved in this process still seems very unclear, but many are beginning to tap into the potential of learning while you sleep. The key here is to take the information we have absorbed during the day, and relearn it during sleep, so that the next day the info is as fresh as if we had spent all night studying it. Though many believe that memory acquisition cannot occur during sleep, a recent study conducted by researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science has found otherwise. To test the possibility of learning new associations while sleeping, researchers played a tone, and then presented participants with either a pleasant or an unpleasant odor. They then played another tone and accompanied it with an odor opposite from the first one. They continued to alternate throughout the course of the night in order to reinforce the associations. They observed that the tone would provoke participants to breathe deeply in their sleep if the associated odor was pleasant, while they breathed in short sniffs when the tone came with a bad smell. The researchers played the tones again when the participants woke up, this time without the accompanying odors, and found that the participants would still sniff in short or deep breaths, depending on what the odor was associated with. The researchers concluded that because this association was not developed beforehand, while the subject was awake, they acquired this association while asleep.
The idea of learning as you sleep was once thought very unlikely, but there are several ways—both low and hi-tech—to try to help you acquire new skills as you doze. While there is no method that will allow you to acquire a skill completely from scratch while you are unconscious, that doesn’t mean that you still can’t use sleep to boost your memory. During the night, our brain busily processes and consolidates our recollections from the day before, and there could be ways to enhance that process. Given that we spend a third of our lives in the land of nod, it is little wonder that sleep learning has long captured the imagination of artists and writers. In most incarnations, it involved the unconscious mind absorbing new information from a recording playing in the background. In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, for instance, a Polish boy learns English after having slept through a radio lecture by George Bernard Shaw; the authoritarian government soon uses the same technique to brainwash its subjects. More recently, in The Simpsons, Homer buys a tape to subliminally reduce his appetite as he sleeps, only to find that it is instead messing with his vocabulary. When his wife, Marge, asks if his diet is working, the normally inarticulate Homer replies: “Lamentably, no. My gastronomic rapacity knows no satiety”.
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In the near future, technology may offer further ways of upgrading the brain’s sleep cycles. Memory consolidation is thought to occur during specific, slow, oscillations of electrical activity, so the idea here is to subtly encourage those brain waves without waking the subject. In 2004, Jan Born at the University of Tübingen found out that he could help amplify those signals using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which passes a small electric current across the skull, successfully improving his subjects’ performance on a verbal memory test. More recently, he has turned to an even less invasive form of stimulation, which uses a skullcap of electrodes to measure neural activity, and headphones deliver sounds that are in sync with the brain waves. Born compares the auditory stimulation to the tiny push that you might give a child on a swing, so that it slightly enhances neural activity that is already present in the brain. “Deepen the slow wave sleep and make it more intense,” says Born. “It’s a more natural way of getting the system into a rhythm.”
Man is a genius
when he is dreaming.
—Akira Kurosawa
REM | Doze & Learn
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TEENS NEED ABOUT 8 TO 10 HOURS OF SLEEP EACH NIGHT TO FUNCTION BEST. MOST TEENS DO NOT GET ENOUGH SLEEP—A STUDY FOUND THAT ONLY ABOUT
3 IN 17 TEENS REPORTED GETTING RECOMMENDED AMOUNT OF SLEEP ON SCHOOL NIGHTS.
REM | Doze & Learn
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Sleeping and learning go hand in hand, studies have shown for years. Even a brief nap can boost your memory and sharpen your thinking. But the relationship goes deeper than that. In a new study, scientists report that the brain can actually learn something new during our sleep. A study published last year by Swiss researchers suggested that sleep enhances our ability to learn foreign words. A few subjects were presented with a series of Dutch-to-German word pairs at 10 pm, then listened to an audio recording of these word pairs until 2 am. Half of the group was allowed to sleep during this period. When re-assessed, the researchers found that those who slept had recalled significantly more words than those who didn’t. Learning a new language while you sleep makes the story of the Polish boy seem almost possible. But were these subjects actually learning from the audio recordings during their sleep? Or, rather, are their memories improved simply because they slept? In fact, slow-wave or deep sleep has been recognized as critical for memory consolidation—the stabilization of memory from shortterm to long-term. During slow-wave sleep, which tends to happen during the first half of the night, the firing of our brain cells is very synchronized. When we measure sleep using electrodes attached to the scalp, slow-wave sleep appears as slow oscillations. These “slow waves” originate in the neocortex and make a circuit with the hippocampus, the brain structure which encodes new memories. Scientists believe that this connection allows for newly learned information to be repeatedly activated with each oscillation. It’s been shown that patients with insomnia, that experience less slow wave sleep than other normal sleepers, show impaired memory consolidation.
