[HN Gopher] Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself durin...
___________________________________________________________________
Scientists uncover how the brain washes itself during sleep
Author : pseudolus
Score : 254 points
Date : 2025-01-09 11:29 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| snsr wrote:
| Notably, the drug Ambien disrupts the norepinephrine oscillation
| that is part of this process.
| hypeatei wrote:
| Ambien, to me, is an extremely scary drug. People in my life
| have become extremely reliant on it to sleep and it has strange
| side effects. Sleepwalking with no recollection is one of them,
| not going to the kitchen, but getting in the car types of
| sleepwalking.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > Ambien, to me, is an extremely scary drug.
|
| Meanwhile, older drugs that are less distressing aren't used
| any more because "We don't use it any more". -Dr: If I ask
| about Librium.
| diggan wrote:
| You're talking about "older drugs" like Chlordiazepoxide
| like they don't have any drawbacks or the drawbacks are
| less heavy compared to other more modern drugs. I'll give
| you that everyone is different, and doctors should evaluate
| what works for each patient, but I don't think it's ever as
| simple as "older drugs == better, newer drugs == worse".
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > but I don't think it's ever as simple as "older drugs
| == better, newer drugs == worse".
|
| I don't think anyone here was making that assertion. In
| this context - the closest thing to a broad, common
| experience are Dr's who won't consider older meds, even
| if they come with less baggage than their newer
| counterparts.
| tartoran wrote:
| I agree, Ambien is a scary drug to rely on as it can create
| dependency and also masks underlying issues that are causing
| not inability to sleep. In emergencies when one needs to get
| some form of sleep it could be useful to break the cycle of
| not being able to sleep and restore sleep hygiene. I had some
| sleep issues back in my 20s (luckily they haven't come back)
| and found that sometimes being too tired made falling and
| staying asleep quite hard. One thing that helped me is to
| forcefully yawn before going to sleep, doing it for a couple
| of minutes.
| diggan wrote:
| > Ambien is a scary drug to rely on as it can create
| dependency and also masks underlying issues that are
| causing not inability to sleep.
|
| That just sounds like you think every sleeping-pill is
| scary, as that's true for literally all of them.
|
| Sleeping pills are mostly effective together with other
| types of therapy to address the underlying causes, just
| like most "temporary solutions". They're supposed to be
| used as "We'll try to figure out what's wrong, but in the
| meantime, so you can feel relatively human, here is a
| temporary crutch", not as a long-term solution.
| tootie wrote:
| Intractable sleep conditions exist. I have narcolepsy
| which is incurable. I'm on sodium oxybate which is
| basically just GHB. It's a "scary" drug to be taking
| every night, but it's very effective and usually very
| safe in controlled dosage.
| lilyball wrote:
| That drug is not a drug designed to put you to sleep
| though (I mean it kinda does, but that's not its
| purpose). The purpose of that drug is to change your
| sleep architecture during the night. I'm on the newer
| form of that drug (because of idiopathic hypersomnia) and
| most nights I still take 1-2 hours to fall asleep.
| toastau wrote:
| I use 5mg a few nights a week to get a full night's rest.
| I've worked hard over the years on good sleep hygiene--no
| screens, wearing a sleep mask, and avoiding food (especially
| carbs or alcohol) before bed.
|
| No direct link has been found to this, but eating carbs has
| always given me deeply vivid (and often exciting) dreams
| since I was little. Unfortunately, from these I wake up
| exhausted, which isn't great for the day.
|
| I'll continue being careful, and especially stay mindful when
| life stress--like love or money--picks up. It's good to be
| aware if anything is being masked or overlooked in the
| process.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Carbohydrates have been a big part of what I've needed to
| figure out in order to reach sleep again after an unusually
| tough period.
|
| Carbohydrate metabolism has histamine intimately involved
| in it; Histamine - as per its inflammatory role - is
| basically used by the body to open tissue to receive blood
| glucose.
|
| As it happens, histamine is also a neurotransmitter! An
| excitatory alertness neurotransmitter!
|
| Both these aspects have been extant as scientific knowledge
| on record for some significant time, but are only really
| becoming _known_ -known as of recent.
|
| I have ADHD. I take lisdexamfetamine. Upon starting
| medication at 39.5 years of age, I quickly noticed that I
| had to be _really_ careful with coffee, and especially to
| _not at all touch any sweet foods or desserts_ around
| evening or so. Or I would wake up at 5:30 AM. (Exactly and
| precisely 5:30. Reliably. It's sort of fascinating.)
|
| As it turns out, amphetamine releases histamine! And!
| Caffeine inhibits the enzymatic breakdown of histamine! And
| sugar causes histamine to be released.
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| It's bad enough that there's a whole subreddit dedicated to
| the shit people get up to on it [1]. Telling thing: the
| description for it starts off with CHOP OFF ALL YOUR HAIR,
| probably a reference to a toothpaste for dinner comic about
| "the ambien walrus" which is a popular meme in the uhhh
| ambien community
|
| [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ambien/top/?t=all
| 93po wrote:
| i used it daily for a couple years and had no idea the impact
| it was having on me. i was an angry, irritable, grumpy
| person, and i completely changed when i finally stopped
| taking it.
|
| i had an addiction but didnt abuse it. it got to the point
| that i craved ambien _during the day_ for reasons i can 't
| even explain. i just inexplicably wanted to take it. i wasnt
| even taking full pills of the usual dose, i usually cut them
| in half.
|
| it took me a long time to learn to put my phone away before
| taking it. i would text people i was causally dating overly
| romantic and loving things and have zero memory of it.
| thankfully whenever it happened the people involved always
| just thought it was funny, and i did have the awareness to
| preface those texts with "maybe its just bc i took some
| ambien". After a few dates with someone i warned them i take
| ambien and might text them something stupid but loving, so
| they were well prepared
| outworlder wrote:
| I personally know of one ambien addict and it's scary. He
| just went through a divorce and lost his job. His barely
| coherent (and angry) voice messages while off the drug don't
| seem too different from addicts of illegal substances.
| appstorelottery wrote:
| I completely agree. I once took Ambien on a flight from San
| Fran -> London, but I didn't sleep. I suffered from crazy
| short term amnesia by the time I got to the other end,
| walking towards the Hilton just outside the airport in that
| long tunnel... I kept forgetting where I was and why I was
| there and then I'd snap back to reality. To the alarm of a
| friend that was supposed to be picking me up, I simply
| checked into the Hilton. What happened on the flight was
| another story altogether. I think I was repeatedly telling
| the attendants that I'd taken Ambien, they ended up shifting
| me to first class. Looking back, it was fun for reasons I
| won't talk about here - but belongs strongly in the
| recreational category. Sitter required.
| desmosxxx wrote:
| I took Ambien for one of my sleep studies and I had sleep
| paralysis and nightmares (bordering on hallucinations because
| I swear I was awake or at least in a lucid state). That was
| my first and last time doing Ambien.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| They gave us Ambien (no go pills) and Provigil (go pills) in
| the miltary during long ready states. After a while, I became
| dependent on Ambien and would sleep walk (among other
| things). My roomates would zip me up in my sleeping bag to
| deal with it.
|
| Took me about 2 years after the military to get back to
| "normal"
|
| I do miss the Provigil, though... that stuff made able to
| focus so well.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| Once upon a time I had severe difficulty sleeping due to high
| and sustained levels of stress.
|
| I had gotten prescribed some Zopiclone which is similar to
| Zolpidem as found in Ambien. Zopiclone makes me feel like I
| have a brain injury the day after. Sometimes after the first
| night, always after the second night if I find I need to take
| it two nights in a row. It's frightening.
|
| I came across a paper: _"Pharmacokinetic and Pharmacodynamic
| Interactions Between Zolpidem and Caffeine"_
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roberta-Cysneiros/publi...
|
| Based on my understanding of the results that a significant
| dose of caffeine counteracts "some but not all" of Zolpidem's
| effects on cognition--and the two Z-drugs being similar--I
| tried drinking a tiny little bit of coffee with the tiny little
| bit of Zopiclone. (I take 2-3mg; a whole tablet is 7.5mg.)
|
| The result is that I am able to sleep and do not feel brain-
| damaged the day after, _and_ the effect also seems to be that
| the failure rhythm of stress-related waking up at precisely
| 5:30 is broken. In other words, the combination seems to fix
| the problem.
|
| I suspect that part of the reason might be that the caffeine
| counteracts the disruption of the norepinephrine oscillation
| you mention. (Thanks!!)
| breadwinner wrote:
| If you have sleep issues try magnesium.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?query=magnesium%20sleep&type=comment
| outworlder wrote:
| What if blood magnesium levels tested normal?
| breadwinner wrote:
| My understanding is that magnesium blood tests are not
| reliable. Since magnesium is a natural element found in
| foods such as spinach, nuts, seeds, and whole grains, you
| know it is safe. Try a supplement and if it helps with
| muscle stiffness or sleep then you have a magnesium
| deficiency.
| lapcat wrote:
| In mouse brains
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| So? What part of the washing chemistry is different?
| kzrdude wrote:
| The interesting thing is that everything with a brain sleeps.
| We really need to get to the bottom of understanding it.
| bityard wrote:
| That's exactly what we don't know yet.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| This is a fundamental physiological process ... not a drug
| interaction.
| bux93 wrote:
| or, as the late great @justsaysinmice used to point out "IN
| MICE"
| highfrequency wrote:
| > Some researchers have challenged parts of this picture,
| however; a 2024 study, for example, suggested waste clearance is
| actually faster during waking than during sleep.
|
| That's a pretty big ambiguity in the story!
