The most valuable contribution of the OP for me was in breaking down “sleep research” into more fine-grained hypotheses.
Does sleeping X hours per night cause an increase in [specific physical or mental health risk]?
A need for a different word for “the physiological states and dynamics associated with various sleep stages” as opposed to the psychological experience of being asleep. Let’s call these “physical sleep” vs “sleep experiences.” Also, we may want to introduce a category of “stimulating experiences” vs “non-stimulating experiences,” the latter of which includes sleep, meditation, perhaps a stroll around the park.
The possibility of interventions that control or reproduce any downstream impacts of physical sleep or sleep experiences on mortality/injury, cognition, and awake experiences (ie meditation as substitute for sleep experiences in memory consolidation).
The possibility that it is in fact non stimulating experiences that are neglected in our culture, and that our understanding of these dynamics is so poor that we uniquely assign their benefits to sleep.
As an analogy, maybe sleep is like lemons, and what we need is vitamin C. Our culture currently assumes there’s a unique power in lemons that can be found nowhere else in nature, but also that anything that we call “lemon juice” (lime juice, lemon juice piped through copper tubing) will give at least some of the benefits. This despite reports from polar explorers that bear liver replicates the effects just as well, but they’re weird crazy polar explorers and the admiral of the navy says limes are fine.
I think Guzey should also look into Buddhist monks, another group who habitually get less than 8 hours of sleep and are highly involved with non stimulating and transcendent experiences. It’s actually interesting to me that so little of the chatter around meditation and enlightenment addresses the role of low-sleep regimens in this context. I’d be curious to learn more.
The most valuable contribution of the OP for me was in breaking down “sleep research” into more fine-grained hypotheses.
Does sleeping X hours per night cause an increase in [specific physical or mental health risk]?
A need for a different word for “the physiological states and dynamics associated with various sleep stages” as opposed to the psychological experience of being asleep. Let’s call these “physical sleep” vs “sleep experiences.” Also, we may want to introduce a category of “stimulating experiences” vs “non-stimulating experiences,” the latter of which includes sleep, meditation, perhaps a stroll around the park.
The possibility of interventions that control or reproduce any downstream impacts of physical sleep or sleep experiences on mortality/injury, cognition, and awake experiences (ie meditation as substitute for sleep experiences in memory consolidation).
The possibility that it is in fact non stimulating experiences that are neglected in our culture, and that our understanding of these dynamics is so poor that we uniquely assign their benefits to sleep.
As an analogy, maybe sleep is like lemons, and what we need is vitamin C. Our culture currently assumes there’s a unique power in lemons that can be found nowhere else in nature, but also that anything that we call “lemon juice” (lime juice, lemon juice piped through copper tubing) will give at least some of the benefits. This despite reports from polar explorers that bear liver replicates the effects just as well, but they’re weird crazy polar explorers and the admiral of the navy says limes are fine.
I think Guzey should also look into Buddhist monks, another group who habitually get less than 8 hours of sleep and are highly involved with non stimulating and transcendent experiences. It’s actually interesting to me that so little of the chatter around meditation and enlightenment addresses the role of low-sleep regimens in this context. I’d be curious to learn more.
Oh man this is so much better than my curation notice.
I may well have skipped this if it wasn’t for your curation notice. I take your judgment on what’s worth reading pretty seriously!
neat, sounds like a success story all around.
What’s a curation notice?
It’s a comment indicating that a moderator has curated something:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HvcZmKS43SLCbJvRb/theses-on-sleep?commentId=hMvSncYmxMukMJm4s