Brain waves appear to wash out waste during sleep in mice

Has she tried cannabis? It prevents dream memory formation and can help with nightmares

If the problem is psychological trauma, wouldn’t therapy be the obvious solution?

She should try ketamine. Sounds like it’s exactly what you say, past trauma, that’s holding her back from a good nights sleep. Ketamine has done wonders for someone I love and I would wholeheartedly recommend it. The person in my life who benefited greatly from it only needed one weekend (2 relatively low to medium dose sessions of ketamine) and she was cured of her ptsd.

Also strongly recommend weighted blankets, especially for someone like your SO.

All the best eh

Promethazine (1) helps some people, myself included (UK Sominex). And occasionally, phenibut.

(1) https://www.inhousepharmacy.vu/p-1189-phenergan-tablets-25mg...

How healthy is she in general? Does she eat well? Exercise? Have a consistent night routing? Has she tried melatonin? What about sleep apnea?

If she's sensitive to sound and light, what has she tried to address that? Like blackout curtains?

I find it a bit odd that sleep clinics would turn her away so readily.

I understand the struggle though which is why I asked so many questions, because all of these things have factored into my quest for better sleep. The psychological stuff is hard.

Bad gut health screwed up my sleep, after working on it it got better. But if im not careful with what I eat, my sleep quality is screwed again

If she falls a sleep then can she have the expected sleep length when not interrupted?

Sounds so hard.

I’ve experienced that a moderate or intense exercise regimen can help a lot with sleep.

If she hasn’t tried therapies directed at trauma and recovery that may also be helpful.

Edibles have been a godsend to me. Have you guys tried them?

Learning to control your dreams is what I did with my nightmares, at some point it becomes so easy you can do it on command but... It doesn't always work and requires extra energy to stay in control often leaving me falling asleep in my dreams which ironically means I don't sleep well. And there are still nightmares I get, just had one a few days ago that left me too afraid to sleep again. Still, I think it's overall a good long term skill about building mental awareness. I learned it as a child on my own, and I believe adults can also learn it by simply studying their environment often and looking if anything else is amiss or "unrealistic". Sometimes you can also ask yourself questions before bed, and try to use visualization before sleeping or sleeping to sound or audiobooks to help you relax too. My family has a history of being more prone to spiritual and psychology issues so bring aware of family history can also sometimes make you idk feel less alone too. Just being able to shift the narrative can mean a lot and give you power when you feel powerless sometimes, but it can be tough to get there but baby steps can make a huge difference. Something I personally did as a child when I felt afraid was to visualize a golden warm light around me almost like a bubble, it didn't always work but I guess it helped to get away from negative thoughts by trying to focus on something protective for me. Soft repetition also seems helpful because it's predictable so perhaps finding something predictable may help too. And maybe looking into CPTSD.

Has she considered PTSD? It sounds a lot like it and there has been promising work around PTSD from what I have seen in passing.

I’ve been watching a lot of healthy gamer youtube channel, the host likes to really geek out on brain science. One of the big take aways I’ve gotten watching him, is that sleep serves a layered purpose psychologically (and physically as per this article), that you work through social problems, then physical problems, then consolidating memory, sort of in that order.

One of the study tricks that the host figured out, was that if you want to memorize something, you should get rid of all the other things you don’t want to learn, and that journaling is amazingly good at that. Basically if you write down all the things you don’t want to remember, it sort of leaves space to move things to long term memory.

I say all this, because I’ve been experimenting with journaling at night, and it really helps with some of the restless nights where it feels like something is keeping me awake. It’s not a magic bullet, and it takes effort, but it may help to write down the things bothering your partner prior to sleep to allow for some of the ”less important” processes to happen.

Psychoanalysis might be useful, it is my understanding that it can deal with complex issues where simpler forms of therapy fails

My suggestion is to try a religious conversion to christianity. I know it sound weird, but we all live in a story and she relive the same story over and over in her dreams and in real life.

Christianity will help her make sense of what happenend and will help her get over it. She will have a place to put evil and a place to put good and she will be slowly be able to fix the direction of her mind.

She can search for scripture that speak around what happened to her and see what she can do about it. She will ask for help to go past her trauma.

I tought all my life that it was supersitious nonsense (scientific atheist) but I found out that I was wrong. We have no choice, we are religious by nature. Without a solid faith we are free floating, anxious, depressed, confused and stuck in loops.

I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night?

Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain.

I think some types of learning and memory formation also happen during sleep, right?

More efficient sleep is possible with ultrasound. But keep in mind that the glymphatic system seems to expand as other systems contract. The waves are tied to brain activity slowing down, can’t have one without the other. That said, could intersperse active times of the day with naps. But naps alone don’t seem sufficient as good sleep.