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| When you talk to neuroscientists and researchers in private you
| often find that they are _far_ less confident than public
| personas, PR, articles, or science reporting, make them sound.
| A lot of their findings are really more like "huh, that's
| weird. We should look at this more." What seems like a ton of
| consensus at cruising altitude is actually much more divisive
| as you approach ground level. The more recent emergence of the
| idea that neuroscientists are a kind of "super scientist" of
| human behavior (all self-help books are now
| "neuroscience"-based now, for example) has also made them seem
| much more certain about certain things than they actually are.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [flagged]
| krapp wrote:
| >It's not just optimistic - its qualitatively unjustified
| to think that neuroscience (in its current form, at least)
| is inevitably capable of cracking consciousness.
|
| The fact that you had to add the parenthetical here to
| hedge your bet demonstrates that you don't even entirely
| believe your own claims.
| beezlebroxxxxxx wrote:
| That claim has a very robust history in philosophy of
| mind. Peter Hacker and M.R. Bennett, a philosopher and a
| neuroscientist respectively, cowrote _Philosophical
| Foundations of Neuroscience_ [0]. There was also a
| fascinating response and discussion in a further book
| with Daniel Dennett and John Searle called _Neuroscience
| and Philosophy_ [1]. Both books are excellent and have
| fascinating arguments and counter-arguments; you get very
| clear pictures of fundamentally different pictures of the
| human mind and the role and idea of neuroscience.
|
| [0]: https://www.wiley.com/en-
| us/Philosophical+Foundations+of+Neu...
|
| [1]: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/neuroscience-and-
| philosophy/97...
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| So... because the problem of untangling how the brain works
| is complicated and unfinished, it might be powered by woo?
|
| Sure, and maybe Cthulu is about to awaken the sunken city
| of R'lyeh. You can't prove me wrong either.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| > despite the evidence to the contrary
|
| Humans being unable to figure out how inanimate matter
| gives rise to consciousness is not evidence that "strict
| materialism on consciousness is misguided". Or is there
| some other evidence I'm unaware of?
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| While I agree in general, I think you overstate things
| here:
|
| > Many STEM people hate this because they want to
| axiomatically believe materialist science can reach
| everything, despite the evidence to the contrary.
|
| Do we have actual evidence that it _can 't_ reach
| everything? That would be "evidence to the contrary". What
| you have given is evidence of its inability to reach
| everything _so far, in its current form_. That 's still not
| nothing - the pure materialists are committed to that
| position because of their philosophical starting point, not
| because of empirical evidence, and you show that that's the
| case. But so far as I know, there is no current evidence
| that they could _never_ reach that goal.
|
| [Edit to reply, since I'm rate limited: No, sauce for the
| goose is sauce for the gander. The materialists don't get
| the freebee, and neither do you. In fact, I was agreeing
| with you about you pointing out that the materialists were
| claiming an undeserved freebee. But you don't get the
| freebee, for the same reason that they don't.]
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| ben_w wrote:
| Science and philosophy as they currently stand have yet
| to settle on just one single an universally agreed upon
| definition of "consciousness" -- last I heard it was
| about 40 different definitions, some of which are so poor
| that tape recorders would pass.
|
| The philosophical definitions also sometimes preclude any
| human from being able to meet the standard, e.g. by
| requiring the ability to solve the halting problem.
|
| Without knowing which thing you mean, we can't
| confidently say which arrangements of matter are or are
| not conscious; but we can still be at least moderately
| confident (for most definitions) that it's something
| material because various material things can change our
| consciousness. LSD, for example.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| A slightly-less-than-perfect analogy: I can mess with the
| execution of software by mis-adjusting the power supply
| far enough. It still runs, but it starts having weird
| errors. Based on that, would we say that software is
| electrical?
|
| _Is_ software electrical? It certainly runs on
| electrical hardware. And yet, it seems absurdly
| reductionist to say that software is electrical. It 's
| missing all the ways in which software is not like
| hardware.
|
| Is consciousness similar? It runs on physical (chemical)
| hardware. But is it itself physical or chemical? Or is
| that too reductionist a view?
|
| (Note that there is no claim that software is "woo" or
| "spirit" or anything like that. It's not just hardware,
| though.)
| glenstein wrote:
| >because various material things can change our
| consciousness. LSD, for example.
|
| I feel really encouraged here, because I think this
| example has surfaced recently (to my awareness at least)
| of a good example of material impacts on conscious states
| that seems to get through to everybody.
| lupusreal wrote:
| It's a pretty old argument tbqh. Also, mind altering
| drugs are basically just more subtle forms of the Phineas
| Gage thing.
| glenstein wrote:
| Right, you can cite, say, lobotomies, concussions etc all
| day long but I think eyes glaze over and it hinges on the
| examples you choose.
|
| I think the one about drugs is helpful because it speaks
| to the special things the mind does, the kind of
| romanticized essentialism that's sometimes attributed to
| consciousness, in virtue of which it supposedly is beyond
| the reach of any physicalist accounting or explanation.
| 0_gravitas wrote:
| > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of
| calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be
| shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
|
| > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at
| the rest of the community.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| No, they're not.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| raziel2p wrote:
| if it's become usual, maybe it's time to reconsider your
| arguments or phrasing?
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| raziel2p wrote:
| I don't really care if I believe you or not, you deleted
| your comment so I can't even see what you're referring
| to, but getting into unproductive arguments on the
| internet is just gonna make you miserable.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| People lash out at anyone who says "aha! this is evidence
| against materialism" in the usual case where materialism
| predicts exactly the same observation. There are only a
| few areas where common materialist and dualist models
| diverge: "brains are complex and hard to understand" is
| not one of them.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| whtsthmttrmn wrote:
| Playing the victim doesn't help advance the conversation.
| smokedetector1 wrote:
| [deleted]
| schnable wrote:
| I learned this after being diagnosed with epilepsy. It became
| clear quickly that we know very little about how the brain
| works. Almost all of the medical advice and prediction was
| based on observed behaviors in the population, nothing
| specifically about my brain.
| lamename wrote:
| As a neuroscientist, yes. But this is true of most science &
| medicine news written for a general audience. I have to tell
| my parents to stop reading "Chocolate is a superfood /
| Chocolate causes cancer" articles every year.
|
| Uncertainty isn't good for engagement, even if it's correct.
| thechao wrote:
| Nonlinear (and inverting!) response curves for drug
| dosimetry that's population and person specific. Especially
| when there's a temporal delay. Trying to explain grapefruit
| to my elderly parents is like pulling teeth.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Trying to explain grapefruit to my elderly parents is
| like pulling teeth.
|
| It is not that hard. It is a fruit roughly the same size
| and appearance as an orange, but more bitter. See! I
| explained it. :) Joking asside, what are you trying to
| explain about grapefruit to your elderly parents? Is it
| the weird way it interacts with certain medicines?
| xp84 wrote:
| It can potentially double or triple the effective dose
| you'll absorb of many medications, so weird doesn't
| adequately describe it. "Potentially life-threatening" is
| better.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This is the first time I've heard of that. Glad I
| stumbled across this, even though I hate the taste.
| krisoft wrote:
| I heard this before. (Perhaps even on hacker news.) The
| way i stored it in my brain is "grapefruit is weird,
| don't eat or drink grapefruit juice when on medication.
| Why? It might make you ill or even kill you."
|
| Obviously that form is ovesimplified. But since I'm not a
| pharmacist, nor a doctor I can allow this simplification
| for myself because it "fails-safe". That is it might make
| me refrain from eating grapefruit in a situation where I
| could safely do so, but it will save me from eating
| grapefruit in situations where it is not safe. It would
| be harder if I would need to remember that I must eat
| grapefruit in some situations and can't eat in other
| situations.
