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.
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’.