If there is any magic bullet, it'll be something biological evolution can't easily jump-to or stumble-upon. Otherwise I think it would have happened already, given the risks of sleep and the rewards of an expanded activity (or at least awareness) cycle.

Philips has a headband product called DeepSleep. They claim it increases your deep sleep by playing some sort of sound during your sleep that induces more deep sleep. For some odd reason, despite being a Dutch company, the product was only sold in the US. I spent a lot of money having it imported to Netherlands.

Unfortunately I can't tell whether it works. I rely on headphones and earplugs to block out sounds during the night. Sounds such as cars and airplanes outside, or other people in the house going to the toilet, tend to wake me up unless I block out those sounds. And the handband is not compatible with headphones or ear plugs.

I wish there is a better solution.

There already is constant cleaning, the brain just can’t seem to keep up. Sleep is more efficient at clearance. People are working on making sleep more efficient. As you can imagine, military leading here.

Check this out, I just saw a reference to this recently:

https://www.nia.nih.gov/news/noninvasive-brain-wave-treatmen...

Am I missing something? 2015 for a paper feels relatively new enough that people might not know about it and it might not be in school books.

so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school.

So with the slow pace knowledge makes it into the school curriculum, you likely wouldn't have heard about it in school unless you just left the system a year or two ago (if even then).

I'm about the median age in the US and wouldn't expect anyone less than a decade younger than me to have been taught it in school unless they went for a degree in a related field, and possibly not even then. 2015 is after I finished grad school and something like a decade after I'd last taken a class where it might have been taught if it had already been around for enough years to make it into the curriculum.

You are missing the context of age demographics. For example: in the United States of America about 63% of the population is over the age of 32 which represents roughly 200 million Americans which graduated Highschool before the year 2010.

I was thinking the same thing, but I wasn't sure how long ago it was.

I’m thinking it should be pinned to the top of any sleep post!

That's been in use for thousands of years already: yoga, pranayama and meditation.

There are courses one can take where one learns this, like Art of Living and any other that follows the same traditions.

Yes, there's research on that, and new studies should absolutely gain from this study. Not entirely sure you'll observe the same effect, that depends on meditator, but you can fall asleep during practice.

I have over a decade experience with it, and have also participated on a study on breathing exercises and epigenetic effects from that versus blind control.

For companies it'd be a dream. 1/4 more awake time is 1/4 more time to buy stuff and watch content and ads. Or work longer hours. Gonna go back to sleep now.

the trigger could be like a sequence of flashes or certain pulsing of sound frequencies, it'd be like hacking the nervous system via unsanitized inputs

Meditation?

Dreamers have no problems here :)

Chemogenetic flattening of these high-energy ionic waves largely impeded cerebrospinal fluid infiltration into and clearance of molecules from the brain parenchyma.

Sounds like unsync'd brain waves, (being awake) impedes cerebrospinal fluid flow through the brain.

When asleep, neurons sync their action potentials, acting like a ionized fluid pump, moving old dirty cerebrospinal fluid out, and allowing new, clean in.

Interestingly, when they synthesize that type of ionization using other means, they saw the same increase in fluid movement.

This is my best attempt at translating. Hopefully within 1-2 football fields. The author leaves choice of American or the rest of the world to the reader to decide.

Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create large-amplitude, rhythmic and self-perpetuating ionic waves in the interstitial fluid of the brain

This line is the money shot. An action potential is the variable electrical charge of a neuron, and they maintain that charge by containing a certain concentration of ions relative to the surrounding cerebrospinal fluid. This paper proposes that neurons synchonise their charge state, which forces ions to flow in or out of the neurons in bulk, the movement of these ions causing the cerebrospinal fluid to move around, clearing out the accumulated debris.

I think the point was that every member of the public should have access to publicly funded research at least through the university's website, rather than at least everyone currently in universities should have access.

Yes, it was published through Nature.

But what stops Univ' site to have original research paper available for download? Nature magazine is just a distribution channel (they did not sponsor the research so should not have exclusive rights on it).

Left college long time ago; and do not have access to any library system.

Is Nature’s open access fee really that crazy? Last time I checked it was a few thousand dollars.

And it’s paid once, to make the whole thing open perpetually. It certainly seems better than having the people interested in reading it pay $30-40 each.

Of course, this is also based on the few times I’ve heard researchers talk about the ways they could spend their grant money. $2k to Nature sounds like a great deal by comparison.

Note: Worked for Nature in the past.

I deliberately didn't use the word "see" when phrasing my response. I used the word observed because it was an observation, not a seeing. And I'm not describing a flow of vague amorphous whitish material, I know what you're talking about and I'm not describing that.