|
| The reason why I'm saying this is because this is how I
| would approach explaining this to someone. By
| oversimplifying to the point where the safe story is easy
| to remember. People already understand that they can't
| mix alcohol and certain medications. So it is just one
| more thing you can't mix with medication.
| kbelder wrote:
| I'm sure they felt the same trying to explain certain
| things to their child :)
| godelski wrote:
| > I have to tell my parents to stop reading
|
| As a researcher myself, I really dislike that this is even
| a thing. I constantly have friends send me articles asking
| what I think about things (frequently the answer is "I have
| no idea" and/or "the paper says something different").
|
| I'm livid about this because this erodes public trust in
| science. Worse, people don't see that connection...
|
| I don't understand how major news publications can't be
| bothered to actually reach out to authors. Or how
| universities themselves will do that and embellish work. I
| get that it's "only a little" embellishment, but it's not a
| slippery slope considering how often we see that compound
| (and how it is an excuse rather than acting in good faith).
| The truth is that the public does not understand the
| difference in the confidence levels of scientists for
| things like "anthropomorphic climate change" vs "drinking
| wine and eating chocolate is healthy for you." To them,
| it's just "scientists" who are some conglomerate. It is so
| pervasive that I can talk to my parents about something
| things I have domain expertise and written papers on and
| they believe scientists are making tons of money over this
| while I was struggling with student debt. I have to explain
| when I worked at a national lab isn't full of rich
| people[0]. There's a lot of easier ways to make money...
| And my parents, each, made more than any of the scientists
| I knew...
|
| [0] People I know that have jumped ship and moved from lab
| to industry 2x-3x their salary (these are people with PhDs
| btw).
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/oak-ridge-national-
| laborato...
|
| https://www.levels.fyi/companies/lawrence-livermore-
| national...
|
| [Side note]: I wish we were able to be more honest in
| papers too. But I have lots of issues with the review
| system and the biggest is probably that no one wants to
| actually make any meaningful changes despite constant
| failure in the process and widespread frustration.
| istjohn wrote:
| Yes. My dad cites the vaccilation of the science on
| whether or not eggs are healthy as the reason he places
| no trust in what scientists say. Of course, he is
| mistaking science reporting for the science itself, but
| he should be able to trust the media to accurately
| communicate the scientific consensus. It's one thing when
| we're talking about eggs or chocolate, but now he's
| skeptical of science reporting on global warming and
| COVID-19. And is that unreasonable? Why should he put a
| high credence in any science reporting going forward?
| He's a construction worker. He's not equiped to go read
| the journal articles for himself.
|
| Of course, we haven't even touched on the replication
| crisis, of which thankfully my dad is blissfully unaware.
| godelski wrote:
| A funny one was I was visiting my parents for the
| holidays. They have the news on and it is talking about
| that $2T funding cuts. It shows a bunch of examples with
| like $50m to this, $500k to that, and then a random $10k
| to "youth break dancing." And I'm like "why is that
| there? Seems like rage bait. Why not list more big ticket
| items? It's $2T, $10k is a nothing at that scale." You
| guessed right, this started a fight. I wasn't even trying
| to say that the thing should be funded (though I have no
| issues. Sounds like just a recreational program. Who
| cares? It's not even "pennies").
|
| A lesson I continually fail to learn is that it isn't
| about the actual things. Information is a weapon to many
| people. Not a thing to chase, to uncover, to discover,
| but a thing that is concrete and certain. I still fear
| the man that "knows", since all I can be certain of is
| that he knows nothing.
| madmask wrote:
| Yes it can be hard to convey numbers to the general
| public. Orders of magnitude are unintuitive unless STEM
| trained.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Classic
| https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
| ggm wrote:
| Another sign "big Carob" has taken over the health
| industry, pushing its "kids, it's healthier" lie.
| Chocolate, Wine and Cheese are the three vital food groups.
| jacobr1 wrote:
| A lot of the things we sort of know are also related to
| studies that look at a very small subsystems attempting to
| isolate variables. Like take a slice of neurons, apply a
| certain chemical and check how it changes action potentials.
| Over time a bunch of that kind of data can be pieced together
| in larger systems analysis. That kind of things relies on
| extrapolation from that lower-order data though, ideally with
| confirming studies from subject animals, but the data is
| really clean. The media reports on research is usually bad
| too, usually taking whatever speculative impact the research
| might have that is suggested for funding or future work ...
| but wasn't actual the results of the paper just something
| tacked on as basically informed speculation.
| generalizations wrote:
| Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who
| can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can
| understand systems. Those people, in turn, are the ones doing
| this research. This is likely a large part of why our
| knowledge of neuroscience is largely mechanistic and without
| a sense of the larger picture.
|
| Compare to the invention of the perceptron, which took a
| joint effort between a polymathic neurophysiologist and a
| logician.
| lamename wrote:
| I agree that the selection for memorization is high, and
| I've worked with many neuroscientists who cared more about
| biological "stamp collecting" than understanding systems.
|
| But in my experience neuroscientists have to have a solid
| level of systems thinking to succeed in the field. There
| are too many factors, related disciplines (from physics to
| sociology), and levels of analysis to be closed off.
| orwin wrote:
| Luckily, those two different traits are learnable, so I'd
| guess as the field advance and mature, this will change?
|
| Honestly 'our knowledge of [X] is largely mechanistic and
| without a sense of the larger picture' is weirdly
| applicable to most scientific fields once they escaped the
| 'natural philosophy' designation.
| generalizations wrote:
| I doubt it, I used the perceptron as a neuroscience-
| related example of what happens when we have the right
| people trying to put the pieces together, not just
| memorizing.
| lazystar wrote:
| > the medical field selects hard for people who can
| memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can
| understand systems.
|
| sounds similar to the problem with tech coding interviews.
| ive refactored the backend orchestration software of a SaaS
| company's primary app and saved 24tb of RAM, while getting
| 300% faster spinup times for the key part of the customer
| app, but i bomb interviews because i panic and mix up O(n)
| for algorithms and forget to add obvious recursion base
| cases. i know i can practice that stuff and pass, its just
| frustrating to see folks that have zero concept of
| distributed systems getting hired because they succeed at
| this hazing ritual.
|
| but with that said, i suppose no industry or job will ever
| be free from "no true scottsman" gate-keeping from tenured
| professionals. hiring someone that potentially knows more
| than you puts your own job security at risk.
| godelski wrote:
| I moved from Physics and Engineering to CS and honestly,
| I found the interview process very odd. It is far more
| involved and time consuming of a process than the
| interviews in other fields.
|
| In other fields, it is expected that if you can "talk the
| talk" you can "walk the walk." Mostly because it is
| really hard to talk in the right way if you don't have
| actual experience. Tbh, I think this is true about
| expertise in any domain. I don't think it is too hard to
| talk to a programmer about how they'd solve a problem and
| see the differences between a novice and a veteran.
|
| A traditional engineering interview will have a phone
| screen and an in person interview. Both of which they'll
| ask you about a problem similar to one they are working
| on or recently solved. They'll also typically ask you to
| explain a recent project of yours. The point is to see
| how you think and how you overcome challenges, not what
| you memorize. Memorization comes with repetition, so it's
| less important. I remember in one phone interview I was
| asked about something and gave a high level answer and
| asked if it was okay for me to grab one of the books I
| had sitting next to me because I earmarked that equation
| suspecting it would be asked. I was commended for doing
| so, grabbed my book, and once I reminded myself of the
| equation (all <<1m?) gave a much more detailed response.
|
| In a PhD level interview, you're probably going to do
| this and give a talk on your work. Where people ask
| questions about your work.
|
| IMO the tech interviews are wasteful. They aren't great
| at achieving their goals and are quite time consuming.
| General proficiency can be determined in other ways,
| especially with how prolific GitHub is these days. It's
| been explained to me that the reason for all this is due
| to the cost of bad hires. But all this is expensive too,
| since you are paying for the time of your high cost
| engineers all throughout this process. If the concern is
| that firing is so difficult, then I don't think it'd be
| hard to set policy where new employees are hired in under
| a "probationary" or "trial" status. It shouldn't take
| months to hire someone...
| kenjackson wrote:
| > I found the interview process very odd. It is far more
| involved and time consuming of a process than the
| interviews in other fields.
|
| What part is too time consuming? What you describe in the
| engineering interview sounds like a software engineer
| interview process as well.
| godelski wrote:
| No engineering interview would have you do anything like
| leetcode problems. No one is going to ask you to solve
| equations in front of them[0]. They will not give you
| take home tests or any of that. Doesn't matter if you're
| at a small startup or a big player like Boeing or
| Lockheed Martin.
