Both cases of sleep and hunger are demonstrably untrue, for we can turn off those systems (with modafinil for sleep, and ECA stack for hunger), and there are few ill effects. These systems are horribly misregulated, and cause more problems than they save from.
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn’t cause any serious problems in healthy adults. Modafinil completely turns off sleepiness, and modafinil users do not die in droves, or even get sick from that.
Sleepiness on the other hand forces you to sleep even when it’s not necessary at all, by reducing your alertness, making it painful to keep awake etc. Sleepiness often kills people, for example by making them insufficiently alert while driving, far more often than it saves them from death due to sleep deprivation.
With appetite suppressants it’s similar story. How many people die due to diets, and how many people die due to obesity?
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn’t cause any serious problems in healthy adults.
Maybe if you do something simple. I experience serious mental impairment on the whole next day even if I sleep 7 hours (in the sense of not being able to get on with reading math or thinking as fast and productive/deep as after good sleep). This isn’t about sleepiness, as I can be perfectly alert, just dumber (there’s also coffee that helps with sleepiness but not with thought). This is probably too fine a point to have been adequately researched.
There has been plenty of research, complete with assigning numbers to the expected IQ drop. From what I recall, acute sleep deprivation has been found to lower measured IQ for up to a week.
(This is without the sleep effects that are particular to modafinil, as opposed to other stimulants such as caffeine or amphetamine.)
If people will forgive me not digging up the details likepage number & citation & metrics, I recall that the big USAF study on modafinil and sleep deprivation found that mental performance on modafinil did begin declining during and past the first night, it just declined less than the alternatives.
I notice the same if I get an hour or two less than normal. It’s extremely obvious when I’m doing anything that is very cognitively demanding, even if I wouldn’t notice anything out of the normal other than a mild sense of malaise if I were watching TV or doing easy cognitive tasks.
I have a similar result, except I’ve never experienced a stimulant effects from anything other than blood sugar I’m not certain I can discount sleepiness. Also, I suffer from a migraine condition which has a much more severe affect on my mental faculties on a day-to-day basis.
And since improper sleeping is one of my triggers—“Happiness is getting enough sleep.” Not too much, not too little.
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn’t cause any serious problems in healthy adults. Modafinil completely turns off sleepiness, and modafinil users do not die in droves, or even get sick from that.
I believe that sleepiness during the waking hours isn’t useful, but if you can significantly reduce sleeping hours indefinitely with no ill effects, that’s very surprising to me. Can you provide pointers to a study testing this?
Different people vary in their need for sleep, and their sleepiness systems may not always be attuned to this variation, but if you took a large random sample and literally turned off sleepiness for all of them for a long period of time I would expect significant negative effects in many cases.
Sleepiness often kills people, for example by making them insufficiently alert while driving, far more often than it saves them from death due to sleep deprivation.
You can’t compare the two directly, because almost everyone is sleepy now and then, while almost noone (as a percentage of the population) uses modafinil-grade sleep prevention. Being in danger of death due to voluntary sleep deprivation is a very rare condition.
Do we know of any actual cases of sleep-deprivation death?
I note that while rats will die of it, mice and pigeons won’t; and Randy Gardner went 11 days without sleep, and I can’t find anything about any long-term health problems (50 years later, he sounds perfectly hale & healthy in http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/sleeping_in.php—note also he probably could’ve gone more than 11 days if the descriptions of his press conference at the end as being ‘lucid’ are to be believed).
Reading about sleep deprivation studies and the ‘micro-sleeps’ that occur in many species, I wonder if the processes making up sleep might be analogous to garbage collection: you can have ‘stop the world’ GC schemes, or incremental ones
(The one human example I did find was ‘fatal familial insomnia’, but I don’t think anything can be safely inferred from a rare genetic disease like that.)
It’s hard to be sure—the deaths could be simply caused by lack of sleep, or what’s causing the inability to sleep could also be causing additional damage.
This reminds me of that sleep schedule where you sleep about 3 hours a day total in 20-30 minute increments. From what I’ve read, a bunch of people (mostly nerds) have tried it, but few have succeeded.
I gave it a try one summer. Toward the end, it did sort of work, but my general conclusion was that you were permanently on a lower level of mental functioning (which seems to accord with Stampi’s results). The experiences I read online generally either didn’t have a good test of mental functioning available, or were focused on creativity—which I figure is something that could well be boosted by the slight delirium/loss of inhibition one sometimes experiences...
Hmm. I wonder how a cost/benefit analysis would work out. On the one hand, you have a lot more time to make up for the mental deficiency, but on the other, small differences in mental performance can add up really quickly. (Anyone who has spent a day chasing a bug that would have taken them five minutes had they just thought a little more clearly will understand this.)
