> 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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Here is a great review by Bailey and colleagues who discovered the risks of grapefruit in drug metabolism. It is from 2013. This is a GREAT example if genotype-by-drug interaction and why knowing your genotype can be extremely useful.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3589309/
>Our research group discovered the interaction between grapefruit and certain medications more than 20 years ago [1990s].1–3 Currently, more than 85 drugs, most of which are available in Canada, are known or predicted to interact with grapefruit. This interaction enhances systemic drug concentration through impaired drug metabolism. Many of the drugs that interact with grapefruit are highly prescribed and are essential for the treatment of important or common medical conditions. Recently, however, a disturbing trend has been seen. Between 2008 and 2012, the number of medications with the potential to interact with grapefruit and cause serious adverse effects (i.e., torsade de pointes, rhabdomyolysis, myelotoxicity, respiratory depression, gastrointestinal bleeding, nephrotoxicity) has increased from 17 to 43, representing an average rate of increase exceeding 6 drugs per year. This increase is a result of the introduction of new chemical entities and formulations.
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.
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.
This is the first time I've heard of that. Glad I stumbled across this, even though I hate the taste.
Have you heard the one about lychee? There is some compound in them which can lower your blood glucose levels. The sugar from digesting the fruit will eventually push up your sugar levels, so it all ends up okay eventually, and the drop is relatively small. But if you already have a low blood sugar level, and eat a lot of lychee it can maybe even kill you. So don’t eat them for an empty stomach just to stay on the safe side.
That is my other “tasty fruit with a weirdly dangerous rare side-effect” fact.
I'm sure they felt the same trying to explain certain things to their child :)
Relevant comic, "The Science News Cycle"
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.
I can remember my mother giving me carob 50 years ago, because it is "healthier than chocolate". Never forget.
> I have to tell my parents to stop reading
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.
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.
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.
Sounds to me like you were focusing on the (negligible) impact, while they were upset on principle?
How many such "pennies" projects were there? It could be that your parents understand that you can waste a lot of money throwing dollar bills out of the window. Most of the time these bills are full of waste such that the sum total of all such projects can equal the threshold of what you might think of as "real money".
Yes it can be hard to convey numbers to the general public. Orders of magnitude are unintuitive unless STEM trained.
> 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."
The problem is that without science and stem foundations it is very hard for people to even understand what is and isn’t known.
My mum used to send me all kind of articles about chakras. “there are kids born now who have their sixth chakra open” and “this chakra is orange, and that chakra is indigo”. One day my mom, my then girlfriend, and me were chatting about what specialisation my girlfriend is thinking about pursuing at medical school. She told her that she is thinking about specialising in endocrinology. My mom become really angry and cided us for using such “big words” to “lord our education over her”. So to placate her we explained that it is a doctor who studies hormones, measures hormone levels and treats diseases of the hormone system. She got visibly surprised and the only things she asked “you can measure hormones?”
The conversation continued of course but that question, and the genuine surprise on her face remained with me. The thing is, she trully did not know that we can measure hormones. And if you don’t know that hormones are as real as the legs of the table, and chakras are as real as santa claus, then they both sound equally plausible theories about health. And when you race the stories against each other “i’m not feeling well because my heart chakra is blocked, and I need healing crystals and massages to get well again” vs “i’m not feeling well because my thyroid gland is not producing enough thyroxine, and i need to take suplements in a pill form” then the first one wins because it is simpler and neater sounding. But one is kinda bulshit and the other is a real thing. But you won’t know that unless you understand that we can measure hormones, and nobody even has any idea what it would mean to measure a chakra.
Ok, but you make it sounds like the vast majority of people are under such impressions. A lot of people in this thread imply that having a STEM degree confers god-like insight over the plebes that don't have one; I think it is a bit of ironic arrogance. For instance, this thing about the "confidence levels of scientists" for climate change; there is a well-known issue with this myth of a "97% consensus" on that topic. As well, many people think critics of "climate policies" are rubes that "don't know teh science stuff" but actually most do accept humans have contributed to some climate change (but don't agree to the extent that lefts claim when they say migrants come to the US because of it) but rather they disagree about what to do about it.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Are you gate-keeping philosophy from neuroscientists? Are you not a fan of the Damasio or Paul and Patricia Kirkland? I don't know; i think you are a bit too dismissive here.
> 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.
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...
I haven't interviewed for a tech job in over 10 years but I've never had a leetcode interview. Never been asked about algorithms, or put on the spot to answer how many manhole covers are there in New York City.
I've been asked about my former projects, my roles, what I liked or didn't like about them, how do I approach a new project, what did I find most interesting, etc.
I gather there are a lot of fakers in the software dev world. So maybe that's why more places try to make you prove you can actually write code.
Reaching for a book to answer, makes sense to me. That's what you'd do on the job, and nobody would think less of you for it.
> 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.
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".