|
| The stereotypical software engineering interview is
| heavily leetcode dependent. It's why leetcode exists and
| they can charget $150/yr for people to just study it
| (time that could be spent on learning other things). I
| mean somewhere like Google you can have 3-6 rounds in the
| interviewing process.
|
| [0] Maybe you'll use a board or paper to draw
| illustrations and help in your explanations, but you're
| not going to work out problems. No one is going to give
| you a physics textbook problem and say "Go".
| stinos wrote:
| _Also note that the medical field selects hard for people
| who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people
| who can understand systems_
|
| It's not impossible for people who are good in memorization
| to also be good in understanding systems.
|
| _Those people, in turn, are the ones doing this research._
|
| Although common, it's not quite so that only people with a
| pure medical background do neuroscience.
|
| All in all, having met quite some people in the field, the
| things you're hinting at never occurred to mee as an actual
| problem. My guess is because the people who actually have
| issues get weeded out very soon. Like: before even
| finishing their PhD. It's not an easy field.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _It 's not impossible for people who are good in
| memorization to also be good in understanding systems_
|
| and it might not be "good at memorization" that's being
| selected, it might be "conscientiousness", one of the Big
| Five, and a relatively important parameter.
| timr wrote:
| This is pretty true for MDs, but I don't know how true it
| is for PhDs.
|
| The classic meme is that MDs love organic chemistry, but
| they hate biochemistry [1], because one is about
| memorization and the other is...less so, anyway.
|
| But then again, neuroscientists do tend to love their big
| books of disjointed facts, so maybe it's more like medicine
| than I realize. I remember the one class I took on
| neuroscience was incredibly frustrating because of the
| _wild extrapolations_ they were making from limited, low-
| quality data [2], that made it almost impossible to form a
| coherent theory of anything.
|
| [1] ...except for the Krebs cycle! Gotta memorize that
| thing or we'll never be able to fix broken legs!
|
| [2] "ooh, the fMRI on two people turned slightly pink!
| significant result!"
| pepinator wrote:
| The perceptron is not such a deep concept.
| tensor wrote:
| > Also note that the medical field selects hard for people
| who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people
| who can understand systems.
|
| This sounds like one of those complete bullshit memes that
| certain groups of people like to repeat. Very similar to
| tech people being "creatives" while other groups like sales
| are somehow not. Utter bullshit.
|
| > Compare to the invention of the perceptron, which took a
| joint effort between a polymathic neurophysiologist and a
| logician.
|
| While cross-field collaboration often yields the best
| insights, I hope you're not implying that computer
| scientists are somehow better at "understanding systems"
| compared to biologists. Not only are computer scientists
| hugely guilty of pretending that various neural networks
| are anything at all like the brain (they are not), its also
| the case that biological systems are fantastically more
| complicated than any computing system.
| godelski wrote:
| > Also note that the medical field selects hard for people
| who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people
| who can understand systems.
|
| It isn't limited to the medical field. This is quite common
| in most fields.
|
| I understand testing knowledge and intelligence is an
| intractable problem, but I my main wish is that this would
| simply be acknowledged. That things like tests are
| _guidelines_ rather than _answers_. I believe that if we
| don't acknowledge the fuzziness of our measurements we
| become overconfident in them and simply perpetuate
| Goodhart's Law. There's an irony in that to be more
| accurate, you need to embrace the noise of the system.
| Noise being due to either limitations in measurements (i.e.
| not perfectly aligned. All measurements are proxies. This
| is "measurement uncertainty") or due to the stochastic
| nature of what you're testing. Rejecting the noise only
| makes you less accurate, not more.
| fsckboy wrote:
| if something happens comprehensively across fields, it's
| likely to be a good idea. the idea that one guy who
| interviewed people "properly" could assemble a team that
| was better at the job across the board and disrupt that
| industry, and other such guys across other industries
| would disrupt those industries, seems a little
| farfetched.
| randcraw wrote:
| I think this is also why LLMs score so well on many tests
| for professions -- much of the learned subject matter is
| expected later to be regurgitated rather than used in the
| synthesis of new ideas or the scientific inquiry of
| mechanisms of action or pathology. If the tests asked
| questions to measure the latter, I suspect LLMs would
| fare far less impressively.
| godelski wrote:
| Yes, you're fairly spot on. (But I still encourage you to
| read all this)
|
| I refer to them as "fuzzy databases" (this is a bit more
| general than transformers too), because they are good at
| curve fitting. There's a big problem with benchmarks in
| that most of the models are not falsifiable in their
| testing. Since it is not open of what they have trained
| on, you cannot verify that tasks are "zero-shot"[0]. When
| you can, they usually don't actually look like it.
| Another example is looking at the HumanEval dataset[1].
| Look at those problems and before searching, ask yourself
| if you really think they will not be on GitHub prior to
| May 2020. Then go search. You'll find identical solutions
| (with comments!) as well as similar ones (solution is
| accepted as long as it works).
|
| IME there's a strong correlation between performance and
| number of samples. You'll also see strong overfitting to
| things very common.
|
| That said, I wouldn't say LLMs aren't able to perform
| novel synthesis. Just that it is highly limited. Needing
| to be quite similar to the data it was trained on, but
| they __can__ extrapolate and generate things not in the
| dataset. After all, it is modeling a continuous function.
| But they are trained to reflect the dataset and then
| trained to output according to human preference (which
| obfuscates evaluation).
|
| Additionally, I wouldn't call LLMs useless nor
| impressive. Even if they're 'just' "a fuzzy database with
| a built in human language interface", that is still some
| Sci-Fi shit right there. I find that wildly impressive
| despite not believing it is a path to AGI. But it is easy
| to undervalue something when it is highly overvalued or
| misrepresented by others. But let's not forget how
| incredible of a feat of engineering this accomplishment
| is even if we don't consider it intelligent.
|
| (I am an ML researcher and have developed novel
| transformer variants)
|
| [0] A zero-shot task is one that it was not trained on
| AND is "out of distribution." The original introduction
| used an example of classification where the algorithm was
| trained to do classification of animals and then they
| looked to see if it could _cluster_ images of animals
| that were of distinct classes to those in the training
| set (e.g. train on cats and dogs. Will it recognize that
| bears and rabbits are different?). Certainly it can't
| classify them, as there was no label (but classification
| is discrimination). Current zero-shot tasks include
| things like training on LAION and then testing on
| ImageNet. The problem here is that LAION is text + images
| and that the class of images are a superset (or has
| significant overlap) with the classes of images in
| ImageNet (label + image). So the task might be a bit
| different, but it should not be surprising that a model
| trained on "Trying for Tench" paired with an image of a
| man holding a Tench (fish) works when you try to get it
| to classify a tench (first label in ImageNet). Same goes
| for "Goldfish Yellow Comet Goldfish For The Pond
| Pinterest Goldfish Fish And Comet Goldfish" and
| "Goldfish" (second label in ImageNet).
|
| (view subset of LAION dataset. Default search for tench)
| https://huggingface.co/datasets/drhead/laion_hd_21M_dedup
| ed/...
|
| (View ImageNet-1k images) https://huggingface.co/datasets
| /evanarlian/imagenet_1k_resiz...
|
| (ImageNet-1k labels) https://gist.github.com/marodev/7b3a
| c5f63b0fc5ace84fa723e72e...
|
| [1]
| https://huggingface.co/datasets/openai/openai_humaneval
| dillydogg wrote:
| This hasn't been my experience at all in medicine and
| science. I perhaps have more exposure to both science and
| medicine than most because I have an MD-PhD. Perhaps at the
| medical student level there is truth to this, but the
| physicians who are conducting clinical research are often
| at academic centers where they go specifically for the
| opportunity to do research. Academic centers almost
| universally pay much less than private hospitals. In my
| area, physicians make double salary in private practice
| over academia.
|
| And this all ignores that the authors are PhD scientists.
| So I'm confused how this is categorized as "medical field"
| in the first place. I found that the ability to memorize is
| essentially useless in PhD level biological science (I
| studied immunology, so I can't necessarily speak to other
| fields), and it is all systems level conceptualizing.
|
| I think this is a team with many talented people who came
| together to do their best. But I'm sure I'm naive. There
| seems to have been a lot of new interest and debate about
| what is happening in the glymphatics sphere.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| I don't know how neuroscientists fare wrt knowledge of
| biology, chemistry, etc. that is relevant to their field,
| but the _real_ problem is when they wade into
| philosophical waters without the requisite philosophical
| chops or background to do so [0].