It’d be difficult to estimate. Intelligence is valuable; even the most basic minimum wage job can be done better if you’re more intelligent.* And then there’s the schedule disruption—more than one polyphasic sleeper has cited that as a reason to go back to monophasic.
[polyphasic sleep] did sort of work, but my general conclusion was that you were permanently on a lower level of mental functioning … [other sources] were focused on creativity
One of the arguments for polyphasic sleep is that some inventors, like Edison, did something like it. Were they trading off intelligence for creativity? Also, you get more time immediately after waking up, which is supposed to be a good time to work.
Do we know of any actual cases of sleep-deprivation death?
I couldn’t find any. On the other hand, Wikipedia claims that total and indefinite sleep deprivation is “impossible” to achieve, possibly even under torture, due to microsleep and extreme tiredness enabling brief ordinary sleep in almost any circumstances. Other reported ill effects of SD might be linked to the cause of the sleep deprivation instead.
However, that doesn’t answer the question of what might happen to an average human who was sleep-deprived by whatever method, as far as possible, for a really long period of time—months, not days. I expect there would be physiological or mental damage of some kind in (almost) everyone. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to negate those effects and do away with sleep one day—it’s just a question of how narrowly we define the “consequences” of sleep deprivation vs. “removable side effects”.
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn’t cause any serious problems in healthy adults.
...in the short term. I need more evidence than “they don’t get sick or die right away” to believe that cranking a knob as central to our physiology as sleep doesn’t deliver some unintended consequences further down the road. For example, possibly contributing to Alzheimer’s.
By simple evolutionary argument, it’s extremely unlikely that sleep would develop to any considerable degree to protect against very late age mental deterioration like Alzheimer’s (Wikipedia says it’s “generally diagnosed in people over 65 years of age”) - we’re trading 8 hours a day at reproductive age (very high cost) versus something that happens far post reproductive age, and until late stages is only a mild problem compared to other not-sleep-dependent deteriorations (benefit very close to zero).
You might want to accept far lower standards of evidence in general. There will never be enough long term medical studies in humans. No long term studies of which early adulthood activities contribute to Alzheimer’s will be done until you reach age when it will be too late to act.
By simple evolutionary argument, it’s extremely unlikely that sleep would develop to any considerable degree to protect against very late age mental deterioration like Alzheimer’s
Indeed. But that doesn’t mean sleep can’t protect against it anyway. Not every biological mechanism that protects against pathology X is an exclusive anti-X bullet. Also, the fact that Alzheimer’s tends to set in after 65 isn’t strong evidence against the claim “human sleep has evolved to delay Alzheimer’s until after reproductive obsolescence”.
You might want to accept far lower standards of evidence in general.
I was talking about belief, not action. You said:
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn’t cause any serious problems in healthy adults.
I don’t think we’re so sure of this. When sufficiently compelled to act (e.g., to gain to more time by sleeping less), we may well decide to scrape together what applicable knowledge we have and take a calculated risk. This is distinct from knowing the risk is low: It takes much less evidence to change which action appears optimal in the low-knowledge scenario than the high-knowledge scenario.
Also, the fact that Alzheimer’s tends to set in after 65 isn’t strong evidence against the claim “human sleep has evolved to delay Alzheimer’s until after reproductive obsolescence”.
Risk of Alzheimer’s is 0.3%/year past 65 years. Only 19% of people in 75–84 group get it, and it’s still a few years before it becomes fatal. It’s extremely far removed from reproductive age (and there might be various environmental factors present, I’m not even sure if wild humans could get Alzheimer’s at all).
If sleep was mainly to protect against Alzheimer’s, we would sleep quite a lot less, and have significant risk of Alzheimer’s by age of 50 or so, just as happens with most other deteriorative diseases. Evolution never overprotects like that.
I don’t think we’re so sure of this.
We know there’s virtually no short to mid term risk.
We know next to nothing about long term risk of pretty much anything, we can only take our best guess and hope for the best.
How many hours on average do you sleep a week? Also, I know that the ECA stack makes losing fat much easier and raises your resting heart rate, but what evidence do you have that ECA stacks “take away hunger”?
I don’t think amount of my sleeping diverges much from 8h/day, but it’s very irregular. I don’t take modafinil unless in special circumstances, but ask people who do so a lot.
With ECA I have personal experience, and you can ask pretty much anyone who tried it, or tried any amphetamines, which act in a very similar way. As far as I know it does not raise resting heart rate.
Pubmed has plenty of studies of ephedrine and weight loss; I don’t have any particular links ready right now, but it shouldn’t be hard to find them if you’re interested.
