Human lack of sleep - as a method of mind control

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Why did we stop sleeping and what to do about it. The record for being awake is 11 days. The man who put it on went through auditory and visual hallucinations, thought he was a black basketball player, and confused road signs with people.

An experiment of the century before last on puppies showed that they are able to live without sleep for no more than 5 days - several times less than without food. Lack of sleep deprives us of our ability to think soberly and affects our health. At the same time, many deliberately deprive themselves of rest by working at night. There is a "sleep deprivation epidemic" in the world.

Let's talk about why we stopped sleeping and how we are threatened by the desire to make more money by constantly working.

Records

In 1963, high school students in San Diego, California, decided to find out how long a person can go without sleep. The test subject was 17-year-old Randy Gardner. Two classmates made sure that he did not sleep, and recorded all the data on Gardner's condition, and Lieutenant Commander John Ross was responsible for the student's health.

On the first day of the experiment, Randy got up at six in the morning, full of enthusiasm. On the second day, his eyes lost the ability to focus, it became impossible to watch TV. On the third day, Randy was nervous and moody and could not pronounce tongue twisters. After four days without sleep, he began hallucinating that he was a black footballer from the San Diego Chargers, Paul Lowe. He confused road signs with people. As a result, Randy Gardner spent 11 days and 25 minutes without sleep.

After Gardner, there was another person who tried to break this record. Tony Wright also crossed the 11-day line in 2007. All the time he was in the same room and struggled with sleep, sitting on the Net and playing billiards. But representatives of the Book of Records said they would not register attempts to break Gardner's record because of too strong a threat to health.

The ancestor of somnology was the Russian biologist and physician Maria Manaseina. At the end of the 19th century, puppies became victims of science. She did not feed the control group of puppies, and did not allow the main group to sleep. After four to five days, the puppies died without sleep. The starving puppies died after 20-25 days.

An autopsy showed how much the brain was damaged without sleep. He was riddled with numerous hemorrhages. The results of the experiment were included in Manaseina's work "Sleep as a third of a person's life, or physiology, pathology, hygiene and psychology of sleep" in 1888, one of the first books on this topic in the world, translated into many other languages.

Consequences

Numerous studies have shown that sleep deprivation causes people to increase production of the stress hormone cortisol. It is the body's natural response to stress, fatigue, starvation, and other emergencies. Because of cortisol, our body will begin to break down proteins into amino acids - including those proteins that make up our muscles. Glycogen is broken down to glucose, and this, along with amino acids, is released into the bloodstream to provide us with the building blocks for emergency recovery. One of the effects of this biological response is obesity. A 2005 study found that sleep disturbance affects a person's ability to metabolize glucose and ultimately lead to diabetes.

Without sleep, we feel pain in the muscles, we lose concentration, which we ourselves do not notice, we experience headaches, irritability, memory loss. Hallucinations, indigestion and nausea begin.

In the 1930s, the NKVD was deprived of sleep as torture, now this method is "in service" with the US Army and the CIA. People were tortured with loud music and lack of sleep, for example, in the infamous Guantanamo prison. In 2015, California's Pelican Bay maximum security prison began waking inmates every 30 minutes with the sound of a gong, calling it a "health check."

But here people were tortured. And many of us do not sleep because of our conscious choice. Or is he not fully aware?

Statistics

Matthew Walker, director of the Center for the Science of Human Sleep at the University of California, Berkeley, believes we are dealing with an epidemic of sleep deprivation. When we look at a sleeping baby, we do not have the thought "this is a lazy child." The opposite is true for adults. People boast that they hardly sleep. Phrases like “I worked so hard that I slept only two hours” we say with pride.

According to a 1942 study, 3% of the US population slept less than five hours a day, 8% slept between five and six hours. 45% basked in bed for eight hours a day. In 2013, these numbers changed dramatically - already 14% slept less than five hours, 26% - up to six hours, and only 29% allowed themselves eight hours of sleep. Interestingly, in 1952 and 2013, there was an equal percentage of people sleeping seven hours a day.

Another interesting trend that the American Institute of Public Opinion Gallup has identified is that fewer people believe they have enough sleep. More and more people are confident that they will feel better if they can get enough sleep. Moreover, 86% of those who answered that they sleep enough spend at least eight hours a day sleeping.

How many people sleep in Russia? The Sleep Cycle company in 2015 found that the average Russian sleeps 6 hours 45 minutes. The study was based on sleep data in a smartphone app used by 941,300 people in 50 countries at the time. And in 2017, Australian and American scientists decided that we sleep an average of 9 hours and 20 minutes. They focused on the activity of data exchange on the network, so I would not trust this study.