|
| Others can be guilty of similar sins, of course, and
| since the early 20th century, when philosophy and the
| _classical_ liberal arts in general evaporated from
| school curricula, scientists have generally been quite
| poor at this, despite unwittingly treading into subject
| matters they are ill-prepared to discuss. Compare how a
| Schroedinger or a Heisenberg[2] talk about philosophical
| stuff, and then look at someone like Krauss [3]. The
| former may not have been great philosophical thinkers,
| but there is a huge difference in basic philosophical
| education and awareness, and these are not just isolated
| cases.
|
| [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/01/against-
| neurobabble...
|
| [1] https://a.co/d/1RMG66X
|
| [2] https://a.co/d/4lrBokZ
|
| [3] https://a.co/d/5qoMLqU
| dillydogg wrote:
| Sure, I agree that, when neuroscientists begin to wade
| into the realm of consciousness etc., they are wandering
| into a world they are unequipped to discuss. In my
| experience with my neurobiology colleagues, they are
| pretty dialed into their neurocircuits. I do have qualms
| with their experimental models on the behavioral end as a
| non-neuroscientist.
|
| To really answer your question, I think I need to talk
| about the books modern day neuroscientists are writing
| and I have to say I simply agree. I think these self-help
| kind of books are not good! Too bad they are so easily
| propagated in the media.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I don't really believe that. The real issue is that basic
| science in medicine is hard. You can't test a human in ways
| that might cause harm, which really limits how much
| investigation we can do. Ethics and morals also restrict
| what can be done to animals to investigate the basics on
| them too, though admittedly a lot of the time things just
| don't carry over anyway.
|
| That being said, I think the rise of "evidence-based"
| medicine is also causing issues. It gets used as a cop-out
| to avoid thinking about the mechanics of what is actually
| happening in an injury. While this is certainly a good
| things for treatments where A or B superiority is
| uncertain, there's a lot of cases where I think an RCT just
| doesn't really make sense.
|
| A pet example:
|
| I broke my ankle recently, and this dug into the literature
| and common practice. A significant number of people will
| get end-stage arthritis a few years after "simple" ankle
| fractures and often the doctors have no idea why. At the
| same time, an important part of ankle anatomy is often left
| unfixed (the deltoid ligament) because a few studies back
| in the 80s found it wasn't necessary to fix it. The bone
| that serves an equivalent purpose IS fixed (if broken)
| though. Mechanically, they restrict the ankle joint and
| prevent it moving in certain directions.
|
| When presented with biomechanical reasons for fixing it,
| and concurrent common poor outcomes for some patients, I've
| seen the response from surgeons thusly - "it's not
| supported by evidence" presumably because there isn't an
| RCT demonstrating definitive superiority.
|
| So much of medicine and treatment is literally just hearsay
| and whatever your surgeon happened to read last week. As a
| whole the standard is rising, but so much research is so
| disjoint, disorganised and inconsistent that doctors often
| have no definitive guidance. It's probably more of a
| problem in some fields (like ortho) than others, but its
| still surprising when you see it yourself.
| BenFranklin100 wrote:
| I work with scientists in many disciplines and
| neuroscientists are the absolute worst when it comes to
| hyping their work. Neuroscience, especially the CNS subfield,
| is complex and still in its infancy compared to other
| disciplines. The field's unknowns creates space for strong,
| ego-driven personalities to claim certainties where none
| exist and hype their work. The field itself perpetuates this
| problem by lionizing specific labs or people (i..e The Allen
| Institute's Next Generation Leaders) instead of viewing
| progress as a group effort sustained over years and decades.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Worse than Origin of Life researchers?
| timr wrote:
| Origin of life doesn't make it into the NY Times health
| column and get parroted by your grandma a week later when
| she wants to know if taking a nap will give you cancer.
|
| Neuroscience is in the same quadrant of the knowledge /
| hype plot as nutrition science.
| glenstein wrote:
| >What seems like a ton of consensus at cruising altitude is
| actually much more divisive as you approach ground level.
|
| I think there's a sense in which that's true (I've especially
| heard it with respect to the foundations of maths), but I
| worry about that way of thinking. There absolutely _are_
| places where we have consensus, even on subjects of extreme
| complexity. And the fact that we _really do_ have consensus
| can be one of the things that 's most important to
| understand. I don't want people doubting our knowledge that,
| say, too much sugar is bad, that sunscreen is good, that
| vaccines are real and so on.
|
| A lot of what passes for nuanced decoding of the social and
| institutional contexts where science really happens, looks to
| outsiders like "yeah, so everything's fake!"
|
| And when the job of communicating these nuances falls into
| the hands of people who don't think it's important to draw
| that distinction, I think that contributes to an erroneous
| loss of faith in institutional knowledge.
| miki123211 wrote:
| Another nuance that most people don't understand is that
| there are different levels of "badness."
|
| There's a difference between "cigarettes cause cancer" and
| "phones cause cancer". The former is very definitely true,
| confirmed by many studies, and the health impact is very
| significant. The latter is probably untrue (there are
| studies that go both ways, but the vast majority say "no
| cancer"). Even if there's any impact, it's extremely
| minimal when compared to cigarettes.
|
| People can't distinguish between those two levels of
| "causes cancer" in a headline.
| richrichie wrote:
| This is especially true in climate science. There is a huge
| chasm between the public and private (post couple of drinks)
| sides.
| skipants wrote:
| Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but isn't that quote referring to
| the glymphatic clearance found in 2012 and not the main topic
| highlighted; fluid clearance via blood vessel contraction?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I was thought it years ago, and there are parents that old
| for using it to treat Alzheimer's
| kbelder wrote:
| Patents?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| autocorrect from patents*
| tshadley wrote:
| Well the Franks study probably destroyed any chance for natural
| sleep conditions. Nedergaard is scathing:
|
| https://www.thetransmitter.org/glymphatic-system/new-method-...
|
| > The new paper used many of the techniques incorrectly, says
| Nedergaard, who says she plans to elaborate on her critiques in
| her submission to Nature Neuroscience. Injecting straight into
| the brain, for example, requires more control animals than
| Franks and his colleagues used, to check for glial scarring and
| to verify that the amount of dye being injected actually
| reaches the tissue, she says. The cannula should have been
| clamped for 30 minutes after fluid injection to ensure there
| was no backflow, she adds, and the animals in the sleep groups
| are a model of sleep recovery following five hours of sleep
| deprivation, not natural sleep--a difference she calls
| "misleading."
|
| > "They are unaware of so many basic flaws in the experimental
| setup that they have," she says.
|
| > More broadly, measurements taken within the brain cannot
| demonstrate brain clearance, Nedergaard says. "The idea is, if
| you have a garbage can and you move it from your kitchen to
| your garage, you don't get clean."
|
| > There are no glymphatic pathways, Nedergaard says, that carry
| fluid from the injection site deep in the brain to the frontal
| cortex where the optical measurements occurred. White-matter
| tracts likely separate the two regions, she adds. "Why would
| waste go that way?"
| janalsncm wrote:
| That part stuck out to me as well. However, I wonder if that
| would be as conclusive as it seems. Even if waste removal is
| faster while awake, waste creation may be slower. Part of the
| purpose of sleep and getting tired could be that waste
| concentration hits some threshold, and the body says "it's time
| to stop creating so much metabolic waste".
| fsckboy wrote:
| >> _researchers have challenged parts of this picture, however;
| a 2024 study, for example, suggested waste clearance is
| actually faster during waking than during sleep_
|
| > _That's a pretty big ambiguity in the story!_
|
| no, it's not: "waste clearance faster during waking than sleep"
| does not mean it's adequate to the job, and waste clearance at
| night could still be critically important. We also do not know
| what the waste consists of comprehensively and having a
| specific sleep system implies its doing something.
| debacle wrote:
| A little over a year ago I was having awful sleep hygiene. From
| time to time, I still wake up at ~2am and just can't find
| restfulness again.
|
| I picked up a simple smart watch that tracks sleep (one of the
| Garmins, as they are one of the few that protect privacy and
| don't need to connect to the Internet). I slowly and methodically
| improved my sleep, and I feel like a different person.
|
| I have noticed that if I turn my blue light filter on my screens
| off, that has a huge impact. Working long days has a huge impact.
| I take a hell of a lot of magnesium. I need ~20 minutes of
| outdoor walking a day and I need to eat dinner before 4pm. Lots
| of other small things that have an impact that I'm probably
| forgetting.
|
| How many of us are just chronically tired?
| kzrdude wrote:
| I've had some periods of "intense work on sleep schedule". A
| big one was discovering that I was on the higher end of
| caffeine sensitivity (but I can still sleep if I only drink
| coffee in the morning).
