Imagine that a pharmaceutical company has stumbled upon the drug to end all drugs. It will protect you against a motley group of diseases, from dementia and diabetes to many kinds of cancer. It will keep death at bay for an extra 80 years. It will strengthen your memories, foster creative insights and sharpen your concentration. It will even keep your weight down. And all the drugmakers ask is that you spend a third of your life in complete and abject servitude to their product.
This is the tyranny of sleep. Every animal on the planet is a junkie hooked on its restorative charms. Scientists have shown that if you keep rats in unrelenting wakefulness they will die within four weeks, a 20th of their normal lifespan.
Yet one species has begun an unprecedented mass experiment in defying the natural world’s most ancient instinct. Humans stir themselves in the morning with chemical stimulants and little buzzing devices, and stay up long after sunset with artificial lights and still more little buzzing devices. Some people face insomnia and depend on recreational products like cannabis. They might take up vaping, take edibles or look for pills after they learn how to choose the right concentrate that can help them fall asleep. The orthodox belief is that this is a catastrophic and irreversible problem that is leaving us more tired than we have ever been. But what if it is wrong? What if we could fight back against our sleep addiction and manage with six hours or even significantly less?
“There will,” Benjamin Franklin once said, “be sleeping enough in the grave.” Jim Horne is inclined to agree. In his book Sleeplessness, which will be published in October, the Loughborough University sleep scientist argues that the modern obsession with spending eight hours out of every 24 in a state of catatonia is misguided. What matters is not so much how long we sleep as how well and efficiently we do it. It is time, he says, to approach rest with the same thirst for economy we bring to all our other activities in the 21st century. Although, some people can’t fall asleep quickly or have that much of a long sleep. This could be due to stress, mental illness, chronic pain, and so many other reasons. These days this can be helped with sleeping pills, or even inhalation of marijuana. For the latter, some might ask ‘do bongs get you higher?’, and the answer is that depending on the amount and the strain you are using, they bring out a sense of intense relaxation and calm before eventually sending you into a deep sleep. These factors are the reason it has become so popular for these health issues around the world from the state of Arizona down to a florida dispensary, and in the coming years people hope more states will accept this drug as a necessary sort of medication. However there are still many people who don’t find it possible to get the right amount of sleep.
“Judging sleep by its duration is like judging a plate of food by the total number of calories on it rather than the fats, proteins and carbohydrates,” Professor Horne said. “We don’t need to make up all the sleep we’ve lost, it’s the quality of the sleep that’s so important.”
Around the world, hundreds of researchers and maverick amateurs are working on ways to maximise this quality and so minimise the amount of time we have to spend in bed. Some of these paths, such as the American military’s attempt to engineer soldiers capable of fighting for a week without sleep, have proved to be quixotic blind alleys. Others work for a while, but their effects come at a prohibitive biological cost. Some, however, might just give us the benefits of eight hours’ rest in the space of four or five. It would be wise to take into account how quite a few people find it hard to sleep anyway with their brains constantly awake even in a state of potential relaxation, this can be helped by using aids such as https://felixgray.com/sleepglasses to promote healthy sleep, however, this study will focus on less sleep in a positive sense, rather than brought on by overuse of electronics, etc.
The easiest fix is gadgetry. Two years ago Phyllis Zee, professor of neurology at Northwestern University in Chicago, brought 13 people between the ages of 60 and 84 into her sleep laboratory for two consecutive nights. On both evenings her subjects looked at 88 pairs of related words (such as “energy – oil”) and tried to commit as many to memory as they could. Then they put on a pair of earphones and went to bed.
The only difference between the two nights was that one of them was punctuated with bursts of meaningless sound broadcast through the earphones. This “pink noise” is a little like the white noise of TV static, but with the volume of the bass frequencies turned up. You might think of the muffled rumble of an old-fashioned locomotive running over sleepers in the rain, or the sighing of waves against a pebble beach. “The noise is fairly pleasant, it kind of resembles a rush of water,” Professor Zee said. “It’s just noticeable enough that the brain realises it’s there, but not enough to disturb sleep.”
