[ExI] Sleep (was Re: Dreams...)

Tue Aug 21 22:35:31 UTC 2012

Actually slow wave sleep is pretty useful. It does a lot of interesting
things. One is dealing with synaptic homeostasis. As you learn during the
day a lot of new synapses are created to store information in a physical
form. But the brain does this initially in a indiscriminate form without
prioritizing about what is important to remember and what is not. But this
is very inefficient in terms or resources utilization. The brain is really
very dense as organic substance, there is really little space between
neurons and between neural connections, it is a packed space. So real
estate is precious in the brain and decisions need to be made about what
needs to be kept and what needs to be thrown away (like the memory of your
ex).

Also while the brain is very good in minimizing energy consumption more
connections can be very energetically wasteful. So the brain has a simple
algorithm that is if a particular neural pathway corresponding with a
particular information or execution of a task was repeated many times or if
it was a very strong and loud signal there is a chance it was important. So
to consolidate this memory the brain activates repeatedly that particular
neural pathway during slow wave sleep and at the same time it gets rid of
the unused pathways in this way renormalizing the system and increasing
signal to noise ratio. It is a process similar to memory defragmentation in
computers (that is usually done in the computer downtime, a sort of
computer sleep).

Also slow wave sleep seems associated with other regulatory process. People
that had their slow wave sleep suppressed for several days showed for
example very elevated insulin levels becoming effectively temporary
diabetics. There is even a connection between slow wave sleep and
anti-aging effects.

Of course as we hack the body we could make these processes more effective
and therefore we could reduce for example the time we spend sleeping. That
is part of my effort with inducing slow wave sleep, we are testing the idea
that by producing more slow waves in the early night period
whatever utility process the slow waves address can be done more
effectively (you do see an exponential decrease of slow wave in natural
setting as they do what they are supposed to do, so it is a matter of
making the exponential decay faster) so requiring maybe less sleep over
all.

Also we are investigating the idea of presenting information during slow
wave sleep and see if this helps with the consolidation of memory. A paper
from my group just showed that you can learn better a melody you were
learning during the day when it is presented again during slow wave sleep:

http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2012/06/memories-reactivated-in-sleep.html

The brain is not dead or inactive while you sleep. I find it exciting that
now I can actually try to control what my brain does at night while I'm not
conscious using a Brain Computer Interface I wrote.

Next step is to maybe update memories while in suspended animation if I
ever go to that point before SENS-like technology becomes reality (kidding
on this one but why not?)
Giovanni

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Giovanni Santostasi
> <gsantostasi at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have a physics background but I have spent the last 2 years working in
> > data analysis of sleep in 2 world famous laboratories in the field. I'm
> not
> > working on dreams so I cannot give much of scholarly input. Instead I
> study
> > the sleepless part of sleep called slow wave sleep.
>
> > Just wanted to share this with the group, sleep is a cool subject.
>
> One of my earliest transhumanist thoughts was that it would be cool to
> no longer need sleep. My reasoning was that sleep "wasted" a full
> third of our lives, and wouldn't it be nice if we could somehow
> recover that lost time. As a teenager, I announced my bold plan to my
> mother. I would shorten each night's sleep by 15 minutes until I
> didn't need as much sleep. I thought that somehow by depriving myself
> of sleep, I would be able to reach a point where I just didn't need it
> as much. The experiment of course failed miserably within two weeks.
> :-)
>
> Nevertheless, I have often reflected upon what a fuller life we could
> have if the sleep cycle could be shortened or even eliminated. I would
> think this would be a common transhumanist desire, but we haven't
> discussed it in the time I've been on the list. If there is work being
> done on radical life extension, it seems equally valid to research the
> shortening of the sleep cycle, as both give you more time, which is
> the ultimate transhumanist desire... I would suppose.
>
> -Kelly
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