I have tried many stimulants for my attention problems, including amphetamines, and all (except a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) raised my resting heart rate unacceptably, from 65-70 to 85-95. I think I might try ECA and report back.
Amount of ephedrine in ECA stack is really pretty low. It won’t have significant stimulant effects past the first couple of days, caffeine in the stack is probably more stimulating than ephedrine.
The stack is good exactly because it provides good appetite suppression to stimulation ratio. You can reduce your hunger by taking a lot of amphetamines, but stimulation will be huge before appetite suppression becomes significant.
And you seem to have some heart problems. In such case, maybe it’s a better idea not to take even mildly stimulating drugs, and go for a willpower-based diet, preferably one with a pseudo-cultish background like paleo or Atkins to help you stay on track.
(I recommended ECA for appetite suppression and fat loss, I don’t have any opinion on their use for attention deficit or any other problem).
Also, have you tried selegiline? Sulbutiamine? Nothing magical, but worth a play. Selegiline in particular I’ve found to boost motivation. That makes the constant effort of turning back to whatever I was supposed to be paying attention to less of a drain on willpower.
Try intense cardiovascular exercise for 50 minutes every day. It’ll lower the heart rate, never mind the boost to cognition! Not entirely joking. Stimulants impact both my blood pressure and my heart rate. With exercise I can reduce my non-wired resting heart rate to 40 and blood pressure to borderline hypotension (when in a near meditative state and according to my monitor). That’s two side effects down!
Swimming is great for dodgy knees. If you can afford it, buy a waterproof mp3 player and listen to it while you swim to help with the boredom. (Obviously, it doesn’t have to be music—put anything on there!) I wish I could buy one of those.
Waterproof mp3 player? Hadn’t thought of that. I’m going shopping. There are only so many miles I can run before my knees wear out and more cross training (that isn’t boring) is always good.
surprisingly simple physical therapy exercises + cycling has done wonders for my knees. i also take a glucosamine / chondroiton complex, and ground flax seed for omega 3s, but i’m not sure how much credit to give them.
I didn’t find any that consistently worked. I’m pretty sure at this point that my problem wasn’t ADD at all, but rather depression. I’m currently on lamotrigine, and my attention problems have greatly improved. All the stimulants seemed to help some at first, but quickly lost their efficacy. (Except the Strattera, which didn’t help at all.)
I feel like ephedrine makes me less efficient at doing the same work, which I guess is part of the attraction to dieters.
I’m not sure that ECA turns off hunger, either.
One thing to consider about the use of stimulants to increase (endurance) exercise performance (caffeine definitely helps me) - you could probably do the same if you felt your life depended on it—this article on [Jure Robic] suggests that extreme endurance athletes may only be better in that they can force their body to use all its reserves.
Big enough dose of ECA significantly reduces hunger on pretty much everyone. You can easily try it on yourself.
Professional athletes undergo years of training, special diets, various legal and illegal performance enhancement, are brainwashed into performing better, and are selected from people genetically predisposed into their sport. That’s a long list of differences.
Things like ECA and modafinil work on an average healthy adult.
Also the most interesting athletic performance enhancing drugs don’t work on CNS, but to enlarge muscle cells or increase their number (HGH, steroids), increase blood capacity to carry oxygen (EPA), reduce body fat (different steroids), or water (diuretics) etc. CNS-affecting drugs seem to be a minor issue.
Both cases of sleep and hunger are demonstrably untrue, for we can turn off those systems (with modafinil for sleep, and ECA stack for hunger), and there are few ill effects.
The fact that we can alter our psychology with drugs does not change what that psychology is. We can also eliminate or cause many emotions and perceptions, and will probably learn to do so with for a larger variety of cases and with less side effects as time goes on. These drugs are properly considered as an extension of willpower, not a counterexample to it.
These systems are horribly misregulated, and cause more problems than they save from.
It only seems that way because of availability bias; we only know these systems when they go awry.
Oh no, we can take marginal view. If sleepiness was slightly more severe, it would kill more people due to diminished attention. If it was slightly less severe, nobody would die due to sleep deprivation, and plenty of lives would be saved.
By this marginal argument, it’s misregulated. It doesn’t mean it would be useless at some different point.
Or we could apply Nick Bostrom’s evolutionary heuristics and say that the systems were regulated fine for older environments, but not modern ones.
This is obviously true for food in 1st World countries, and plausibly true for sleep. (If calories are nearly free & electrical lighting universal, then the safe-place/low-energy rationale holds much less water.)
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn’t cause any serious problems in healthy adults.
Does “no serious problems” include “no impairment in learning”? I’ve seen plenty of studies saying that learning, memory formation and skill acquisition is consolidated during sleep.