Beneath the apparent perversity of the experiment was a certain logic. The brain’s rhythms of electrical activity can slip into sync with certain subtle patterns of sound in a phenomenon known as entrainment. In 2012 Chinese researchers had shown that continuous pink noise broke down the complexity of people’s brainwaves as they slept, effectively stabilising the deeper stages of their slumber. Other groups found that entraining the sleeping brain with targeted blasts of sound made the method even more effective.
Even so, Professor Zee’s results, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in March, were astounding. The morning after their pink noise-blighted night, her human guinea pigs performed three times as well in their memory tests as they did on the other day. Their slow-wave activity, the phase of sleep during which the body releases growth hormones while the brain stocks up on energy and consolidates its new neural pathways, was markedly increased. It was, in crude terms, super-sleep.
Then there are the brain-zappers. Every great culture has had its bioelectricity fad. In the first century AD Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, was in the habit of treating gout and migraines by applying a live electric torpedo fish to the affected spot. The Victorians used “electropathic” belts to boost the virility of feeble men. Today we have transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS). These clunky headsets are designed to pass a weak electrical field through a particular brain region, making it easier or harder for the neurons to chatter with one another. They have been used as experimental treatments for depression, chronic pain and belief in God. It was always going to be only a matter of time before scientists would test their capacity for sleep enhancement.
Beneath the apparent perversity of the experiment was a certain logic. The brain’s rhythms of electrical activity can slip into sync with certain subtle patterns of sound in a phenomenon known as entrainment. In 2012 Chinese researchers had shown that continuous pink noise broke down the complexity of people’s brainwaves as they slept, effectively stabilising the deeper stages of their slumber. Other groups found that entraining the sleeping brain with targeted blasts of sound made the method even more effective.
Even so, Professor Zee’s results, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in March, were astounding. The morning after their pink noise-blighted night, her human guinea pigs performed three times as well in their memory tests as they did on the other day. Their slow-wave activity, the phase of sleep during which the body releases growth hormones while the brain stocks up on energy and consolidates its new neural pathways, was markedly increased. It was, in crude terms, super-sleep.
Then there are the brain-zappers. Every great culture has had its bioelectricity fad. In the first century AD Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, was in the habit of treating gout and migraines by applying a live electric torpedo fish to the affected spot. The Victorians used “electropathic” belts to boost the virility of feeble men. Today we have transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS). These clunky headsets are designed to pass a weak electrical field through a particular brain region, making it easier or harder for the neurons to chatter with one another. They have been used as experimental treatments for depression, chronic pain and belief in God. It was always going to be only a matter of time before scientists would test their capacity for sleep enhancement.
Humans, like the great apes, instinctively prefer to doze in two phases. Winston Churchill, who famously got by on five or six hours of sleep, was one of the best-known modern nappers. “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner,” he once said. “Take off your clothes and go to bed. That’s what I always do . . .You will
Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, one of Professor Russell’s Oxford colleagues, thinks they may hold the key not only to discovering more efficient ways of sleeping but also to a more fundamental understanding of what sleep is. “You start wondering why on earth such a big animal as an elephant hardly sleeps at all,” he said. “It must have found a way to fulfil this function by other means.” Humans already sleep about two hours less each night than chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump have claimed to get by on four hours a night. Harriet Green, the IBM executive and former head of Thomas Cook, says she manages with three. What do they do that the rest of us don’t?
In a remarkable study that came out last year, Dr Vyazovskiy and his colleagues experimented with mice that ran voluntarily on a wheel for hours at a stretch, sometimes covering several miles in the course of a night. When the scientists examined the animals’ brains they found something bizarre. Some of the mice’s neurons completely stopped firing as they exercised. The activity in the motor and sensory processing regions dropped by more than a third.
