[ExI] why sleep?

Thu Jun 18 00:23:51 UTC 2020

The gravitational wave stuff was so interesting but one of the reasons I
switched was because I was looking at noise for years with no signals, lol.
We were confident at that time GW existed but not 100 % certain. It was
weird to work in a scientific field where you just look at noise all day
long and no signal at all.
We had even a sociologist in our community that studied exactly this kind
of anomaly and how scientists managed.

Also my dad died of ALS and my job as a professor at the small college
where I was teaching had to let go all the new hires because of the crisis
in 2008. That was the year that I was supposed to get tenure. So I wanted
to use this negative situation to do something new and challenging and more
practical and went into biomed (also closer to transhumanistic type of
research).
Given the anti-aging and cognition enhancing connection with hacking sleep
I feel I'm contributing to the field of life extension and that is
fulfilling.
By the way Franco-Cortese and I have a paper that was published in Aubrey
scientific Journal about a possible approach to radical life extention.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Whole-Body-Induced-Cell-Turnover%3A-A-Proposed-for-Cortese-Santostasi/bf269924f14f41d8b5fe49c40d7697484019b135

This paper was mentioned in Juvenescence book with his own chapter
https://www.amazon.com/Juvenescence-Investing-longevity-Mellon-Jim/dp/0993047815

This should serve as a introduction as myself given you didn't know I was a
PhD, I'm catching up.

On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 5:08 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Well, "learned" via whatever mean, yes genetic, just a poetic license for
> acquiring an ability.
>
> Spike, yes I think I did mentioned before my dissertation was on
> gravitational waves (I developed a special filter to detect signals using a
> cryogenic bar detector, there was at the time the only functional in all
> US, at the lab where I worked as a PhD) and the other half on possible
> gravitational waves models from the remnant of 1987A. I worked for LIGO for
> sometime too.
> I switched to neuroscience 2009. Now 2 startups one that tries to
> commercialize the patent on the sleep device and the other is a algo
> trading company to trade stocks and crypto. Too many career changes, lol.
> https://alphahub.us/
> Shameless self promotion (talking about being humble, lol):
> By the way if any of you is interested in testing my trading algos let me
> know we are doing an alpha testing right now. Sign up with code GIOVANNI1.
> One of the algo did 3x last year (trading 1 stock x day)
>
> Giovanni
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 3:02 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Giovanni wrote:  It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins
>> that can have some level of low alertness because they learned how to make
>> half of the brain sleep while the other is functional but at very low level
>> of operation
>>
>> Good post - thanks.  My question:  do you really mean 'learned' in that
>> clip above?  Why not just genetic?  bill w
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 4:20 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Half of my scientific career has been in the field of neuroscience of
>>> sleep (the other half in gravitational waves that is one of the topics we
>>> discuss here often).
>>> I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at
>>> Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory.
>>> I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep
>>> that is the most restorative part of sleep.
>>> https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi  We received a
>>> lot of press coverage for this invention (Times, ABC, Smithsonian,  WSJ),
>>> several grants including one from DARPA.
>>> Here a podcast where I discuss my work in the field
>>> https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi.
>>> In the transhumanist community the topic of doing without sleep comes
>>> often up and of course I have my very strong bias and reservations having
>>> worked in the field and realized the fundamental importance of sleep.
>>> Sleep has many functions. It is basically a time off for the system to
>>> reset and do a lot of things that would not be a very good idea to do while
>>> the system is operating and interacting with the world.
>>> One of the main functions of sleep is memory consolidation, that is a
>>> process where new information acquired during the day, is selected and then
>>> integrated and redistributed in the brain. New memories are made permanent
>>> and other erased. The brain needs to be isolated from the environment and
>>> produce slow oscillations (that don't support consciousness) for this
>>> fundamental process to take place.
>>> Other important function of sleep is the production  and regulation of
>>> hormones (Human Growth Hormone for example, testosterone in men) that have
>>> important anti-aging effects, immune system learning, repair of tissues and
>>> so on.
>>> Almost all animals sleep, from unicellular ones to the largest
>>> creatures, even if sleep may mean just a time off for the simplest ones.
>>> It is true there are notable exceptions like dolphins that can have some
>>> level of low alertness because they learned how to make half of the brain
>>> sleep while the other is functional but at very low level of operation. The
>>> main reason they do this is because they need to come up to the surface to
>>> breath. They still sleep a total of 33 % of their day as humans though.
>>> That half asleep state is not very efficient and it is basically almost
>>> like napping. May be able to do simple automatic actions (maybe hunting
>>> slow moving fish) but I doubt their attention and higher functions are
>>> engaged. I intended to study more this topic of dolphin sleep but I had not
>>> chance yet. But in general it is the exception that confirms the rule that
>>> sleep is so fundamental that all the complex organisms do it and they do it
>>> for a large part of their day. The paradox is that sleep seems a waste of
>>> time in terms of basic priorities like food procurement and mating but also
>>> because it exposes the organism (given it is motionless and with most
>>> senses shut off during sleep) to predators that have reversed the sleep
>>> patterns (they sleep during the day for example). This points to the
>>> fundamental importance of sleep.
>>> My intuition has been for sometime that even AIs that mimic brain
>>> architecture would have some form of time off that would be the equivalent
>>> of sleep. This article that come out recently confirms this intuition:
>>> https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html
>>>
>>> It is not really wasted time but it is a fundamental part of being
>>> alive.
>>> By the way my invention is about making more efficient sleep by
>>> enhancing its restorative property in particular memory consolidation. We
>>> created a Brain Computer Interface that locks to the brain waves using
>>> machine learning algos to boost the slow waves and this boost in amplitude
>>> correlates with improved cognition. There are other groups around the world
>>> that showed that this approach can also improve learning, immune system
>>> performance and cardiovascular health.
>>>
>>> https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what
>>>> actually slays the insomniac:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> If we can prove this study correct and figure out an alternative means
>>>> of accomplishing the same thing without sleeping, oh that would be cool:
>>>> you get the functional equivalent of a third more time to do fun stuff.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> As cool as this is, I must admit skepticism.  Any organism which never
>>>> sleeps would have such a big advantage over sleepers in the survival
>>>> department, one would think evolution would have stumbled upon whatever we
>>>> can do in the lab at some point.  The insomniac beast could hunt night and
>>>> day, find sleeping beasts to attack and devour, get a huge advantage.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab.  So…
>>>> let us hope it is true.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Aside: we have long theorized that sleeping gives our muscles time to
>>>> repair and regenerate tissue etc, but in our modern world, muscles are
>>>> seldom taxed (other than voluntarily.)  We sit in front of a computer a lot
>>>> of the time.  So we could perhaps find a way to deal with the phenom
>>>> described in the article.  Then if that is the only lethal mechanism in
>>>> severe insomnia (which I doubt (but certainly hope is true)) and we figure
>>>> out a way around that, then we get most of our time to do fun stuff.  Cool!
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> spike
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