The boost to alertness and general stimulatory properties more than compensate. Learning is improved over baseline (in non extreme sleep deprivation scenarios). Of course, some memory effects are easier to study than others. I don’t recall what impact it has on skill acquisition.
Something I am more wary of is that forgetting may be impaired. The process of filtering through memories, sifting out the useful abstractions and discarding the crap is a fairly important part of sleep. I love having extremely retentive memory but I don’t necessarily think it is healthy!
On the health side of things, taking Modafinil and cutting down on sleep doesn’t make you sick on it’s own if you are otherwise healthy. But it isn’t without physical costs. Many users (including myself) note that you need to be in far more in touch with your own physiology. If you’ve turned the safety mechanism off and don’t take care to monitor your health and force sleep when you need it you will wear yourself down over a couple of weeks. This means that you will be more vulnerable to the effects of stress and less able to recover from intense exercise.
Many users (including myself) note that you need to be in far more in touch with your own physiology. If you’ve turned the safety mechanism off and don’t take care to monitor your health and force sleep when you need it you will wear yourself down over a couple of weeks.
Thanks for the advice; I’d just started modafinil and thought I only needed to make sure I was eating enough. What about your health needs monitoring?
Unless you are far more responsible than I you have experienced the effects of a period of sleep deprivation over multiple days. Now, forget the cognitive impairment. Forget the vulnerable mood and the constant urge to sleep. Moadifinil takes cares of those.
But there’s other effects, more physiological, that are sometimes only noticeable after a few days of this self abuse. A somewhat paler face. Fatigued eyes (bloodshot or dry). A hint in the throat, almost a cough. Basically, whatever you usually get when you are run down. If you add more physical (too much exercise?) or emotional stressors with an unlucky exposure to a pathogen then watch out.
Just something to watch out for if you rely on higher doses over a period of weeks. Basically, just add ‘sleep’ and ‘rest’ to ‘food’ and it’s fine. Easy to forget if you don’t feel the need for any of them.
I cannot answer to you, because research is so limited. And research is so limited, because it’s non-prescription use, so nobody is really bothered (and funded) to research it, and also because all enhancement uses are unofficial, and shunned.
Another reason is that we don’t really know that much about the processes of learning, and we cannot easily test that. Testing simple things like attention and short term memory is much easier, so it’s done.
Testing long-term memory would probably be pretty easy, actually, using flash card programs like Supermemo. You just measure the retention of foreign vocabulary over time, and compare based on when it was first learned and whether you were sleeping regularly or not over that time, or using modafinil, or whatever. Of course, it’s still much more tricky than testing short term memory.
Testing learning is not difficult, and lots is known. There is no doubt that decreased sleep negatively affects the brain and learning and impairs existing abilities in normal human beings that aren’t taking Modafinil. Modafinil research is barely out of its infancy though, which explains the relative lack of studies related to Modafinil-modified sleep regimes and learning.
Another paper, Modafinil activates cortical and subcortical sites in the sleep-deprived state found that altered neural activity and cognitive impairment due to sleep deprivation were both improved by Modafinil on an n-back task (which taxes attention, working memory, and the executive system), but only when working on a moderate difficulty task—not on either an easier task or a more difficult task (for those familiar with n-back, the easy/moderate/difficult levels were 1-back/2-back/3-back, resp.). That study also showed slower reaction times under sleep deprivation even with Modafinil, but they were greatly improved over sleep deprived without Modafinil, even if not at the level of non-sleep deprived with or without Modafinil.
(Modafinil: A Review of Neurochemical Actions and Effects on Cognition)[http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v33/n7/abs/1301534a.html] looks like it might be an interesting read, since they reviewed all English language papers on Modafinil in pubmed, but I unfortunately don’t have access. Maybe somebody else who does have access could summarize the main points.
If large portion of effects of “sleep deprivations” can be reversed by drugs, it begs a question if they are effects of lack of sleep, or more side effect of the systems trying to get you to sleep.
Let’s take as a hypothesis that they are entirely of the latter kind, and modafinil and stimulants simply don’t turn off the sleep forcing system completely. Is there any strong evidence against it?
It’s trivial to point evidence against hypothesis that they’re entirely based on sleep deprivation, as even partial reversibility disproves it.
I’m also surprised by many of the procedures, which tried modafinil and/or stimulants as a single dose taken only after a lot (24h or more, often 36h+) of being forcefully awake. The right way that everyone uses them is to use them before first effects of sleepiness happen, which would be no later than about ~14h after waking up, and then boosting regularly every now and then, so you never go into sleepy phase. I don’t know if this affects the results, but intuitively it should make them less effective.