More curious still, the mice spent considerably more time awake than their sedentary peers. Something about the rhythmic, repetitive drumming of their feet on the wheel seemed to send parts of their brains to sleep, enabling them to refresh themselves on the go. “This state,” Dr Vyazovskiy wrote in a recent article, “may even allow the brain to rest without entering deep sleep and provide some of the same benefits.” Much as migrating birds can snooze on the wing with only half of their brains, at least one mammal species appears to be able to drift into a mode that blends active wakefulness with the healing power of sleep.
Mice, it must be stressed, are not humans. But there is tantalising evidence that we may have similar abilities. Traditional Buddhist meditation practices, involving a balance between concentration and relaxation, are known to profoundly alter how the brain works. Their aim, according to Willoughby Britton, an expert on the psychology of meditation at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is the cultivation of a “vigilant awareness in every waking moment [that extends] beyond the waking state to sleep states as well”.
be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one. Well, at least one and a half.”
The polyphasic sleep movement is napping on steroids. Taking their cue from the way babies and the majority of other animal species break their sleep up into even smaller chunks, thousands of people have quietly abandoned the long goodnight altogether. On internet chat forums such as Reddit they swap tips about intimidating schedules with names like the Everyman, the Uberman and the Dymaxion. Buckminster Fuller, the American polymath and inventor, earned notoriety for his ability to drop off within 30 seconds and to sleep in 30-minute bursts every six hours. Even Dame Ellen MacArthur has tried her hand at the technique, sleeping as little as one-and-a-half hours a day in a series of micro-naps during her record-breaking circumnavigation of the world in 2005.
Steve Pavlina, a self-help writer from the US, used the method to nap for 20 minutes every four hours, totalling only two hours of sleep each day over five-and-a-half months. “Adapting to polyphasic sleep took many days, and I felt like a zombie the first week,” he wrote. “At one point I just sat on the couch staring at a wall for 90 minutes, unable to form any thoughts. But eventually I was able to adapt, and it was one of the most unusual experiences of my life.” The trick is to get to the rapid-eye movement stage, when dreams occur, in a matter of minutes. And it worked. Pavlina said the sole reason he had given up was to see more of his wife and children. “The rest of the world,” he said, “simply isn’t polyphasic.”
The science, however, is dubious. Attempts to test the approaches in a systematic way have foundered on the tendency of participants to drop out in large numbers as they find they cannot stand the punishing strain. Researchers say that the only reason polyphasic sleep appears to be more efficient is because the brain is effectively on a permanent war footing, duped into fighting for its survival. In the end it may have disastrous consequences for health. “I would say generally that it’s not something that any of us would recommend to anybody unless they absolutely have to,” Professor von Schantz said. “To sleep less than you feel you need to is likely to be harmful to you in the medium and long term.”
There may be a better way. Sleep needs vary enormously across the animal kingdom. Some bat species roost for as much as 21 hours out of 24, but according to a paper published in March African elephants may sleep for less than two. While their counterparts in zoos rest for as much as seven hours a day, the wild elephants were found to dream only once every three or four days.
The religion’s ancient writings suggest that proficient meditators should end up sleeping about four hours a day. This is fairly counterintuitive, as the paradoxical Buddhist state of slumberous alertness turns out to drastically increase the amount of time spent in the shallows of sleep at the expense of the deeper, slow-wave phases. Yet 70 per cent of the participants in one study of a three-month Theravada retreat ended up sleeping about two hours less than normal, while a controlled experiment involving Indian master-meditators showed that they slept only 5.2 hours a night compared with 7.8 for a group of non-meditators.
Waking and sleeping; sleeping and waking. The two may not be quite the mutually estranged realms we once took them for. If it is possible to blur the hardest boundary in our cognitive experience by jogging or even simply by adopting the right habits of thought, then drugs or electronic devices guided by our emerging knowledge of neurobiology could one day have effects on our sleep that would have been indistinguishable from magic half a century ago. For now, this science is in its speculative childhood. The imperium of sleep will not be broken any time soon.