So, yes, we can learn during sleep—a bit. However this is mostly limited to making subconscious associations, like pairing scents to images. This is not exactly practical in the real world, nor will it likely lead to long-term memory storage. For more complex learning, such as baseball statistics or foreign language vocabulary, it is more likely that sleep is helping to consolidate what we have already learned, not actively processing new incoming signals. Instead of donning clunky headphones or spritzing your pillow with the same lavender scent used while studying for your Spanish test, it’s probably best to stop trying to hack your sleep. Our brains have developed a pretty clever mechanism for helping us learn new information. Be kind to your noggin and give yourself enough sleep to take advantage of it.
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“Put my head under my pillow and let the quiet put things where they are supposed to be.” —Stephen Chbosky
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Sleep 05.
TRADE
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REM | Sleep Trade
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I
nsomnia can have a significant impact. Some of the effects of insomnia are obvious, while others can be subtle and increase over time. Either way, it's important to address insomnia.
If you have insomnia, you may feel as though you're alone. Many people don't talk about sleep troubles either because the problem is so long standing it has become an accepted part of our life, or because they believe they should cope with it on their own. There is a chance though, if you talk to people that you know, you will find someone else with similar sleep troubles.
As anyone who has insomnia will tell you, the very act of laying awake while the rest of the house sleeps can also feel very lonely and frustrating. Tucking into bed with your partner and tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling or your clock, or getting back up on your own to mull around living room can be a solitary experience. Whether you live by yourself or in a full household, insomnia can make you feel like you're the only one still awake while the rest of the world sleeps. If you can't sleep, over time, the lack of control and unpredictability you experience can become a source of tension and worry. Not only do people with insomnia feel the effect of insufficient sleep on their mental and physical health, they also tend to feel anxiety or even dread as the evening progresses and the prospect of staying awake again looms. If this cycle sounds familiar, don't resign yourself to night after night of sub-par sleep and do not blame yourself. Know that insomnia is a sleep problem experienced by many and could be caused by something happening in your body that is not under your control.
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Insomnia may be characterized based on its duration. Acute insomnia is brief and often happens because of life circumstances (for example, when you can't fall asleep the night before an exam, or after receiving stressful or bad news). Many people may have experienced this type of passing sleep disruption, and it tends to be resolved without any treatment.
Chronic insomnia is disrupted sleep that occurs at least thrice a week and lasts at least three months. Chronic insomnia disorders can have many causes. Changes in the environment, unhealthy sleep habits, shift work, other clinical disorders, and certain medications could lead to a long pattern of insufficient sleep. People with chronic insomnia may benefit from some form of treatment to help them get back to healthy sleep patterns. Chronic insomnia can be comorbid, meaning that it is linked to another medical or a psychiatric issue, although sometimes it's difficult to understand this cause and effect relationship.
Insomnia can be caused by various psychiatric and medical conditions, unhealthy sleep habits, specific substances, and/or certain biological factors. Recently, researchers have begun thinking of insomnia as a problem of your brain being unable to stop being up and awake (your brain has a sleep cycle and a wake cycle—when one is turned on the other is turned off—insomnia can be a problem with either part of this cycle. This means too much wake drive or too little sleep drive). Sleep apnea is another sleep disorder linked to insomnia. With it, a person's breathing becomes partially or completely obstructed during sleep, leading to pauses in breathing and a drop in oxygen levels. This awakens the person briefly but repeatedly throughout the night. People with sleep apnea sometimes also have reported experiencing insomnia.