> months to hire
I've seen that at BigCo, but that's the exception. Every other place strongly prefers a start date of ASAP, with O(weeks) from initial contact as a next-best option. If you state that you aren't available for months you probably won't be hired.
> concern is that firing is so difficult
There are lots of concerns.
Keep in mind, 95% of resumes are some sort of bot/scam, and 0.5% of the rest are actually at the skill level I'm looking for. There are lots of potential explanations, and I don't think it's that only 0.5% of developers are who I'm looking for (there are sampling biases, survivorship bias, and all sorts of things at play in that data), but from my position doing the screening and interviewing those are the stats I see.
1. Suppose you actually did hire everyone who passed a 1hr screen. You'd still have 20+ failed candidates before you found the right person. Even with a 2-week trial period, that's 3/4 of the year not having your projects properly staffed, a demoralizing experience for all their coworkers, and 3/4 of a SWE-year in wages and benefits lost.
2. Is it really fair to hire somebody if I know there's a 95% chance I intend to fire them? What if they have to move? What if they hadn't quit their old job till I accepted them? I suppose if somebody said they were confident in themselves and were willing to risk a trial period I might allow it, but the current set of social expectations is that once you're hired your employer will spend months at a bare minimum trying to make you successful, I'd want to be cautious with that sort of arrangement out of respect for the candidates.
3. Onboarding is even more expensive than it might seem since it sucks away your more senior talent for the training. If the cost of a bad engineer were just the normal day-to-day post-onboarding it wouldn't be _that_ terrible (you still have attrition and other knock-on effects to worry about), but having multiple onboarding sessions for a single hire (because of multiple trial periods) is the most expensive part of the process.
etc
> General proficiency can be determined in other ways, especially with how prolific GitHub is these days
I agree. Walking through a project with a candidate is one of my favorite interview sessions. They tend to be more comfortable, I tend to learn more, and I get to learn something about their technical communication on top of any coding knowledge.
Not everyone has a GH with anything interesting, so I make other interviews available for everyone, but my life is a little easier if public "proof" (till you talk to the candidate you really have no idea how much they know or who wrote what, but I thankfully haven't seen that problem yet in an interview) exists.
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.
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!"
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.
>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.
> Also note that the medical field selects hard for people who can memorize information, to the exclusion of people who can understand systems.
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.
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.
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_deduped/...
(View ImageNet-1k images) https://huggingface.co/datasets/evanarlian/imagenet_1k_resiz...
(ImageNet-1k labels) https://gist.github.com/marodev/7b3ac5f63b0fc5ace84fa723e72e...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
The perceptron is not such a deep concept.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
Worse than Origin of Life researchers?
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.
Yeah this is very common. You might see the headline "Scientists prove X causes Y", and when you click through all the pop-science journalism until you get to the paper, you'll find "We found a weak positive correlation between X and Y and it's surprising because the prior research found the opposite".
This is especially true in climate science. There is a huge chasm between the public and private (post couple of drinks) sides.
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>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.
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...
> 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?
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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.]
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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.
>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.
It's a pretty old argument tbqh. Also, mind altering drugs are basically just more subtle forms of the Phineas Gage thing.
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.
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.)
> 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.
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if it's become usual, maybe it's time to reconsider your arguments or phrasing?
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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.
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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.
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No, they're not.
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Playing the victim doesn't help advance the conversation.
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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.
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?”
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”.
* Waste creation may be slower when asleep
>>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.
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?
I was thought it years ago, and there are parents that old for using it to treat Alzheimer's
Patents?
autocorrect from patents*
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".
> 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.
> 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?
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.
If maternal mortality were the only issue, evolutionary pressure would also favor women with wider hips/birthing canals. After all, we see hyper intelligent individuals at the current brain size, it's clearly possible to get more processing power in there but there doesn't seem to be much reproductive benefit.
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.
"Children? With these economic conditions?"
"There's no way we could have a child now. Not with the market the way it is, no."
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.
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.
Check in with various farm animals, they are already there.
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.
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?
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 ?
Exactly, but that isValidAndTrue method is probably a little tricky to write...
It helps to be able to pinch yourself.
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.
>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
Why are your competitors and predators asleep?
At night it is harder to see food. It is harder to see predators, some of whom are in fact nocturnal. It is harder to notice visual cues and gestures from allies/kin. It is harder to navigate, both due to difficulty seeing distant landmarks and nearby obstructions, so you are more likely to get lost and/or injured. It is colder so your body has to spend more calories to keep you warm.
There are adaptations that can improve nocturnal capabilities, but these typically come with tradeoffs that make diurnal life harder. Evolution is a series of many baby steps - either you need to adapt to not sleeping while you're still at a disadvantage at night, or you need to adapt to being awake at night while you still need to sleep. Neither path seems like it would have been advantageous to our ancestors.
Well we can't see can we
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.
The polyphasic sleep experiments
> 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 ?
If it were biologically possible, other organisms would have evolved that capability. There’s some fundamental, biological reason why all animals sleep.
