https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636982/
In short it explains, mechanistically, why poor sleep affects daily cognition, mental health, and age-related declines. Robust scientific theories explain more of the evidence. The glymphatic nervous system explains why sleep is so key to surviving and thriving. Maiken Nedergaard will end up winning the Nobel for its discovery.
Sadly her issues are mostly psychologically rooted due to past trauma, while all the treatments seem to be geared towards "simple" physical issues. She's tried contacting various sleep clinics here and they've all said they can't help.
She struggles a lot with falling asleep, she's exceptionally sensitive to sound and vibration while trying to sleep or sleeping, and if she falls asleep she almost always have nightmares, which significantly reduces the quality of the sleep even if they don't always wake her up.
One issue is that when you're that close to the limit of what is no longer bearable, it's hard to just try things. For example, I've been thinking exposure therapy might help for her sound and light sensitivity, but she's not convinced it'll help and doesn't want to try potentially sleeping even worse for many weeks. Which I understand, but...
One of the study tricks that the host figured out, was that if you want to memorize something, you should get rid of all the other things you don’t want to learn, and that journaling is amazingly good at that. Basically if you write down all the things you don’t want to remember, it sort of leaves space to move things to long term memory.
I say all this, because I’ve been experimenting with journaling at night, and it really helps with some of the restless nights where it feels like something is keeping me awake. It’s not a magic bullet, and it takes effort, but it may help to write down the things bothering your partner prior to sleep to allow for some of the ”less important” processes to happen.
Here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving insomnia: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/
And here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving nightmares: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-nightmares
Prazosin is the standard drug for PTSD-related nightmares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin
Also strongly recommend weighted blankets, especially for someone like your SO.
All the best eh
I’ve experienced that a moderate or intense exercise regimen can help a lot with sleep.
If she hasn’t tried therapies directed at trauma and recovery that may also be helpful.
I'm assuming you've tried ~everything already, but just in case: Have you tried white noise yet? Your brain is very good at filtering it out after listening to it for a while, but it'll still drown out other noises.
If she's sensitive to sound and light, what has she tried to address that? Like blackout curtains?
I find it a bit odd that sleep clinics would turn her away so readily.
I understand the struggle though which is why I asked so many questions, because all of these things have factored into my quest for better sleep. The psychological stuff is hard.
(1) https://www.inhousepharmacy.vu/p-1189-phenergan-tablets-25mg...
Christianity will help her make sense of what happenend and will help her get over it. She will have a place to put evil and a place to put good and she will be slowly be able to fix the direction of her mind.
She can search for scripture that speak around what happened to her and see what she can do about it. She will ask for help to go past her trauma.
I tought all my life that it was supersitious nonsense (scientific atheist) but I found out that I was wrong. We have no choice, we are religious by nature. Without a solid faith we are free floating, anxious, depressed, confused and stuck in loops.
Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain.
I think some types of learning and memory formation also happen during sleep, right?
Unfortunately I can't tell whether it works. I rely on headphones and earplugs to block out sounds during the night. Sounds such as cars and airplanes outside, or other people in the house going to the toilet, tend to wake me up unless I block out those sounds. And the handband is not compatible with headphones or ear plugs.
I wish there is a better solution.
https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/noninvasive-brain-wave-treatmen...
It says that it was published in 2015, or am I missing something?
So with the slow pace knowledge makes it into the school curriculum, you likely wouldn't have heard about it in school unless you just left the system a year or two ago (if even then).
Could not find any free access to the paper, even though the Univ' says "This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the BJC Investigators Program at Washington University; and the Neuroscience Innovation Foundation."
These kind of grant funded research should be accessible at the least from the Univ' websites.
In this case it seems the authors didn’t pay the (crazy expensive) Nature open access fee. They will have to upload a free PDF to PubMed manually, but have up to a year to do so, and don’t seem to have done it yet.
And it’s paid once, to make the whole thing open perpetually. It certainly seems better than having the people interested in reading it pay $30-40 each.
Of course, this is also based on the few times I’ve heard researchers talk about the ways they could spend their grant money. $2k to Nature sounds like a great deal by comparison.
Note: Worked for Nature in the past.
https://www.alzforum.org/news/research-news/do-sleep-rhythms...
Jiang-Xie, LF., Drieu, A., Bhasiin, K. et al. Neuronal dynamics direct cerebrospinal fluid perfusion and brain clearance. Nature 627, 157–164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6
Every Uni should have access through your library system.
But what stops Univ' site to have original research paper available for download? Nature magazine is just a distribution channel (they did not sponsor the research so should not have exclusive rights on it).
Left college long time ago; and do not have access to any library system.
Are they actually responsible for the observed activity, or do they merely trigger some ‘flushing’ mechanism inherent to the cells? Or, are the waves a result of that process?
