Aspies For Freedom

I often have insane difficulty getting out of bed in the mornings, and having heard lots about people who do not get restful sleep due to constant REM I theorised that cutting out the REM portion of sleep might lead to more rest.

So, here's how I tested my theory (not fully scientific since there's an obvious bias in self-experimentation, and of course I was the only subject):

I hooked up an EEG and calibrated it then setup a little script on my computer to detect REM. Upon detecting REM, it was to play some binaural beats at 20hz on headphones which should (if it doesn't wake me) cut off the REM phase.

According to the logs, it did indeed cut short REM but didn't wake me up. I only woke up hours later (at around 8am - went to bed at roughly midnight) as a result of my son waking up.

First thing I noticed was I felt more tired than usual, but - and this is the weird part - I found it much easier physically to actually get up. I'm now (at 8:28am) starting to feel more properly awake most likely due to the use of a strong dose of caffeine and modafinil the instant I woke up, but before that I felt much much more fatigued than normal.

So far i've not noticed any other ill effects, I obviously do not recall any dreams last night, although I probably had at least one very very short dream as it is takes time first for the computer to respond and then for the brain to respond to the binaural beats produced by the computer. This could be made more efficient with direct electrical stimulation (which I can do via a CES device) - but that could be dangerous during sleep if the electrodes fall off and land somewhere else on the body (such as, for example, on my chest near my heart....)

In summary, the results:

• I can turn off (or rather, drastically shorten) REM sleep
  
• Doing so makes dreaming disappear completely
  
• This causes it to be easier to get up
  
• The price is more natural fatigue
  
• The natural fatigue is easily fixed through pharmaceutical means - but that is probably not healthy
  
• This is not something i'd recommend to others
  

Are you going to trial this for a bit longer and look at results then?

Considering the increased fatigue, I don't think it'd be healthy to do it longer term.

I might do another trial at some point just to replicate last night's findings, and if I can find anyone online who's already experienced with neuro-hacking give them a copy of the software I used to see if they can replicate it.

But I won't be doing this on a regular basis - it appears from this one experiment that REM is in fact important to restful sleep. Another experiment (probably on a weekend so the fatigue does not matter as much) will either add more weight to that conclusion or show some other factor is at play for the fatigue I experienced today.

The next experiment after that will be to try and extend REM and see if that leads to more restful sleep compared to my natural pattern or shortened REM.

If I can find some way to artificially induce extremely restful sleep, then that would be a very useful trick.

But, I don't recommend this kind of hacking to anyone who isn't already familiar with this kind of stuff.

If you fancy a 215-page doctoral thesis in German about stimulation with short-wave light and smell, here's the link for you.
Most of the cited literature (pages 179-193) is in English. Happy reading .

ETA: ever tried green tea from Darjeeling? That's what keeps me going.

To misquote metallica:

Took the caffeine
Modafinil
But the tiredness remains

Not as bad as when I woke up, but still not as awake as I should be by now
Still, should be awake enough to get through today - and the fact i'm awake at all rather than oversleeping is a good thing

I'm not sure Aspies do sleep well.  I appreciate "well" is a subjective word, but I mean good, regular sleep patterns, 7 days a week, leaving the person feeling like they can take on the world when they wake up.  Maybe NTs don't sleep that well, but certainly along those lines.

The reading I've done on the matter implies that Aspies wake easily (light and sound sensitivity probably being two of the high ranking causes).  I was only diagnosed an Aspie August 2009.  On telling my mum, and meeting her for lunch a few weeks later, one of the first things she said was how me being an Aspie explained so much ... especially why I was so hard to get off to sleep when I was young, and always the first to wake.  (I'm guessing she's been busy on Google.)

The thing is, like you Gareth, I'm guessing I normally get good REM sleep, but I rarely remember dreams the following day.  (I think the last one I remember was last autumn.)  The only thing I can conclude is that I sleep for short periods, but that sleep is extremely high quality - it has to be, as I wouldn't otherwise be able to function the following day.

(    Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.    )

I usually do remember dreams very well, but I tend to get tired very easily during the day. Mildly more awake  earlier in the day, then lots of tiredness is my natural state.

Amy volunteered to have the EEG on during a nap, and her claims are apparently true - REM within 5 minutes