A life of leisure and a life of laziness are two different things. There will be sleeping enough in the grave. —Benjamin Franklin
The future could hold a technology that helps patients or individuals suffering from such medical situations. Another application of trading sleep or even buying sleep could be for those hardworking individuals or students that stay up all night working. In order to have a proper functioning day, it is important to be well rested. With the amount of workload that people have these days, getting a good night's sleep is a luxury that not many can afford. With the development of ways to transfer sleep from one person to another, a whole industry of "professional sleepers" could develop that helps the entire society. This technology can benefit those who are physically unfit to work and even take advantage of newly born babies who spend about 80% of their days sleeping. Imagine if sleep was like blood and sometimes you would run short due to an injury or surgery. In this case, the new need is sleep. At first there was an epidemic, and then a scientific discovery. So now sleep can be donated. And of course the purest, most untainted sleep comes from babies. The theory is that they have no life experience to give them nightmares. Such a technology would revolutionize the entire society and bring about a change that works towards the betterment of this world.
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Ultimately, the new sleep will come down to personalized optimization, which means that it will be customized to an individual’s specific biology and brain functions and be utilized for more than just rest. “We have already been using brain-scanning technology to get very fuzzy pictures of dreams,” says Uldrich. “So it will become a matter of how we use it to alter our sleep experience. In other words, are the DisneyPixar releases of the far future not meant for a movie screen but instead meant for our dreams? When does Dreamworks really become dream works?”
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Your future depends on your dreams. So go to sleep. —Mesut Barazani
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References
REM | References
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www.raconteur.net/healthcare/the-future-of-sleep www.vanwinkles.com/what-will-sleep-be-like-in-the-future www.everydayhealth.com/sleep/how-sleep-heals-the-body.aspx www.aeon.co/essays/ technology-to-cut-down-on-sleep-is-just-around-the-corner www.reverie.com/wp/blog/ what-will-the-future-of-sleep-look-like www.lonelyplanet.com/travel-tips-and-articles/ top-10-travel-trends-of-the-future www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-michael-j-breus/sleeptips_b_5723640.html www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/27/cant-sleep-survey_n_1625350.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Articles/si91ld.html www.medicaldaily.com/sleep-memory-connection-and-allways-we-can-learn-our-sleep-348880 www.bbc.com/future/ story/20140721-how-to-learn-while-you-sleep www.scinerds.tumblr.com/post/32400126128/ learning-in-your-sleep-image-your-brain-is-so www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/06/ how-much-can-you-really-learn-while-youre-asleep www.sleepfoundation.org/insomnia/content/insomnia-you www.sleepfoundation.org/insomnia/content/ what-causes-insomnia www.bossfight.co/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/ boss-fight-free-high-quality-stock-images-photos-photography-clouds-town-airplane-view.jpg www.mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/shared/npr/styles/x_ large/nprshared/201604/473534562.jpg
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Photo Credits
REM | Photo Credits
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www.earth911.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/bedsheets.jpg www.imgur.com/7xXCxnv www.lawofattractionsolutions.com/wp-content/ uploads/2016/04/LucidDreaming-1080x675.jpg www.princessinthetower.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/bigstock-Dream-like-surreal-double-expo-76291820.jpg www.kylasay.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/img_0091.jpg www.eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/87000/87347/iss046e000693_lrg.jpg www.www.skonahus.se/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ miljo-x-c-default.jpeg www.freebie.photography/concept/thumbs/sleep_mask.jpg www.assets.goodhousekeeping.co.uk/main/embedded/25672/ feet-key-sleeping-insomnia-poke-out-duvet-body-temperature-goodhousekeepinguk.jpg www.cdn3.bigcommerce.com/s-q9fqkhwd/products/441/ images/1357/D13CV029_PILES100_FEATHER_ EUROSTANDARD_MAIN_IMAGE_ _01359_ _72577.14459714 21.1280.1280.jpg?c=2 www.i.ytimg.com/vi/9thEB0Cskxs/maxresdefault.jpg www.s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/0a/41/0d/0a410d9d 0093764d2ab1a15117cbd0e8.jpg http://www.webpower-group.com/wp-content/ uploads/2016/09/Ontdek-de-nieuwe-Mediabibliotheekals-eerste.jpg www.media.npr.org/assets/img/2016/04/08/ istock_000083035111_wide-f028f738c768265758c8b517f50a07ce106402e8.jpg?s=1400
REM | Colophon
Design
Kush Hiren
School
Academy of Art University
Course
GR 601: Type Systems
Instructor Semester
David Hake Fall 2016
Typefaces
Didot, Gotham
Printing & Binding
Imagink Copy Services