"The accumulation of metabolic waste is a leading cause of numerous neurological disorders, yet we still have only limited knowledge of how the brain performs self-cleansing. Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create large-amplitude, rhythmic and self-perpetuating ionic waves in the interstitial fluid of the brain. These waves are a plausible mechanism to explain the correlated potentiation of the glymphatic flow1,2 through the brain parenchyma. Chemogenetic flattening of these high-energy ionic waves largely impeded cerebrospinal fluid infiltration into and clearance of molecules from the brain parenchyma. Notably, synthesized waves generated through transcranial optogenetic stimulation substantially potentiated cerebrospinal fluid-to-interstitial fluid perfusion. Our study demonstrates that neurons serve as master organizers for brain clearance. This fundamental principle introduces a new theoretical framework for the functioning of macroscopic brain waves."
Sounds like unsync'd brain waves, (being awake) impedes cerebrospinal fluid flow through the brain.
When asleep, neurons sync their action potentials, acting like a ionized fluid pump, moving old dirty cerebrospinal fluid out, and allowing new, clean in.
Interestingly, when they synthesize that type of ionization using other means, they saw the same increase in fluid movement.
This is my best attempt at translating. Hopefully within 1-2 football fields. The author leaves choice of American or the rest of the world to the reader to decide.
This line is the money shot. An action potential is the variable electrical charge of a neuron, and they maintain that charge by containing a certain concentration of ions relative to the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid. This paper proposes that neurons synchonise their charge state, which forces ions to flow in or out of the neurons in bulk, the movement of these ions causing the cerebrospinal fluid to move around, clearing out the accumulated debris.
""
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
I have no expertise in this area I’m just a dreamer :)
There are courses one can take where one learns this, like Art of Living and any other that follows the same traditions.
Yes, there's research on that, and new studies should absolutely gain from this study. Not entirely sure you'll observe the same effect, that depends on meditator, but you can fall asleep during practice.
I have over a decade experience with it, and have also participated on a study on breathing exercises and epigenetic effects from that versus blind control.
I had never taken sleep very seriously prior to that and I feel extremely foolish for it. Life is 100x better if you get an appropriate amount of sleep. Everything becomes a little easier.
My boss was diagnosed with apnea in his 30s. It was so bad they didn't believe his first test results and had to redo it, off the charts. According to him it literally killed his father. Once he started using the device for sleeping he had 100x more mental and physical energy, everything was just easier.
In my case, I was able to take a sleep test from a doctor which was basically just a pulse oximeter I wore while sleeping.
Short, intentional, regular napping is associated with a lower risks of dementia. This is different from increased, longer, napping seen in older adults. Longer naps in older adults is associated with Alzheimer’s. See this summary:
https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/can-nap...
It will be interesting to see if further research in humans can pinpoint a plausible causal mechanism in adult for both regular night time sleep and intentional short daytime napping. This might encourage companies to put in ‘sleep pods’ or at least remove the stigma of adult napping.
Humans. Just can't win can they.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524974/#!po=72...
Thank you for trying.
Probably not... I think our brains are like LLMs. We train them on sensory input we perceive over time, building up a data model that is unique to us. The models may generate similar results, but each person's brains are wired as differently as the raw binary data stored in ChatGPT vs Llama or Gemini. Thus the cleaning mechanism is probably unique per person as well.
But I don't really have a clue. It's just a logical inference.
The mechanism is very not unique. Unlike other neuronal activity, the slow-waves are synchronous firing of neurons, and almost all brains respond to interruptions 30 degrees off the peak of the wave.
It's much more health engineering than much of the medicine I'm aware of.
We've been working on this for the last 4 years at https://affectablesleep.com
Maybe it’s dreaming? Dreaming by my experience is tedious and not restful… I have 4-6 dreams every night and never feel like I’m truly asleep.
Shouldn’t be hard to figure out with an EKG and a decent graph to see what your aiming for.
Disclaimer : I have no source and I may be wrong. It’s my understanding.
Now I wake up refreshed but I’m sick of watching the same rehashed combinations of dreams. I can do lucid dreaming, but I’d just rather not dream at all
4 to 6 dreams every night sounds exhausting. You should probably check it out with a doctor, it seems you're subconsciously waking up too often during the night.
The "waves" don't exist in the brain - which is why I'm surprised this title survived publication.
The wave is the electrical activity we measure as a result of the synchronous firing of neurons which is the hallmark of deep sleep.
The slow-wave is linked to the glymphatic flush.
We can't create slow-waves, however, we can increase their power (more synchronous firing).
This is known science, and we've been working to commercialize it for the last 4 years. Getting close. https://affectablesleep.com
Anyone deep into this field around?
Glymphatic System activity is linked to the synchronous firing of neurons that define slow-wave sleep.
If you interrupt the brain near the peak of a slow wave, the brain response is to increase this synchronous firing, increasing delta power, and the flushing of the glymphatic system.