>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.
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.
Or when my early-riser wife talks to me about anything before I've had my coffee.
> 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.
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
SLAs are terrible. I agree.
But at least there’s (usually) some exciting shows on while you are waiting!
On the other side, heart delivers a lifetime service without any maintaince, that's a truly wonder of nature.
Its "maintenance" is built into its design
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?
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.
Also, cats and panthers are crepuscular, active at dawn and dusk. Which leads to lots of waiting for that time of day.
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.
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.
And after a while, the system get bad enough that fsck starts failing regularly.
Really poor design.
Through formal meditation practice, you can train the brain to perform these as background tasks in the waking state.
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.
It even has random downtime during the day (hello, power naps)
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.
You aren’t overclocking your system?
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I did it for a couple of years and it was getting worse. It got better with rest and walking.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. I think that should be the commonly spread advice instead of the blue/red light thing
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.
Would you be kind enough to provide a little more detail on the program that worked for you?
> 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.
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.
> 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?
I was chronically tired because of sleep apnea. CPAP changed my life.
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.
What about your diet, specifically sugar and carbohydrates. Personally, I have much, much more energy and stamina when I avoid them.
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.
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.
For the moving a lot during sleep problem: have you looked into weighted blankets?
> 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?
I averaged ~4 hours of sleep last year based on FitBit’s sleep tracker. I’m a parent too, so mostly that checks out.
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.
What Garmin model specifically?
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.
yes tired but can't stop.
Nedergaard (lab head here and main findings of this effect since 2012) is going to win the Nobel for this line of research. When I got my Ph.D. 20 years ago in cognitive neuroscience we knew three main deficits to a lack of sleep but couldn’t connect them mechanistically: 1) loss of daily performance metrics 2) increased risks of mental health concerns 3) increased risks of cognitive declines
The glymphatic nervous system, like any great scientific theory, unites disparate findings under a common mechanism. Not getting enough sleep is akin to not running your dishwasher or washing machine long enough, the gunk accumulates.
And for all the parents out there, pediatric recommendation is 10-12 hours a night for kids 6-12 years old and 8-10 hours a night for kids 13-18 years old.
It makes me think of long COVID and CFS, where patients complain of a lack of "unrefreshing sleep" and "brain fog". A lack of perfusion resulting in waste not being sufficiently flushed out could possibly result in those symptoms.
Recommended hours not nearly hit enough when they have to finish the night's homework then catch the 7am school bus...
Notably, the drug Ambien disrupts the norepinephrine oscillation that is part of this process.
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!!)
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Lumryz? GHB is metabolized very quickly and would be out of your system within 2 hours. Lumryz is supposed to process slower. I have had a few bad nights on xyrem, but mostly it puts me sleep quickly enough. And more importantly puts me on a better sleep cycle so I'm actually sleepy at bed time by dint of being awake during the day.
Xywav, with the 2-dose schedule. My impression based on how I feel waking up at various times in the morning is each dose produces effects that last somewhere around 3–5 hours. My understanding is most people taking this drug are falling asleep much more quickly than I am, and I do feel it trying to make me sleepy shortly after taking it, but not enough to defeat my delayed sleep phase disorder and various insomnia issues. But my point was that "falling asleep quickly" is not a direct goal of the drug, even if it is a common effect, the goal of the drug is to change what your brain does while you're asleep.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
> 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. As far as there is a broad, common experience, it is Dr's who won't consider older meds, even if they come with less baggage than their newer counterparts.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you have sleep issues try magnesium.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=magnesium%20sleep&type=comment
What if blood magnesium levels tested normal?
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.
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
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?
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.)
I'd like to learn more about the washing. Do you have a link or word/phrase to Google?
The glymphatic system
And more specifically that norepinephrine waves are highly correlated with and perhaps causative of that pumping.
... 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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
Reading that link, it sounds like the build up of amyloid protein is still the current leading theory.
Perhaps it seems odd, but could experiencing nightmares actually aid in the cleansing process?
I guess I've been brainwashed without knowing it, which seems about par for the course :\
it licks its paw and then runs it over its fur
Am I reading this right as implying Ambien...promotes Alheimers....?
i dunno, sounds like brainwashing
I wonder how nicotine affects this? since it can affect norepinephrine
Falling asleep with nicotine patches on results in wild dreams so it clearly screws up something in the brain!
There was a MRI looking video showing this
As someone who sometimes has trouble sleeping, I'm struck by how much sleep affects the brain
Very interesting CSF talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WicKmA9lQTI
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.
In mouse brains
This is a fundamental physiological process ... not a drug interaction.
or, as the late great @justsaysinmice used to point out "IN MICE"
So? What part of the washing chemistry is different?
The interesting thing is that everything with a brain sleeps. We really need to get to the bottom of understanding it.
That's exactly what we don't know yet.
"In mice"
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?
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.
> 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.
What is the logic behind this? I genuinely don’t understand your moral argument