|
| I have thought that the blue light filter doesn't do so much,
| with a caveat. The laptop screen is much less bright, so it
| doesn't bother me. It seems like the blue light of a desk
| screen has a bigger effect. But I also think it is the brain
| activity of stimulus seeking on the screen itself that has a
| big effect on sleep. It's better to turn of screens entirely to
| wind down, or do something that actually helps you wind down
| for sleep.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| For me, the light doesn't seem to have much effect - but what
| I _do_ on the computer matters. For example, as much as I
| liked to watch something in the evening, I now find that if I
| watch an interesting movie or TV show too late, my mind is
| still wound up in it when I lie down, and I find it much
| harder to fall asleep.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Yes. I think that should be the commonly spread advice
| instead of the blue/red light thing
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I still do this sometimes, but I occasionally
| unintentionally torture myself by programming pretty late
| and then trying to fall asleep 15m later. I'll sleep, it's
| not restful at all. There needs to be some period to let
| brain activity decrease before falling asleep.
| deadbabe wrote:
| A lot of people just have undiagnosed sleep apnea, disrupting
| their brains sleep cycles. Despite sleeping for hours, they
| wake up tired and groggy, not refreshed.
| david-gpu wrote:
| _> How many of us are just chronically tired?_
|
| Probably a lot of us, especially parents of small children.
|
| I've also been struggling with sleep for the past five or six
| years, waking up in the middle of the night feeling strangely
| wired up. With a _lot_ of trial and error I 've been improving
| the quality of my sleep.
|
| Three years ago I went to a sleep clinic because I noticed
| symptoms of sleep apnea and they were able to confirm it and
| prescribe a CPAP machine, for which I am grateful, but the
| overall experience was disappointing. When I explained during
| the follow up that I still was waking up at night feeling
| stressed they brushed me off and suggested some herbal remedy.
| It turns out that the pressure they had prescribed me was
| laughably off, which I only learned through trial and error for
| a period of two years until I found what works for me -- almost
| twice what they prescribed.
|
| You mention some factors that I've also noticed having a big
| impact, like stress/work, walking outdoors (1hr minimum for
| me), stretching, foam rolling, early dinners, and only drinking
| one cup of coffee first thing in the morning. Another one that
| seems to have a weirdly strong impact is _what_ I eat for
| dinner, with legumes /beans being by far the most beneficial --
| maybe something to do with blood glucose during the night?
|
| Doctors will often recommend exercise, but I find that these
| days even moderately strenuous exercise like riding a bicycle
| destroys my sleep quality for several days. There's something
| about it that appears to be too physiologically stressing, even
| though ten years ago I was a happy as a regular gymgoer.
| wcarss wrote:
| > moderately strenuous exercise like riding a bicycle
| destroys my sleep quality for several days.
|
| this is surprising! Not that this would be easy to just do,
| but have you ever leaned into it for a while (like a month)
| and seen if that persists? I'm obviously not a doctor or
| anything -- I just wondered in reading that whether it may
| possibly be a change shock that would subside after a brief
| period at a higher activity level, resulting in the best of
| both worlds.
| david-gpu wrote:
| I did it for a couple of years and it was getting worse. It
| got better with rest and walking.
| suninsight wrote:
| > Doctors will often recommend exercise, but I find that
| these days even moderately strenuous exercise like riding a
| bicycle destroys my sleep quality for several days. There's
| something about it that appears to be too physiologically
| stressing, even though ten years ago I was a happy as a
| regular gymgoer.
|
| I had something similar like this. I think I was able to fix
| it. The theory is that your sleep is still poor, even though
| you sleep through the night. This is causing high cortisol
| levels during day time and higher resting heart rate. This is
| elevated further after doing moderate exrercise and takes a
| long time to get back to normal as your sleep isnt adequate.
| If your heart rate doesnt go down enough, then your sleep
| quality gets destroyed.
|
| The solution, for me and I am guessing for you, is this: Stop
| the cycleing. First fix sleep. Track it using Wellue O2 Ring.
| If the scores are not good, the reconfigure CPAP - use
| sleepapnea reddit for inputs. Once sleep is sorted as per O2
| Ring, then it might take a few months for you to recover.
| After that you can restart moderate exercise and things
| should be fine.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Yeah, I also suspected a vicious cycle of stress/cortisol
| causing poor sleep, which leads to more cortisol and poor
| recovery.
|
| It did get better when I stopped cycling, as much as I
| loved it. I'm now walking instead and feeling much better.
| I intend to increase volume over time and once my VO2Max is
| back to my baseline then I may introduce cycling with an
| eye on going easy and eating enough before/during/after
| exercise.
|
| Thanks for the advice, it is good to hear that it worked on
| other people.
| ericmcer wrote:
| The simplest predictor I heard is the lower your resting
| heart rate, the better you sleep. It is way easier to target
| that then a jumble of diet, exercise, caffeine, light, etc.
| Try to lower your resting heart rate as you wind your day up,
| food and blue light raise it, as well as all the obvious
| things like playing video games or high dopamine things like
| TV/Social media.
| taeric wrote:
| > How many of us are just chronically tired?
|
| That is a tough question. Activity, it seems, has a habit of
| begetting activity. Such that the answer may not be, "you need
| better sleeping habits," but it could be more that, "you need
| better activity habits."
|
| Noticing things is also a dangerous place to be in. A lot of
| what your body does while asleep is based on expectations as
| much as it is anything else. Learned expectations, to be
| specific. Most people know the "you wake up before the alarm
| goes off" idea. That is strong enough that it will work for
| changes in the alarm time.
|
| What does that mean? It may be that your body learned a cue to
| start something for your sleep. So, for you, you now need to
| turn on your blue light filter; even if that may, in fact, not
| be actively doing anything.
| carabiner wrote:
| Some of us just need to be less lonely. When you don't have
| friends, your body is primed to wake up in the middle of the
| night to be ready for threats. I've noticed when I have a
| good social interaction in the day, I sleep much better and
| for a shorter period, even.
| Prbeek wrote:
| Early last year, I lost my phone and I intentionally delayed
| replacing in some kind of smart phone detox. I have never had
| better sleep than in those two weeks.
| testbjjl wrote:
| What about your diet, specifically sugar and carbohydrates.
| Personally, I have much, much more energy and stamina when I
| avoid them.
| spelunker wrote:
| I was chronically tired because of sleep apnea. CPAP changed my
| life.
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I averaged ~4 hours of sleep last year based on FitBit's sleep
| tracker. I'm a parent too, so mostly that checks out.
| lolinder wrote:
| > I have noticed that if I turn my blue light filter on my
| screens off, that has a huge impact.
|
| Just to confirm, because this is a surprising result:
| _disabling_ the blue light filter on your screens improves your
| sleep?
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > I slowly and methodically improved my sleep, and I feel like
| a different person.
|
| How do you do that? The smartwatch may give some info, but what
| do you do with it that allows falling and staying asleep, while
| all kinds of random variables may affect the metrics?
| bobheadmaker wrote:
| yes tired but can't stop.
| adaptbrian wrote:
| Male here. Elimination diet going down to single ingredient
| foods -> talk therapy -> oxyegen therapy -> steady weekly
| ketosis -> after a year adding back in low inflammation foods,
| prioritizing carbs from beans like lentils to help repair the
| gut and now I can give a motivational speech like Tony Robbins
| from being at a place of basically suicide/ruminating thoughts
| that never end and cluster headaches that were growing into a
| chronic, never going away condition.
|
| Everyone's obviously different and your mileage may vary but at
| the end of the day you can drastically feel different by
| heavily modifying your diet and pushing past hunger 1 time/day.
| appstorelottery wrote:
| Would you be kind enough to provide a little more detail on
| the program that worked for you?
| almost_usual wrote:
| I quit drinking alcohol and it fixed all of my sleep problems.
|
| I was routinely waking up in the middle of the night and unable
| to fall back asleep even on days I did not drink. Now I fall
| back asleep instantly.
|
| I tried eliminating caffeine and practicing mindfulness before
| cutting out alcohol. I only stopped to be healthier, was
| pleasantly surprised when all my sleep issues went away. Have
| resumed my caffeine intake without any problems.
| w10-1 wrote:
| > How many of us are just chronically tired?
|
| Alertness is also partly a function of resting metabolic rate,
| which is higher for those who exercise and/or have more muscle
| tissue.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| Fitbit tracker is how I discovered I am in _bad shape_ when it
| comes to sleep. My doctor was worried I had dementia due to my
| cognitive issues and hallucinations in the past few years, and
| he sent me for neuro-psychiatric testing and to see a
| neurologist for it. I kept mentioning that my sleep tracker is
| reporting a lack of quality sleep, especially REM sleep. I said
| yes I know it 's not 100% reliable but it seems worth looking
| into because on days I get some REM, I feel great. Docs weren't
| really taking me seriously though.