Monash University here in Australia is looking into the impact this may have on Alzheimer's prevention.
There isn't a drug that I'm aware of that is as effective.
You can do what we do with rTMS, light stimulation, haptics, etc. it's more about interrupting the brain than it is creating a slow-wave, as far as everything I am aware of in the current literature.
We link to a few studies on our website https://affectablesleep.com - I'll be posting more links soon (we just launched our re-brand 2 days ago).
Your brain is a movie theater. When it's in use it's all bright lights and gripping soundtrack and shiny shiny. But once in a while you have to chase out the Observers and shut down the projector and then go grab a hose and ruthlessly flush out all the tracked-in mud and popcorn remnants and stepped-on gummy bears and who the hell knows what other gunk.
Much like you occasionally reboot your machine to flush and re-align memory etc...
When you sleep, your sensory input systems are handed a surrogate (dreams) whist the rest of your brain gets back into phase with itself, and the idea is that this allows for an 'alignment' of sorts within the brain which allows for the cerberal fluids to more porously flow through the brain and carry away ionic and other molecules which freely float through the brain.
As the rain washes the paths and the streets after a windy, dusty day...
To allow for a fresh path where the previous wake-cycles experiences in molocules can be more properly absorbed into the brain and your neurons can 'take in' what happened all wake cycle.
Any recommendations on how long should I sleep for this process to kick off and get completed? Or does it happen all the time I am sleeping?
In rats or something
No wonder Musk is interested in this area of research.
This line indicates that with an optigenetic implant you can substitute sleep with something more efficient.
Not only because you think Musk is any where near the leader in the implant space, but more so that you don't understand optogenetics. The device referenced here was transcranial (i.e., non-invasive) but regardless optogenetics requires tagging specific neurons with an opsin (usually via viral vector).
I'm sorry for being curt but this is the 4th or 5th neuroscience post in the last 72h that HN have blasted with shit takes. If I wanted misunderstood science I'd revive my Reddit account.
Yes you are right one would probably use transient gene therapy tho make a modification like that, but transcranial methods are afaik for human adults less suitable since the structures lying above the stuff you usually want to stimulate are simply too thick, so a hypothetical sleep replacement machine would probably need to be an implant. That is unless you can use self-refocusing lasers or holograms for stimulation, but I do not see how one would do this unless you replace most of the skull with glass.
The point with Musk was a joke more or less.
Though it’s true that he is probably the only person both morally ambiguous enough to even try to build a dystopian sleep replacement machine and capable of getting funding for it.
Maybe a Reddit account is a good idea.
Then it starts sounding like a great deal to me at least.
If it's opportunistic GC, then it's simply running when nothing else is.
IOW, we may need the sleep for a different reason, and that is when the load is low enough to allow the GC to run.
Assume that we can trigger this while awake. This doesn't mean that we don't need to sleep for some other reason.
But thinking about it more, maybe there is something to it? I'm wholly unqualified to speculate here, but I know computers and computers are exactly the same as everything in the real world, so let's go! ...
- When restful and with my eyes closed, I definitely "see" waves move across my field of vision. My eyes see "black" (or dark gray) with slightly lighter edges that move and act like a wavefront in a fluid. There's distinct flow, and (minor) swirling and interference. I've seen these since I was very young, and I have no idea if it's a common thing or if it has a name. It must. I've mentioned it to a very small number of other non-experts but no one has ever recognized it. (I also sometimes see tiny colored tiles that light up in moving masses -- again rarely mentioned but never recognized, probably an unrelated phenomenon...)
- I do not think these are simply phosphenes, because there is no external proximate stimuli. Though I suppose we all live in environments saturated with EMF, most of the time, and a proper test would require being in a very remote area (and that's probably not enough). Though if I can "see" the presence of EMF, I'm totally making some phone calls to Charles Xavier's people.
- I've theorized that this was fluid in my eye (eyelid is too thin) moving around and refracting what little light is getting through in a dark room. But it also happens when I am completely still (though nothing in the body is ever completely still), and it also happens in complete darkness.
- The "shape" of the waves does not resemble anything that could be related to blood vessels in the eyelid. And again, complete darkness.
- So, is it possible that it's actually this ionic flow of CSF through the vision-sensing part of the brain? Not actually light coming through my eyeballs at all, but fluidlike electrical variations in the parts of the brain itself which are sensitive to the electrical signals normally coming from the optic nerves?
I have no idea. But it's an fun new angle to consider in the idle moments while I watch the waves flow before I fall asleep.
(That said, please feel free to correct my wild speculation if there's an obvious explanation that has not intersected my completely-unrelated fields of study! :)
I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.
I was slightly disappointed to see my comment down voted but I'm not too surprised. I stand by my description as an accurate and well considered, rational description of what I had observed in the past.