Both cases of sleep and hunger are demonstrably untrue, for we can turn off those systems (with modafinil for sleep, and ECA stack for hunger), and there are few ill effects. These systems are horribly misregulated, and cause more problems than they save from.
We know that not sleeping for days, or sleeping significantly less per day than 8h, doesn’t cause any serious problems in healthy adults. Modafinil completely turns off sleepiness, and modafinil users do not die in droves, or even get sick from that.
Sleepiness on the other hand forces you to sleep even when it’s not necessary at all, by reducing your alertness, making it painful to keep awake etc. Sleepiness often kills people, for example by making them insufficiently alert while driving, far more often than it saves them from death due to sleep deprivation.
With appetite suppressants it’s similar story. How many people die due to diets, and how many people die due to obesity?
These systems are completely broken.
Maybe if you do something simple. I experience serious mental impairment on the whole next day even if I sleep 7 hours (in the sense of not being able to get on with reading math or thinking as fast and productive/deep as after good sleep). This isn’t about sleepiness, as I can be perfectly alert, just dumber (there’s also coffee that helps with sleepiness but not with thought). This is probably too fine a point to have been adequately researched.
There has been plenty of research, complete with assigning numbers to the expected IQ drop. From what I recall, acute sleep deprivation has been found to lower measured IQ for up to a week.
(This is without the sleep effects that are particular to modafinil, as opposed to other stimulants such as caffeine or amphetamine.)
If people will forgive me not digging up the details likepage number & citation & metrics, I recall that the big USAF study on modafinil and sleep deprivation found that mental performance on modafinil did begin declining during and past the first night, it just declined less than the alternatives.
I notice the same if I get an hour or two less than normal. It’s extremely obvious when I’m doing anything that is very cognitively demanding, even if I wouldn’t notice anything out of the normal other than a mild sense of malaise if I were watching TV or doing easy cognitive tasks.
I have a similar result, except I’ve never experienced a stimulant effects from anything other than blood sugar I’m not certain I can discount sleepiness. Also, I suffer from a migraine condition which has a much more severe affect on my mental faculties on a day-to-day basis.
And since improper sleeping is one of my triggers—“Happiness is getting enough sleep.” Not too much, not too little.
I believe that sleepiness during the waking hours isn’t useful, but if you can significantly reduce sleeping hours indefinitely with no ill effects, that’s very surprising to me. Can you provide pointers to a study testing this?
Different people vary in their need for sleep, and their sleepiness systems may not always be attuned to this variation, but if you took a large random sample and literally turned off sleepiness for all of them for a long period of time I would expect significant negative effects in many cases.
You can’t compare the two directly, because almost everyone is sleepy now and then, while almost noone (as a percentage of the population) uses modafinil-grade sleep prevention. Being in danger of death due to voluntary sleep deprivation is a very rare condition.
Do we know of any actual cases of sleep-deprivation death?
I note that while rats will die of it, mice and pigeons won’t; and Randy Gardner went 11 days without sleep, and I can’t find anything about any long-term health problems (50 years later, he sounds perfectly hale & healthy in http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/sleeping_in.php—note also he probably could’ve gone more than 11 days if the descriptions of his press conference at the end as being ‘lucid’ are to be believed).
Reading about sleep deprivation studies and the ‘micro-sleeps’ that occur in many species, I wonder if the processes making up sleep might be analogous to garbage collection: you can have ‘stop the world’ GC schemes, or incremental ones
(The one human example I did find was ‘fatal familial insomnia’, but I don’t think anything can be safely inferred from a rare genetic disease like that.)
A fatal genetic disorder which makes sleep impossible
While the article is interesting (thanks for posting the link!), the disease doesn’t appear to cause “actual cases of sleep-deprivation death”.
It’s hard to be sure—the deaths could be simply caused by lack of sleep, or what’s causing the inability to sleep could also be causing additional damage.
This reminds me of that sleep schedule where you sleep about 3 hours a day total in 20-30 minute increments. From what I’ve read, a bunch of people (mostly nerds) have tried it, but few have succeeded.
I gave it a try one summer. Toward the end, it did sort of work, but my general conclusion was that you were permanently on a lower level of mental functioning (which seems to accord with Stampi’s results). The experiences I read online generally either didn’t have a good test of mental functioning available, or were focused on creativity—which I figure is something that could well be boosted by the slight delirium/loss of inhibition one sometimes experiences...
Hmm. I wonder how a cost/benefit analysis would work out. On the one hand, you have a lot more time to make up for the mental deficiency, but on the other, small differences in mental performance can add up really quickly. (Anyone who has spent a day chasing a bug that would have taken them five minutes had they just thought a little more clearly will understand this.)