|
| Thanks to the tracker, I was able to determine that on nights I
| have just awful sleep, it correlated with my exercise days.
| Turns out that taking a pre-workout loaded with caffeine at 4PM
| is a terrible idea because caffeine can have a nearly 12 hour
| half-life. Oops. Ditched the pre-workout and my sleep improved
| significantly. No more insomnia and less time waking up in the
| middle of the night. I still have issues with REM at least half
| of the week unfortunately.
|
| I finally got referred to a sleep study a few months ago and
| although it was for existing sleep apnea - which I've already
| been treating successfully with cpap/autopap for decades - it
| confirmed that I am indeed not going into REM. So it's not
| dementia (at least not yet), it's lack of REM sleep. It also
| revealed that my body is moving a lot during sleep, not good.
| And for the cherry on top, I recently started exhibiting
| behavior of REM sleep disorder where I am smacking/punching
| myself and my partner and yelling out in the middle of the
| night. Definitely not a good sign, but at least now we know
| sleep issues are at the heart of it. That Fitbit sleep tracking
| turned out to be very valuable after all.
| gukov wrote:
| For the moving a lot during sleep problem: have you looked
| into weighted blankets?
| pedalpete wrote:
| Maybe you're just getting your sleep stages confused, but REM
| sleep, while considered important, is not the vital function
| of sleep related to memory, dementia, and other health
| outcomes - from everything I understand, and I work in the
| sleep/neurotech space.
|
| N3, also known as deep sleep is when the glymphatic system
| flushes toxins from the brain, consolidates memories,
| increases HGH secretion, along with other hormonal changes,
| primes the immune system, drives parasympathetic response,
| etc etc.
|
| REM sleep is related to emotional processing, and some
| memory, but I also recently heard a theory that REM may also
| be necessary to prevent the elasticity of the brain from
| over-writing the visual system with other inputs, which was
| an interesting theory, as sight is the only sense which is
| turned off during sleep.
| makeworld wrote:
| What Garmin model specifically?
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Dinner before 4pm, wow. How much time is that before you lie
| down?
|
| I'm in the midst of a reflux episode so this is definitely
| something, but 4-5 hours between final meal and bed is a lot of
| time. Regardless, glad you found something that works and
| thanks for sharing.
| jerbearito wrote:
| Just to clarify -- we already knew about the washing, right? But
| this refers to the specific mechanism where the blood vessels
| contract to cause the washing?
| iandanforth wrote:
| And more specifically that norepinephrine waves are highly
| correlated with and perhaps causative of that pumping.
| bityard wrote:
| Yes.
|
| And to further qualify the conclusion, the research was done in
| mice so it's premature to say whether or not human brains
| operate identically. (Mammalian anatomy between species is
| often similar, but just as often is found to be different in
| unexpected ways.)
| adsteel_ wrote:
| I'd like to learn more about the washing. Do you have a link
| or word/phrase to Google?
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| The glymphatic system
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system
| abeppu wrote:
| ... so, perhaps a fool-hardy idea, but could we use an external
| device to create or amplify the same effect?
|
| - if you rhythmically give mice norepinephrine while they're
| awake, can you create the same movement in cerebrospinal fluid?
| Would mice go to sleep later following such an intervention?
|
| - could you directly just pump cerebrospinal fluid faster? If you
| were willing to have a mechanical device surgically installed,
| could you have a rapid, extra-refreshing sleep at the press of a
| button?
|
| - if the efficacy of washing is partly due to the _contents_ of
| cerebrospinal fluid, could you look at what 's being "washed out"
| and add stuff to the cerebrospinal fluid that makes those things
| more soluble?
| bityard wrote:
| As much as I applaud the biohacking curiosity, we've known for
| a while that sleep does lots of things to rest and repair the
| whole body. "Cleaning" the brain is only one of them. Finding
| an easy button to hack around the need for sleep is probably as
| unlikely as finding an immortality pill.
| abeppu wrote:
| I guess on the animal model research side, the gap in various
| metrics between artificially "cleaning" the brains of sleep-
| deprived mice vs mice that get to sleep would be one way of
| measuring some of the non-cleaning functions of sleep (e.g.
| memory consolidation).
|
| In some far hypothetical future human device, I think even if
| amplifying a "washing" function doesn't _replace_ sleep it
| could still be helpful ... but outweighing the risks involved
| in the intervention (attaching a person to a pump?) would be
| a high bar. But if decades from now you were already going to
| put in a neuralink v20, perhaps it would seem reasonable.
| lawlessone wrote:
| I wonder how nicotine affects this? since it can affect
| norepinephrine
| napoleongl wrote:
| Falling asleep with nicotine patches on results in wild dreams
| so it clearly screws up something in the brain!
| vladslav wrote:
| Perhaps it seems odd, but could experiencing nightmares actually
| aid in the cleansing process?
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability.
| On average, after running for just 16 hours, it must be offlined
| for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as "scrub", "garbage
| collect", "trim", and "fsck".
| baxtr wrote:
| SLAs are terrible. I agree.
|
| But at least there's (usually) some exciting shows on while you
| are waiting!
| tivert wrote:
| > The brain truly is a system with terrible service
| availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it
| must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as
| "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck".
|
| There's hope. If the carbon chauvinists can be prevented from
| messing things up, AI is on track to provide something with a
| better SLA, which will finally allow us to decommission and
| junk those troublesome legacy systems without disrupting the
| business.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| You've got it all wrong, and LLMs have it all correct.
|
| True brains, after 16hrs of actual work, need to hallucinate
| strongly for 8 hours or so, in order to continue their high
| level contributions to society.
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Interesting. What if that is actually a beneficial part of
| our own development: comparing the nonsense in our dreams to
| waking life and building the ability to tell the difference?
| euroderf wrote:
| Get an LLM to dream, and to use the time effectively to
| purge those hallucinations, and reinforce the "valid and
| true" memories, and you might have something there ?
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Exactly, but that isValidAndTrue method is probably a
| little tricky to write...
| jpmattia wrote:
| And after a while, the system get bad enough that fsck starts
| failing regularly.
|
| Really poor design.
| glenstein wrote:
| >The brain truly is a system with terrible service availability
|
| Taking this as a jumping off point for a way of thinking about
| those 'services'. It seems remarkable to me that we can
| initiate the _attempt_ to think of an elephant, and then get
| there in one shot. We don 't sort through, say, rhinos, hippos,
| cars, trucks. We don't seem to have to rummage.
|
| Of course when it comes to things on the edge of our memory or
| the edge of our understanding, there's a lot of rummaging. But
| it could have been the case that _everything_ was that way
| (perhaps it is that way for some animals), instead, there are
| some things to which we have nearly automatic, seemingly
| instant recall.
| alaithea wrote:
| This makes me think of how my dog reacts very quickly, of
| course, for hard-wired "dog" behavior things, but when I use
| human language and gestures to communicate something to him,
| such as "go find Daddy", I can figuratively see a loading
| spinner over his head for several seconds, until the
| recognition comes and he responds. I don't know what's going
| on in that head, but it definitely appears to be "rummaging"
| from the outside. Probably similar to how we feel when
| conversing in a foreign language we're not fluent in.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| Or when my early-riser wife talks to me about anything
| before I've had my coffee.
| nbenitezl wrote:
| On the other side, heart delivers a lifetime service without
| any maintaince, that's a truly wonder of nature.
| interludead wrote:
| Its "maintenance" is built into its design
| amai wrote:
| I believe it is not only garbage collecting. It is also doing
| backpropagation on the memories of the day before. After 8
| hours you get an updated, more optimized service.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| This is the insight missing from everyone comparing LLM
| parameter counts to human neurons or synapses. The human
| model gets a new version every day, and the digital one costs
| $5B of energy and a year to do the same.
| outworlder wrote:
| > The brain truly is a system with terrible service
| availability. On average, after running for just 16 hours, it
| must be offlined for 8 hours to run maintenance tasks such as
| "scrub", "garbage collect", "trim", and "fsck".
|
| It's a trade-off. The brain is about as large as it can be
| while making birth possible. It already uses a lot of energy(2%
| of body weight, 20% of energy consumption). We also need it to
| be working at peak performance when we are doing activities.
|
| A background 'scrub' task to keep it working 24/7 would
| probably use more energy (require more food and heat
| dissipation 24/7), possibly require a larger area (for
| redundancy, similar to how dolphins can sleep one hemisphere at
| a time and have really large brains). An alternative would be
| to slow down processes enough so that those tasks could happen
| constantly.
