<div dir="ltr">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. <br>We had even a sociologist in our community that studied exactly this kind of anomaly and how scientists managed. <br><br>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). <br>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. <br>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.<br> <br><a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Whole-Body-Induced-Cell-Turnover%3A-A-Proposed-for-Cortese-Santostasi/bf269924f14f41d8b5fe49c40d7697484019b135">https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Whole-Body-Induced-Cell-Turnover%3A-A-Proposed-for-Cortese-Santostasi/bf269924f14f41d8b5fe49c40d7697484019b135</a> <br><br>This paper was mentioned in Juvenescence book with his own chapter
<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Juvenescence-Investing-longevity-Mellon-Jim/dp/0993047815">https://www.amazon.com/Juvenescence-Investing-longevity-Mellon-Jim/dp/0993047815</a> <br><br>This should serve as a introduction as myself given you didn't know I was a PhD, I'm catching up. <br><br><br> <br><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 5:08 PM Giovanni Santostasi <<a href="mailto:gsantostasi@gmail.com">gsantostasi@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">Well, "learned" via whatever mean, yes genetic, just a poetic license for acquiring an ability. <br><br>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. <br>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. <br><a href="https://alphahub.us/" target="_blank">https://alphahub.us/</a> <br>Shameless self promotion (talking about being humble, lol):<br>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) <br><br>Giovanni <br><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 3:02 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)">Giovanni wrote: <span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)">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</span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:"comic sans ms",sans-serif;font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34)"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small;color:rgb(0,0,0)"><span style="color:rgb(34,34,34)"><font face="comic sans ms, sans-serif">Good post - thanks. My question: do you really mean 'learned' in that clip above? Why not just genetic? bill w</font></span></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 4:20 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr">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).<br>I worked with Tononi a the University of Wisconsin, Madison and at Northwestern University Circadian and Sleep Laboratory. <br>I have a patent in this field about a device to enhance Slow Wave sleep that is the most restorative part of sleep.
<a href="https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi" target="_blank">https://patents.justia.com/inventor/giovanni-santostasi</a>
We received a lot of press coverage for this invention (Times, ABC, Smithsonian, WSJ), several grants including one from DARPA. <br>Here a podcast where I discuss my work in the field
<a href="https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi" target="_blank">https://neurohacker.com/people/giovanni-santostasi</a>. <br>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. <br>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.<br>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. <br>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. <br>Almost all animals sleep, from unicellular ones to the largest creatures, even if sleep may mean just a time off for the simplest ones. <br>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. <br>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:
<a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html" target="_blank">https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/artificial-intelligence-human-sleep-ai-los-alamos-neural-network-a9554271.html</a> <br>It is not really wasted time but it is a fundamental part of being alive. <br>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. <br><a href="https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/" target="_blank">https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2017/april/pink-noise-sound-enhance-deep-sleep-memory/</a> <br><br><br><br><br></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Jun 17, 2020 at 7:58 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US"><div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">This research group claims to be closing in on figuring out what actually slays the insomniac:<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:Helvetica,sans-serif;color:rgb(34,34,34);background:white"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/" target="_blank">https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-sleep-deprivation-kills-20200604/</a><u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">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.<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">On the other hand, we can do some pretty cool stuff in the lab. So… let us hope it is true.<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">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!<u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">spike<u></u><u></u></p></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>
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