It’d be difficult to estimate. Intelligence is valuable; even the most basic minimum wage job can be done better if you’re more intelligent.* And then there’s the schedule disruption—more than one polyphasic sleeper has cited that as a reason to go back to monophasic.
So you want to be someone with a flexible schedule & undemanding job. A good method for freelancers, I suppose, or students (eg. GPA correlates higher with ‘conscientiousness’ than IQ; consider http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-elite-us-colleges-choose-personality.html ); positions where consistency can be more valuable than peaks.
* claimed in Murray’s infamous The Bell Curve; I have no particular reason to disblieve it
One of the arguments for polyphasic sleep is that some inventors, like Edison, did something like it. Were they trading off intelligence for creativity? Also, you get more time immediately after waking up, which is supposed to be a good time to work.
Well, there are issues with anecdotes: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm#Thomas%20Alva%20Edison
I couldn’t find any. On the other hand, Wikipedia claims that total and indefinite sleep deprivation is “impossible” to achieve, possibly even under torture, due to microsleep and extreme tiredness enabling brief ordinary sleep in almost any circumstances. Other reported ill effects of SD might be linked to the cause of the sleep deprivation instead.
However, that doesn’t answer the question of what might happen to an average human who was sleep-deprived by whatever method, as far as possible, for a really long period of time—months, not days. I expect there would be physiological or mental damage of some kind in (almost) everyone. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a way to negate those effects and do away with sleep one day—it’s just a question of how narrowly we define the “consequences” of sleep deprivation vs. “removable side effects”.
...in the short term. I need more evidence than “they don’t get sick or die right away” to believe that cranking a knob as central to our physiology as sleep doesn’t deliver some unintended consequences further down the road. For example, possibly contributing to Alzheimer’s.
By simple evolutionary argument, it’s extremely unlikely that sleep would develop to any considerable degree to protect against very late age mental deterioration like Alzheimer’s (Wikipedia says it’s “generally diagnosed in people over 65 years of age”) - we’re trading 8 hours a day at reproductive age (very high cost) versus something that happens far post reproductive age, and until late stages is only a mild problem compared to other not-sleep-dependent deteriorations (benefit very close to zero).
You might want to accept far lower standards of evidence in general. There will never be enough long term medical studies in humans. No long term studies of which early adulthood activities contribute to Alzheimer’s will be done until you reach age when it will be too late to act.
Indeed. But that doesn’t mean sleep can’t protect against it anyway. Not every biological mechanism that protects against pathology X is an exclusive anti-X bullet. Also, the fact that Alzheimer’s tends to set in after 65 isn’t strong evidence against the claim “human sleep has evolved to delay Alzheimer’s until after reproductive obsolescence”.
I was talking about belief, not action. You said:
I don’t think we’re so sure of this. When sufficiently compelled to act (e.g., to gain to more time by sleeping less), we may well decide to scrape together what applicable knowledge we have and take a calculated risk. This is distinct from knowing the risk is low: It takes much less evidence to change which action appears optimal in the low-knowledge scenario than the high-knowledge scenario.
Risk of Alzheimer’s is 0.3%/year past 65 years. Only 19% of people in 75–84 group get it, and it’s still a few years before it becomes fatal. It’s extremely far removed from reproductive age (and there might be various environmental factors present, I’m not even sure if wild humans could get Alzheimer’s at all).
If sleep was mainly to protect against Alzheimer’s, we would sleep quite a lot less, and have significant risk of Alzheimer’s by age of 50 or so, just as happens with most other deteriorative diseases. Evolution never overprotects like that.
We know there’s virtually no short to mid term risk.
We know next to nothing about long term risk of pretty much anything, we can only take our best guess and hope for the best.
How many hours on average do you sleep a week? Also, I know that the ECA stack makes losing fat much easier and raises your resting heart rate, but what evidence do you have that ECA stacks “take away hunger”?
I don’t think amount of my sleeping diverges much from 8h/day, but it’s very irregular. I don’t take modafinil unless in special circumstances, but ask people who do so a lot.
With ECA I have personal experience, and you can ask pretty much anyone who tried it, or tried any amphetamines, which act in a very similar way. As far as I know it does not raise resting heart rate.
Pubmed has plenty of studies of ephedrine and weight loss; I don’t have any particular links ready right now, but it shouldn’t be hard to find them if you’re interested.
I have tried many stimulants for my attention problems, including amphetamines, and all (except a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor) raised my resting heart rate unacceptably, from 65-70 to 85-95. I think I might try ECA and report back.
Amount of ephedrine in ECA stack is really pretty low. It won’t have significant stimulant effects past the first couple of days, caffeine in the stack is probably more stimulating than ephedrine.
The stack is good exactly because it provides good appetite suppression to stimulation ratio. You can reduce your hunger by taking a lot of amphetamines, but stimulation will be huge before appetite suppression becomes significant.
