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Hacking your sleep?

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Given enough generations, maybe.

This'd be interesting to try with mayflies, or something else with a fairly short lifespan.
Keep a population in a contained environment with very carefully controlled dark/light cycles.
Very slowly decrease the length of the night period, maybe so it ends up being 4 seconds for each generation.
See if anyone survives to the end of 10,000 generations, and if so, what their DNA ended up doing to permit it to happen.
 
Given enough generations, maybe.

This'd be interesting to try with mayflies, or something else with a fairly short lifespan.
Keep a population in a contained environment with very carefully controlled dark/light cycles.
Very slowly decrease the length of the night period, maybe so it ends up being 4 seconds for each generation.
See if anyone survives to the end of 10,000 generations, and if so, what their DNA ended up doing to permit it to happen.

Insane brain shrinkage, and more CSF fluid to permit faster clearance of beta amyloid proteins. If they were to be prey'd upon while sleeping though... they probably couldn't wake up and respond in time without hallucinating.

It would be hard to detect in DNA, structural changes like that. Its in the 60% "No idea what this does" region.

Probably higher levels of orexin, and they would burn alot of energy. Sleep is interesting.
 
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Might I propose that we stop inserting the word "hack" into every sentence?

There were once perfectly fine and serviceable words for this. Like: "fix," or "do" or "change."
 
I can say, having kids will change your sleeping habits forever.
When your children sleep, you can't sleep fully, you must watch them every moment )
At least many women do so 🙂
It's not about men 🙂
 
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