I tried to observe the phenomena yesterday again and couldn't observe it but it was very specifically this in the past: spherical orbs of white light expanding from a centre. There were many of these, and my perception was that the nature of this geometric expanding shape was healing. To describe it more clearly, many years ago I felt that the perfect geometric spherical nature of these expanding waves were designed to gently round off rough edges. To make an analogy, imagine kneading some play dough over and over again. When you use your hands to do so, every time your hands make contact with the play dough, the play dough changes shape slightly because of the contact between your hands and the play dough and it gets softer. Now apply this concept to the idea of energetic waves making contact and passing through the material substrate of the brain and the rest of the body (yes I observed the waves applying to more than just my mind). It was my physical and conscious perception that as the spherical waves emanated from some center, they gently readjusted the physical substrate that they passed through. And because there were so many of them in different spatial locations, this readjustment was incredibly refined.

I was slightly disappointed to see my comment down voted but I'm not too surprised. I stand by my description as an accurate and well considered, rational description of what I had observed in the past.

Ok, I have never told anyone this, but I also sometimes wake up and “see” like a waterfall effect over my vision. It only happens very rarely and only for less than a minute after I get woken from a deep sleep. It is not unlike a moving sensation or water moving over my eyes. I realized that it is probably fluid moving over my visual cortex and being interpreted as vision. Seems weird and I have nothing to back it up on, but it has happened multiple times over my lifetime and the sensation is exactly the same every time.

I'm not talking about the general effect of meditation which is to relax the body and increase the flow throughout the body. I was talking very specifically about this concept of spherical expanding waves of light. To make an analogy, it resembles a moderately white light expanding from a centre. See my other comment where I describe how such a phenomena could be healing and restorative using a physical analogy.

No I'm not. Please see my other comment where I make a physical analogy to why spherical expanding waves of light may be healing and restorative.

I don’t feel physically tired in the mornings. I ran in high school 8-10 miles a day and would collapse, waking up dream free.

Now I wake up refreshed but I’m sick of watching the same rehashed combinations of dreams. I can do lucid dreaming, but I’d just rather not dream at all

Huh? It cleans the brain? Care to elaborate or provide a source?

Maybe it's comforting to think that the time is not only spent with garbage collection. That's one part of sleep, but by far not the only one.

Well if it gives you an uptime of 80-110 years, that’s pretty useful.

Only in f it's exclusively for GC.

If it's opportunistic GC, then it's simply running when nothing else is.

IOW, we may need the sleep for a different reason, and that is when the load is low enough to allow the GC to run.

Assume that we can trigger this while awake. This doesn't mean that we don't need to sleep for some other reason.

What if it's garbage collection and NN training/backprop time?

Then it starts sounding like a great deal to me at least.

It didn't get the memo on big 'O'.

Have you seen this volume of garbage?!

I'm imagining a row of little mice sleeping on their right side in a lab experiment

The Effect of Body Posture on Brain Glymphatic Transport

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524974/#!po=72...

Your spine contracts during the day and releases while you sleep at night.

Thank you.

Any recommendations on how long should I sleep for this process to kick off and get completed? Or does it happen all the time I am sleeping?

I was snoring, and in my case my wife told me there would be moments of kind of disturbing moments where I would stop breathing and then gasp multiple times a night.

In my case, I was able to take a sleep test from a doctor which was basically just a pulse oximeter I wore while sleeping.

You have dedicated facilities who let you sleep there and monitor you. But apnea can be easily seen, the person has gaps in breathing during some parts of sleep, gasping. Snoring can be one of the symptoms but reverse is not automatically true.

My boss was diagnosed with apnea in his 30s. It was so bad they didn't believe his first test results and had to redo it, off the charts. According to him it literally killed his father. Once he started using the device for sleeping he had 100x more mental and physical energy, everything was just easier.

I am very aware how optogenetics works, I wasted some part of my live getting channelrhodopsins into cells to trigger neurons.

Yes you are right one would probably use transient gene therapy tho make a modification like that, but transcranial methods are afaik for human adults less suitable since the structures lying above the stuff you usually want to stimulate are simply too thick, so a hypothetical sleep replacement machine would probably need to be an implant. That is unless you can use self-refocusing lasers or holograms for stimulation, but I do not see how one would do this unless you replace most of the skull with glass.

The point with Musk was a joke more or less.

Though it’s true that he is probably the only person both morally ambiguous enough to even try to build a dystopian sleep replacement machine and capable of getting funding for it.

Maybe a Reddit account is a good idea.

HN is great but it's only illusory that it has smarter people than Reddit. We're all just people rising to our incompetence to the limit the system allows.

I scoop about 2-3 grams

That one is the default google answer, but not the one I saw. Mine had a spine attached and there was no highlighting, the fluid movements were distinguishable in the scans.

Thank you for trying.