And you seem to have some heart problems. In such case, maybe it’s a better idea not to take even mildly stimulating drugs, and go for a willpower-based diet, preferably one with a pseudo-cultish background like paleo or Atkins to help you stay on track.
(I recommended ECA for appetite suppression and fat loss, I don’t have any opinion on their use for attention deficit or any other problem).
That’s what I was interested in it for.
Also, have you tried selegiline? Sulbutiamine? Nothing magical, but worth a play. Selegiline in particular I’ve found to boost motivation. That makes the constant effort of turning back to whatever I was supposed to be paying attention to less of a drain on willpower.
Try intense cardiovascular exercise for 50 minutes every day. It’ll lower the heart rate, never mind the boost to cognition! Not entirely joking. Stimulants impact both my blood pressure and my heart rate. With exercise I can reduce my non-wired resting heart rate to 40 and blood pressure to borderline hypotension (when in a near meditative state and according to my monitor). That’s two side effects down!
I did that for a while. Unfortunately it’s incredibly mentally painful for me—intense boredom. Also, I have weird knee problems.
Swimming is great for dodgy knees. If you can afford it, buy a waterproof mp3 player and listen to it while you swim to help with the boredom. (Obviously, it doesn’t have to be music—put anything on there!) I wish I could buy one of those.
Waterproof mp3 player? Hadn’t thought of that. I’m going shopping. There are only so many miles I can run before my knees wear out and more cross training (that isn’t boring) is always good.
If exercise is boring, get a good MP3 player and some audiobooks.
Or with sufficiently loud and raging music, you might be able to get yourself in a state where you don’t think, just keep going.
Works for me. Not really for swimming.
surprisingly simple physical therapy exercises + cycling has done wonders for my knees. i also take a glucosamine / chondroiton complex, and ground flax seed for omega 3s, but i’m not sure how much credit to give them.
That sucks.
Out of interest, which of the stimulants did you find the most useful?
I didn’t find any that consistently worked. I’m pretty sure at this point that my problem wasn’t ADD at all, but rather depression. I’m currently on lamotrigine, and my attention problems have greatly improved. All the stimulants seemed to help some at first, but quickly lost their efficacy. (Except the Strattera, which didn’t help at all.)
I’m on Lamotrigine myself. Great stuff.
I feel like ephedrine makes me less efficient at doing the same work, which I guess is part of the attraction to dieters.
I’m not sure that ECA turns off hunger, either.
One thing to consider about the use of stimulants to increase (endurance) exercise performance (caffeine definitely helps me) - you could probably do the same if you felt your life depended on it—this article on [Jure Robic] suggests that extreme endurance athletes may only be better in that they can force their body to use all its reserves.
Big enough dose of ECA significantly reduces hunger on pretty much everyone. You can easily try it on yourself.
Professional athletes undergo years of training, special diets, various legal and illegal performance enhancement, are brainwashed into performing better, and are selected from people genetically predisposed into their sport. That’s a long list of differences.
Things like ECA and modafinil work on an average healthy adult.
Also the most interesting athletic performance enhancing drugs don’t work on CNS, but to enlarge muscle cells or increase their number (HGH, steroids), increase blood capacity to carry oxygen (EPA), reduce body fat (different steroids), or water (diuretics) etc. CNS-affecting drugs seem to be a minor issue.
The fact that we can alter our psychology with drugs does not change what that psychology is. We can also eliminate or cause many emotions and perceptions, and will probably learn to do so with for a larger variety of cases and with less side effects as time goes on. These drugs are properly considered as an extension of willpower, not a counterexample to it.
It only seems that way because of availability bias; we only know these systems when they go awry.
Oh no, we can take marginal view. If sleepiness was slightly more severe, it would kill more people due to diminished attention. If it was slightly less severe, nobody would die due to sleep deprivation, and plenty of lives would be saved.
By this marginal argument, it’s misregulated. It doesn’t mean it would be useless at some different point.
Or we could apply Nick Bostrom’s evolutionary heuristics and say that the systems were regulated fine for older environments, but not modern ones.
This is obviously true for food in 1st World countries, and plausibly true for sleep. (If calories are nearly free & electrical lighting universal, then the safe-place/low-energy rationale holds much less water.)
These drugs don’t extend willpower, they alter the system 1 defaults so that willpower is no longer needed, for there is nothing to be overcome.
Does “no serious problems” include “no impairment in learning”? I’ve seen plenty of studies saying that learning, memory formation and skill acquisition is consolidated during sleep.
The boost to alertness and general stimulatory properties more than compensate. Learning is improved over baseline (in non extreme sleep deprivation scenarios). Of course, some memory effects are easier to study than others. I don’t recall what impact it has on skill acquisition.