Imagine that a pharmaceutical company has stumbled upon the drug to end all drugs. It will protect you against a motley group of diseases, from dementia and diabetes to many kinds of cancer. It will keep death at bay for an extra 80 years. It will strengthen your memories, foster creative insights and sharpen your concentration. It will even keep your weight down. And all the drugmakers ask is that you spend a third of your life in complete and abject servitude to their product.
This is the tyranny of sleep. Every animal on the planet is a junkie hooked on its restorative charms. Scientists have shown that if you keep rats in unrelenting wakefulness they will die within four weeks, a 20th of their normal lifespan.
Yet one species has begun an unprecedented mass experiment in defying the natural world’s most ancient instinct. Humans stir themselves in the morning with chemical stimulants and little buzzing devices, and stay up long after sunset with artificial lights and still more little buzzing devices. Some people face insomnia and depend on recreational products like cannabis. They might take up vaping, take edibles or look for pills after they learn how to choose the right concentrate that can help them fall asleep. The orthodox belief is that this is a catastrophic and irreversible problem that is leaving us more tired than we have ever been. But what if it is wrong? What if we could fight back against our sleep addiction and manage with six hours or even significantly less?
“There will,” Benjamin Franklin once said, “be sleeping enough in the grave.” Jim Horne is inclined to agree. In his book Sleeplessness, which will be published in October, the Loughborough University sleep scientist argues that the modern obsession with spending eight hours out of every 24 in a state of catatonia is misguided. What matters is not so much how long we sleep as how well and efficiently we do it. It is time, he says, to approach rest with the same thirst for economy we bring to all our other activities in the 21st century. Although, some people can’t fall asleep quickly or have that much of a long sleep. This could be due to stress, mental illness, chronic pain, and so many other reasons. These days this can be helped with sleeping pills, or even inhalation of marijuana. For the latter, some might ask ‘do bongs get you higher?’, and the answer is that depending on the amount and the strain you are using, they bring out a sense of intense relaxation and calm before eventually sending you into a deep sleep. These factors are the reason it has become so popular for these health issues around the world from the state of Arizona down to a florida dispensary, and in the coming years people hope more states will accept this drug as a necessary sort of medication. However there are still many people who don’t find it possible to get the right amount of sleep.
“Judging sleep by its duration is like judging a plate of food by the total number of calories on it rather than the fats, proteins and carbohydrates,” Professor Horne said. “We don’t need to make up all the sleep we’ve lost, it’s the quality of the sleep that’s so important.”
Around the world, hundreds of researchers and maverick amateurs are working on ways to maximise this quality and so minimise the amount of time we have to spend in bed. Some of these paths, such as the American military’s attempt to engineer soldiers capable of fighting for a week without sleep, have proved to be quixotic blind alleys. Others work for a while, but their effects come at a prohibitive biological cost. Some, however, might just give us the benefits of eight hours’ rest in the space of four or five. It would be wise to take into account how quite a few people find it hard to sleep anyway with their brains constantly awake even in a state of potential relaxation, this can be helped by using aids such as https://felixgray.com/sleepglasses to promote healthy sleep, however, this study will focus on less sleep in a positive sense, rather than brought on by overuse of electronics, etc.
The easiest fix is gadgetry. Two years ago Phyllis Zee, professor of neurology at Northwestern University in Chicago, brought 13 people between the ages of 60 and 84 into her sleep laboratory for two consecutive nights. On both evenings her subjects looked at 88 pairs of related words (such as “energy – oil”) and tried to commit as many to memory as they could. Then they put on a pair of earphones and went to bed.
The only difference between the two nights was that one of them was punctuated with bursts of meaningless sound broadcast through the earphones. This “pink noise” is a little like the white noise of TV static, but with the volume of the bass frequencies turned up. You might think of the muffled rumble of an old-fashioned locomotive running over sleepers in the rain, or the sighing of waves against a pebble beach. “The noise is fairly pleasant, it kind of resembles a rush of water,” Professor Zee said. “It’s just noticeable enough that the brain realises it’s there, but not enough to disturb sleep.”