Causes

The reasons for the reduction in the time we spend on sleep seem quite obvious - it is electricity, followed by television and the Internet. In addition, work interferes with sleep.

In connection with the penetration of broadband Internet, the development of mobile communications, the line between entertainment and work has become thinner when we talk about professions that involve communicating with colleagues via phone or mail. Recently, messengers have also become popular, and with them dozens of working and friendly chats in Slack and Telegram came to us. Work permeates people's lives, leaving them no time to rest.

As a result, humans have become the only species on Earth that deliberately deprives itself of sleep for no objective reason. They forget, for example, that sleeping less than six hours a day leads to premature death: this was proved by a study that covered a period of 25 years, 1.3 million people and 100 thousand deaths.

Polyphasic sleep

Now let's talk about how to get enough sleep. Let's start with polyphasic sleep, in which a person sleeps several times a day. There are several different options for this type of sleep.

Biphasic - 5-7 hours at night, 20 minutes during the day.

Everyman - 1, 5-3 hours at night, 3 times for 20 minutes in the afternoon.

Dymaxion - 4 times for 30 minutes every 5, 5 hours;

Uberman - 6 times for 20 minutes every 3 hours and 40 minutes;

One of the interesting examples of the life of a person with polyphasic sleep is the 5 and a half months that American blogger Steve Pavlina spent in Uberman mode. During his "journey" to a new world with 30-40 extra hours a week, he kept a detailed diary. Already on the third day of adaptation, he began to dream, that is, his body began to enter REM sleep faster.

One of the most important (and extremely unexpected) events that happened to me during the practice of polyphasic sleep was the change in the perception of the passage of time, during my naps. Now, after waking up, I feel that much more time has passed than the clock shows. Almost every time I wake up, I am sure (by physical sensations) that I slept for at least 1-2 hours. My sleep is deeper and deeper than ever before. I have very rich and vivid dreams.

The pilots of Solar Impulse, the world's first manned aircraft that uses exclusively the energy of the Sun and is able to fly indefinitely, became the forced adherents of polyphasic sleep (with a high-quality study of the route, of course). Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg slept two to three hours a day in several runs for 20 minutes. While preparing for the flights, they learned techniques for achieving rapid deep sleep.

The traveler Fyodor Konyukhov, after a round-the-world balloon trip in 2016, said that for 11 days he slept in segments of about a second: he took a spoon in his hand, fell asleep with it and woke up when it fell to the floor. After landing, he slept off for 5 hours.

Polyphasic sleep as a necessity for performing any tasks like traveling around the world in an airplane or in a hot air balloon has a right to exist. However, the doctor of biological sciences, researcher Piotr Woźniak notes that the consequences of such experiments are the same as from any other types of sleep disorders. Adepts of polyphasic sleep turned directly to Wozniak, he investigated the influence of such a rhythm of life on their organisms, and did not find any confirmation of the effectiveness of the method.

Polyphasic sleep is dangerous because it affects the balance of the various stages of sleep that a person needs to fully recover. The only safe option for polyphasic sleep is biphasic: when a person sleeps for 7-8 hours at night, and takes a quiet hour during the day. Siesta is common in Spain, and naps are recommended for preschool children in Russia as well.

How to sleep properly

Let's continue with tips for the usual, monophasic rest option. The cosmonauts have already shared their experience with people, who are duty-bound to observe the daily routine. Otherwise, they, like Valentin Lebedev, can take fifty photographs of the Earth through a closed window.

NASA experts have identified several important points:

Without sunlight and darkness, a person loses the ability to regulate sleep time.

The body cannot withstand activity 24 hours a day.

A person cannot correctly assess the quality of sleep.

The sleep cycle is shifting. A person sleeps worse, and as a result, after a couple of weeks of lack of sleep, his state can be compared with the state of alcoholic intoxication. The person who is not getting enough sleep does not notice anything unusual. To avoid such problems, the astronauts gave us four tips:

Make a schedule for yourself, even on weekends. If you do not follow the regime, the sleep phase will begin to lag behind. The benefits of the graph in personal experience have been talked about on Geektimes before.

Relax an hour before bed.

Make the contrast between day and night sharper.

Keep your bedroom dark, cool, and quiet.

A few more scientifically proven tips are presented in an article on Habrahabr. For quality sleep, you need to ensure complete darkness and a temperature of 30-32 degrees, if you sleep without a blanket, you need to avoid light sources in the blue part of the spectrum and, of course, turn off the TV. And in the morning you need exercise.

Please share in the comments methods to get enough sleep, talk about your polyphasic sleep experience, and give your tips.