Something I am more wary of is that forgetting may be impaired. The process of filtering through memories, sifting out the useful abstractions and discarding the crap is a fairly important part of sleep. I love having extremely retentive memory but I don’t necessarily think it is healthy!
On the health side of things, taking Modafinil and cutting down on sleep doesn’t make you sick on it’s own if you are otherwise healthy. But it isn’t without physical costs. Many users (including myself) note that you need to be in far more in touch with your own physiology. If you’ve turned the safety mechanism off and don’t take care to monitor your health and force sleep when you need it you will wear yourself down over a couple of weeks. This means that you will be more vulnerable to the effects of stress and less able to recover from intense exercise.
Thanks for the advice; I’d just started modafinil and thought I only needed to make sure I was eating enough. What about your health needs monitoring?
Unless you are far more responsible than I you have experienced the effects of a period of sleep deprivation over multiple days. Now, forget the cognitive impairment. Forget the vulnerable mood and the constant urge to sleep. Moadifinil takes cares of those.
But there’s other effects, more physiological, that are sometimes only noticeable after a few days of this self abuse. A somewhat paler face. Fatigued eyes (bloodshot or dry). A hint in the throat, almost a cough. Basically, whatever you usually get when you are run down. If you add more physical (too much exercise?) or emotional stressors with an unlucky exposure to a pathogen then watch out.
Just something to watch out for if you rely on higher doses over a period of weeks. Basically, just add ‘sleep’ and ‘rest’ to ‘food’ and it’s fine. Easy to forget if you don’t feel the need for any of them.
You’re right! I hadn’t even noticed that I was starting to sound like Leonard Cohen.
I cannot answer to you, because research is so limited. And research is so limited, because it’s non-prescription use, so nobody is really bothered (and funded) to research it, and also because all enhancement uses are unofficial, and shunned.
Another reason is that we don’t really know that much about the processes of learning, and we cannot easily test that. Testing simple things like attention and short term memory is much easier, so it’s done.
Testing long-term memory would probably be pretty easy, actually, using flash card programs like Supermemo. You just measure the retention of foreign vocabulary over time, and compare based on when it was first learned and whether you were sleeping regularly or not over that time, or using modafinil, or whatever. Of course, it’s still much more tricky than testing short term memory.
Testing learning is not difficult, and lots is known. There is no doubt that decreased sleep negatively affects the brain and learning and impairs existing abilities in normal human beings that aren’t taking Modafinil. Modafinil research is barely out of its infancy though, which explains the relative lack of studies related to Modafinil-modified sleep regimes and learning.
I did a quick search and turned up Modafinil restores memory performance and neural activity impaired by sleep deprivation in mice, which identified a plausible physical correlate of impaired spatial working memory due to sleep deprivation and observed that Modafinil eliminated the impairment and restored normal neurological activity.
Another paper, Modafinil activates cortical and subcortical sites in the sleep-deprived state found that altered neural activity and cognitive impairment due to sleep deprivation were both improved by Modafinil on an n-back task (which taxes attention, working memory, and the executive system), but only when working on a moderate difficulty task—not on either an easier task or a more difficult task (for those familiar with n-back, the easy/moderate/difficult levels were 1-back/2-back/3-back, resp.). That study also showed slower reaction times under sleep deprivation even with Modafinil, but they were greatly improved over sleep deprived without Modafinil, even if not at the level of non-sleep deprived with or without Modafinil.
(Modafinil: A Review of Neurochemical Actions and Effects on Cognition)[http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v33/n7/abs/1301534a.html] looks like it might be an interesting read, since they reviewed all English language papers on Modafinil in pubmed, but I unfortunately don’t have access. Maybe somebody else who does have access could summarize the main points.
If large portion of effects of “sleep deprivations” can be reversed by drugs, it begs a question if they are effects of lack of sleep, or more side effect of the systems trying to get you to sleep.
Let’s take as a hypothesis that they are entirely of the latter kind, and modafinil and stimulants simply don’t turn off the sleep forcing system completely. Is there any strong evidence against it?
It’s trivial to point evidence against hypothesis that they’re entirely based on sleep deprivation, as even partial reversibility disproves it.
I’m also surprised by many of the procedures, which tried modafinil and/or stimulants as a single dose taken only after a lot (24h or more, often 36h+) of being forcefully awake. The right way that everyone uses them is to use them before first effects of sleepiness happen, which would be no later than about ~14h after waking up, and then boosting regularly every now and then, so you never go into sleepy phase. I don’t know if this affects the results, but intuitively it should make them less effective.
I’d go with ‘neglected adolescent’.