Beneath the apparent perversity of the experiment was a certain logic. The brain’s rhythms of electrical activity can slip into sync with certain subtle patterns of sound in a phenomenon known as entrainment. In 2012 Chinese researchers had shown that continuous pink noise broke down the complexity of people’s brainwaves as they slept, effectively stabilising the deeper stages of their slumber. Other groups found that entraining the sleeping brain with targeted blasts of sound made the method even more effective.
Even so, Professor Zee’s results, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in March, were astounding. The morning after their pink noise-blighted night, her human guinea pigs performed three times as well in their memory tests as they did on the other day. Their slow-wave activity, the phase of sleep during which the body releases growth hormones while the brain stocks up on energy and consolidates its new neural pathways, was markedly increased. It was, in crude terms, super-sleep.
Then there are the brain-zappers. Every great culture has had its bioelectricity fad. In the first century AD Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, was in the habit of treating gout and migraines by applying a live electric torpedo fish to the affected spot. The Victorians used “electropathic” belts to boost the virility of feeble men. Today we have transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS). These clunky headsets are designed to pass a weak electrical field through a particular brain region, making it easier or harder for the neurons to chatter with one another. They have been used as experimental treatments for depression, chronic pain and belief in God. It was always going to be only a matter of time before scientists would test their capacity for sleep enhancement.
Beneath the apparent perversity of the experiment was a certain logic. The brain’s rhythms of electrical activity can slip into sync with certain subtle patterns of sound in a phenomenon known as entrainment. In 2012 Chinese researchers had shown that continuous pink noise broke down the complexity of people’s brainwaves as they slept, effectively stabilising the deeper stages of their slumber. Other groups found that entraining the sleeping brain with targeted blasts of sound made the method even more effective.
Even so, Professor Zee’s results, published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience in March, were astounding. The morning after their pink noise-blighted night, her human guinea pigs performed three times as well in their memory tests as they did on the other day. Their slow-wave activity, the phase of sleep during which the body releases growth hormones while the brain stocks up on energy and consolidates its new neural pathways, was markedly increased. It was, in crude terms, super-sleep.
Then there are the brain-zappers. Every great culture has had its bioelectricity fad. In the first century AD Scribonius Largus, court physician to the Roman emperor Claudius, was in the habit of treating gout and migraines by applying a live electric torpedo fish to the affected spot. The Victorians used “electropathic” belts to boost the virility of feeble men. Today we have transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS). These clunky headsets are designed to pass a weak electrical field through a particular brain region, making it easier or harder for the neurons to chatter with one another. They have been used as experimental treatments for depression, chronic pain and belief in God. It was always going to be only a matter of time before scientists would test their capacity for sleep enhancement.
Humans, like the great apes, instinctively prefer to doze in two phases. Winston Churchill, who famously got by on five or six hours of sleep, was one of the best-known modern nappers. “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner,” he once said. “Take off your clothes and go to bed. That’s what I always do . . .You will
Vladyslav Vyazovskiy, one of Professor Russell’s Oxford colleagues, thinks they may hold the key not only to discovering more efficient ways of sleeping but also to a more fundamental understanding of what sleep is. “You start wondering why on earth such a big animal as an elephant hardly sleeps at all,” he said. “It must have found a way to fulfil this function by other means.” Humans already sleep about two hours less each night than chimpanzees, our closest relatives. Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump have claimed to get by on four hours a night. Harriet Green, the IBM executive and former head of Thomas Cook, says she manages with three. What do they do that the rest of us don’t?
In a remarkable study that came out last year, Dr Vyazovskiy and his colleagues experimented with mice that ran voluntarily on a wheel for hours at a stretch, sometimes covering several miles in the course of a night. When the scientists examined the animals’ brains they found something bizarre. Some of the mice’s neurons completely stopped firing as they exercised. The activity in the motor and sensory processing regions dropped by more than a third.