|
| And then our day/light cycles helped select for this approach.
| Until recently there wasn't much one could do (safely!) at
| night.
| barbazoo wrote:
| > The brain is about as large as it can be while making birth
| possible.
|
| I wonder if it had been beneficial to have larger brains,
| we'd have evolved to support that. Diminishing returns maybe
| or just a local maximum we didn't get out of?
| ifyoubuildit wrote:
| Beneficial kinda just means "leads to more procreation"
| right?
|
| So if bigger brains meant people reproducing more, our
| brains would get bigger to the point that most births are
| cesarean or something.
|
| I do wonder what happens when we eventually evolve to a
| point where we can't survive without more and more advanced
| technology.
|
| A lot of people who would have died off before reproducing
| 200 years ago now don't, which is of course incredible for
| us. But what are effects of that 100/1000 years down the
| line?
|
| Presumably we'll have plenty of more immediately pressing
| issues over that time frame.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Check in with various farm animals, they are already
| there.
| wh0knows wrote:
| It is interesting from a space-faring species
| perspective. By the time we can embark to other
| planets/asteroids our biology might require us to lug
| around significantly more technology just to survive.
| endymi0n wrote:
| So how evolution works is that a feature needs to have an
| evolutionary advantage, but the specimen must also not die.
| So there are two adversarial pressures here, carefully
| balancing each other in a mammal species that already has
| one of the highest birth mortality rates of both mother and
| child. If heads were any larger, it would create a
| proportional amount of negative evolutionary pressure by
| both direct and indirect death (of the mother) at birth.
|
| Interestingly, there seem to be some indications showing
| that human interventions by modern technology already show
| clear evolutionary trends:
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5338417/
|
| Humans might eventually evolve to not even being able to be
| born naturally anymore at some point.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| That's a fascinating thought. As people with larger
| brains are more successful in life and more likely to
| have children*, mortality rates for natural births would
| increase, and over time we would evolve to become
| dependent upon modern technology.
|
| The continued existence of our species would become
| dependent upon continued civilisation. A dark age could
| kill us, or at least cripple the population.
|
| *how true is this? Uni-educated people tend to have lower
| fertility rates.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| "Children? With these economic conditions?"
| perfmode wrote:
| Through formal meditation practice, you can train the brain to
| perform these as background tasks in the waking state.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I'm not sure I buy this. Meditation can give you distance
| from the "I" part of the brain but it doesn't seem equivalent
| to an on-demand GC.
| w10-1 wrote:
| It's worse than that.
|
| At all times, every single one of the billions of participants
| acts like a bureaucrat, delaying response until it's
| unavoidable and then resting afterwards at least half the time.
| If only we could cut through the bureaucracy!
|
| Neuronal activities:
|
| - Action potential initiation: 0.2-0.5ms
|
| - Action potential duration: ~1-2ms
|
| - Relative refractory period: ~2-4ms
|
| - Total cycle time until fully ready: ~5-7ms
| toasterlovin wrote:
| We don't actually know if 1/3rd downtime is a requirement. For
| most of our evolutionary history, it has not been economical to
| remain awake at night, so our intense sleep drive may actually
| be driven primarily by conservation of energy (since energy has
| been a major engineering constraint for all of our evolutionary
| history minus the last several hundred years or so). If that's
| the case, then with other processes may have evolved to fit
| themselves into our sleeping time as an optimization, but
| perhaps those processes could happen while we're awake if our
| evolutionary constraints were different.
| euroderf wrote:
| > our intense sleep drive may actually be driven primarily by
| conservation of energy
|
| Or perhaps to keep us quiet and immobile, and harder to
| locate and eat ?
| kgeist wrote:
| >it has not been economical to remain awake at night
|
| Why? If you can gather fruits or hunt pray while all your
| competitors (or predators!) are asleep, isn't it an
| advantage? What about nocturnality?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnality
| adammarples wrote:
| Well we can't see can we
| seventytwo wrote:
| If it were biologically possible, other organisms would have
| evolved that capability. There's some fundamental, biological
| reason why all animals sleep.
| xtracto wrote:
| There was this fad of multiphasic sleep in the early 2000.
|
| I remember, in theory you could do sleeping for 15 minutes 6
| times in 24 hours.
| interludead wrote:
| The polyphasic sleep experiments
| janalsncm wrote:
| I also wonder why cats sleep so much. Is it mainly because
| there's nothing for them to do during the day, so why not
| sleep? Whereas humans can be active all day?
| biggestdummy wrote:
| Carnivores tend to sleep longer than omnivores, who tend to
| sleep longer than herbivores. For a hunting carnivore, energy
| comes in big bursts, so it makes sense that they would be
| active for a short period of time, and hoard energy when they
| didn't need to be active. For a cud-chewing herbivore, time
| spent not chewing is time spent not creating energy.
| Obviously, this is a broad generalization - feeding habits,
| day/night cycles, predator/prey behaviors all factor into a
| particular animal. But it probably explains why your cat,
| like the panther at the zoo, spends most of its time asleep.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Also, cats and panthers are crepuscular, active at dawn and
| dusk. Which leads to lots of waiting for that time of day.
| incognition wrote:
| You aren't overclocking your system?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Dolphins have a much better system, they take half of it
| offline for maintenance while the other half stays on for 100%
| uptime. Fancy that.
| interludead wrote:
| It even has random downtime during the day (hello, power naps)
| jokoon wrote:
| There was a MRI looking video showing this
| treprinum wrote:
| Didn't Chinese scientists recently show a crazy success rate
| (~90%) of treating advanced Alzheimer/dementia by performing a
| microsurgery of the neck, allowing brain to dispose accumulated
| waste?
| burkaman wrote:
| They tried it on 6 people and found "slight improvements" after
| 5 weeks, with no control group to compare to and no longer term
| effects known yet.
|
| - https://gpsych.bmj.com/content/37/3/e101641
|
| Certainly seems worth investigating but I wouldn't call it a
| crazy success yet.
| ongytenes wrote:
| One thing to look at is Alzheimer's. The current leading theory
| is that a build up of amyloid protein is the root cause of this
| disease. It would be wonderful if someone connected the dots to
| find the reason for the build up and they're able to develop a
| treatment to prevent the onset of the disease.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The current leading theory is that a build up of amyloid
| protein is the root cause of this disease
|
| That's ... controversial, a few years ago fraud allegations
| surfaced [1].
|
| [1] https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/for-researchers/explaining-
| amy...
| criddell wrote:
| Reading that link, it sounds like the build up of amyloid
| protein is still the current leading theory.
| idlewords wrote:
| "In mice"
| kcartlidge wrote:
| > _To avoid this problem, the scientists surgically implanted
| mice with electrodes and fiber optic filaments. Although the
| rodents are tethered to a set of cables, they can fall asleep
| normally while researchers track blood volume, electrical
| activity, and chemical levels and use light transmitted through
| the fiber optic lines to activate certain groups of neurons._
|
| I detest this kind of medical research. It's horrific barbarity.
|
| If the output is important enough for this kind of activity to
| take place, then it's important enough for humans to volunteer to
| be the subjects. If nobody volunteers then it isn't that
| important after all. Leave other species out of it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| What is the logic behind this? I genuinely don't understand
| your moral argument
| mrayycombi wrote:
| Am I reading this right as implying Ambien...promotes
| Alheimers....?
| jakeogh wrote:
| Very interesting CSF talk:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WicKmA9lQTI
| croemer wrote:
| Ugh, this is multiple correlation/causation fallacies in one:
|
| > Studies from Nedergaard's group and others suggest vigorous
| glymphatic clearance is beneficial: Circulation falters in
| Alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative illnesses.
|
| That circulation falters in Alzheimer's does not suggest anything
| re the benefit of circulation. Science's science journalism is
| usually SOTA, this is not.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I guess I've been brainwashed without knowing it, which seems
| about par for the course :\
| MollyRealized wrote:
| it licks its paw and then runs it over its fur
| interludead wrote:
| As someone who sometimes has trouble sleeping, I'm struck by how
| much sleep affects the brain
| pedalpete wrote:
| The glymphatic system activity is greatest during slow-waves in
| N3 (deep) sleep. A slow-wave is the synchronous firing of neurons
| which is seen as the glymphatic system pumps CBF through the
| brain.
|
| For the past 5 years we've been developing phase-targeted
| auditory stimulation to increase slow-wave activity, which has
| been shown to have a positive response in amyloid response, as
| well as memory, and a bunch of other biomarkers.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38163288/
|
| I link to more research on our website for anyone interested in
| the space - https://affectablesleep.com/research
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