More curious still, the mice spent considerably more time awake than their sedentary peers. Something about the rhythmic, repetitive drumming of their feet on the wheel seemed to send parts of their brains to sleep, enabling them to refresh themselves on the go. “This state,” Dr Vyazovskiy wrote in a recent article, “may even allow the brain to rest without entering deep sleep and provide some of the same benefits.” Much as migrating birds can snooze on the wing with only half of their brains, at least one mammal species appears to be able to drift into a mode that blends active wakefulness with the healing power of sleep.
Mice, it must be stressed, are not humans. But there is tantalising evidence that we may have similar abilities. Traditional Buddhist meditation practices, involving a balance between concentration and relaxation, are known to profoundly alter how the brain works. Their aim, according to Willoughby Britton, an expert on the psychology of meditation at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is the cultivation of a “vigilant awareness in every waking moment [that extends] beyond the waking state to sleep states as well”.
be able to accomplish more. You get two days in one. Well, at least one and a half.”
The polyphasic sleep movement is napping on steroids. Taking their cue from the way babies and the majority of other animal species break their sleep up into even smaller chunks, thousands of people have quietly abandoned the long goodnight altogether. On internet chat forums such as Reddit they swap tips about intimidating schedules with names like the Everyman, the Uberman and the Dymaxion. Buckminster Fuller, the American polymath and inventor, earned notoriety for his ability to drop off within 30 seconds and to sleep in 30-minute bursts every six hours. Even Dame Ellen MacArthur has tried her hand at the technique, sleeping as little as one-and-a-half hours a day in a series of micro-naps during her record-breaking circumnavigation of the world in 2005.
Steve Pavlina, a self-help writer from the US, used the method to nap for 20 minutes every four hours, totalling only two hours of sleep each day over five-and-a-half months. “Adapting to polyphasic sleep took many days, and I felt like a zombie the first week,” he wrote. “At one point I just sat on the couch staring at a wall for 90 minutes, unable to form any thoughts. But eventually I was able to adapt, and it was one of the most unusual experiences of my life.” The trick is to get to the rapid-eye movement stage, when dreams occur, in a matter of minutes. And it worked. Pavlina said the sole reason he had given up was to see more of his wife and children. “The rest of the world,” he said, “simply isn’t polyphasic.”
The science, however, is dubious. Attempts to test the approaches in a systematic way have foundered on the tendency of participants to drop out in large numbers as they find they cannot stand the punishing strain. Researchers say that the only reason polyphasic sleep appears to be more efficient is because the brain is effectively on a permanent war footing, duped into fighting for its survival. In the end it may have disastrous consequences for health. “I would say generally that it’s not something that any of us would recommend to anybody unless they absolutely have to,” Professor von Schantz said. “To sleep less than you feel you need to is likely to be harmful to you in the medium and long term.”
There may be a better way. Sleep needs vary enormously across the animal kingdom. Some bat species roost for as much as 21 hours out of 24, but according to a paper published in March African elephants may sleep for less than two. While their counterparts in zoos rest for as much as seven hours a day, the wild elephants were found to dream only once every three or four days.
The religion’s ancient writings suggest that proficient meditators should end up sleeping about four hours a day. This is fairly counterintuitive, as the paradoxical Buddhist state of slumberous alertness turns out to drastically increase the amount of time spent in the shallows of sleep at the expense of the deeper, slow-wave phases. Yet 70 per cent of the participants in one study of a three-month Theravada retreat ended up sleeping about two hours less than normal, while a controlled experiment involving Indian master-meditators showed that they slept only 5.2 hours a night compared with 7.8 for a group of non-meditators.
Waking and sleeping; sleeping and waking. The two may not be quite the mutually estranged realms we once took them for. If it is possible to blur the hardest boundary in our cognitive experience by jogging or even simply by adopting the right habits of thought, then drugs or electronic devices guided by our emerging knowledge of neurobiology could one day have effects on our sleep that would have been indistinguishable from magic half a century ago. For now, this science is in its speculative childhood. The imperium of sleep will not be broken any time soon.