As recently as a few decades ago in the Western world, stars dazzled humans with their brightness and the Milky Way could be seen spanning the far reaches of the heavens as night deepened into an unspeakable darkness. In the 21st century, such a scene is becoming a rarity across many parts of the globe as we light up the night like never before.
Today our experience of the night differs significantly from that of our ancestors. Before they mastered fire, early humans lived roughly half their lives in the dark. The only night light they had came from the moon when skies were clear. Then, when humans began to gain some control over fire use (probably around 400,000 years ago), everything changed. From that point on, most people have had access to some form of “artificial” light, at least occasionally. Thus began our persistent efforts to light up the night. Even people who lived relatively recently—those with candles, oil lamps, and early electricity—were far more familiar with darkness than we are today. Their nocturnal world simply wasn’t as bright as ours.
But what have we gained by illuminating the night? Has anything been lost in our efforts to banish darkness? Were people, and the world, better off when it was darker?…
Posts Tagged ‘sleep’
“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once”*…
Our lives are spread across range of ways that we spend our time. A newly-published study tracks time-use around the world…
How do you spend each day? Researchers sought answers to that basic question from people of various ages living around the world. They report that on an average day, people spend more than a third of their time focused on matters of health, happiness and keeping up appearances.
“We found that the single largest chunk of time is really focused on humans ourselves, a little more than 9 hours,” explained study author Eric Galbraith, of McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “Most of this—about 6.5 hours—is doing things that we enjoy, like hanging out, watching TV, socializing and doing sports,” he said. Reading and gaming also fall within this rubric.
The other 2.5 hours (out of the 9) are spent on hygiene, grooming and taking care of our own health and that of our kids, said Galbraith, a professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences.
Sleep and bedrest occupy the next largest chunk of time: more than 9 hours on average. That sounds like a lot of shut-eye, but Galbraith stressed this number reflects the average across the full age span, so it includes kids who might sleep up to 11 hours a day. “It also includes time in bed and not sleeping, which can be as much as one hour per day,” he said…
The remaining minutes? They seem to go toward getting organized, moving about or producing, creating and maintaining things and spaces…
For more findings and background on the methodology: “Sleep, cleaning, fun: Research reveals the average human’s day worldwide,” in @physorg_com.
* Albert Einstein
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As we contemplate chronology, we might recall that it was on this date in 2011 that the Swedish game design house Mojang Studios released the first full version of Minecraft. A sandbox game created by Markus “Notch” Persson, it has become the best-selling video game in history, with over 300 million copies sold– and countless hours consumed…
“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub”*…
I’m not the first person to note that our understanding of ourselves and our society is heavily influenced by technological change – think of how we analogized biological and social functions to clockwork, then steam engines, then computers.
I used to think that this was just a way of understanding how we get stuff hilariously wrong – think of Taylor’s Scientific Management, how its grounding in mechanical systems inflicted such cruelty on workers whom Taylor demanded ape those mechanisms.
But just as interesting is how our technological metaphors illuminate our understanding of ourselves and our society: because there ARE ways in which clockwork, steam power and digital computers resemble bodies and social structures.
Any lens that brings either into sharper focus opens the possibility of making our lives better, sometimes much better.
Bodies and societies are important, poorly understood and deeply mysterious.
Take sleep. Sleep is very weird.
Once a day, we fall unconscious. We are largely paralyzed, insensate, vulnerable, and we spend hours and hours having incredibly bizarre hallucinations, most of which we can’t remember upon waking. That is (objectively) super weird.
But sleep is nearly universal in the animal kingdom, and dreaming is incredibly common too. A lot of different models have been proposed to explain our nightly hallucinatory comas, and while they had some explanatory power, they also had glaring deficits.
Thankfully, we’ve got a new hot technology to provide a new metaphor for dreaming: machine learning through deep neural networks.
DNNs, of course, are a machine learning technique that comes from our theories about how animal learning works at a biological, neural level.
So perhaps it’s unsurprising that DNN – based on how we think brains work – has stimulated new hypotheses on how brains work!
Erik P Hoel is a Tufts University neuroscientist. He’s a proponent of something called the Overfitted Brain Hypothesis (OBH).
To understand OBH, you first have to understand how overfitting works in machine learning: “overfitting” is what happens when a statistical model overgeneralizes.
For example, if Tinder photos of queer men are highly correlated with a certain camera angle, then a researcher might claim to have trained a “gaydar model” that “can predict sexual orientation from faces.”
That’s overfitting (and researchers who do this are assholes).
Overfitting is a big problem in ML: if all the training pics of Republicans come from rallies in Phoenix, the model might decide that suntans are correlated with Republican politics – and then make bad guesses about the politics of subjects in photos from LA or Miami.
To combat overfitting, ML researchers sometimes inject noise into the training data, as an effort to break up these spurious correlations.
And that’s what Hoel thinks are brains are doing while we sleep: injecting noisy “training data” into our conceptions of the universe so we aren’t led astray by overgeneralization.
Overfitting is a real problem for people (another word for “overfitting” is “prejudice”)…
Sleeping, dreaming, and the importance of a nightly dose of irrationality– Corey Doctorow (@doctorow) explains: “Dreaming and overfitting,” from his ever-illuminating newsletter, Pluralistic. Eminently worthy of reading in full.
(Image above: Gontzal García del Caño, CC BY-NC-SA, modified)
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
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As we nod off, we might send fully-oxygenated birthday greetings to Corneille Jean François Heymans; he was born on this date in 1892. A physiologist, he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1938 for showing how blood pressure and the oxygen content of the blood are measured by the body and transmitted to the brain via the nerves and not by the blood itself, as had previously been believed.
“I’m envious of people who can sleep as long as they want. I have the circadian rhythm of a farmer.”*…
After World War II, scientists began studying the internal clocks of animals in earnest. They discovered that mammals and other creatures are ruled by their own, internal body clock, what is commonly referred to today as a biological clock. The German physician and biologist Jürgen Aschoff wondered if this might also be true of humans. In the early 1960s, as head of a new department for biological timing at the Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology, Aschoff and his research partner Rütger Wever designed an experiment to find out.
To study the inner workings of human biological clocks, Aschoff built a soundproof underground bunker in the foothills of a mountain deep in the Bavarian countryside, just up the road from the well-known beer-brewing monastery Kloster Andechs. Through a series of investigations that included 200 subjects and spanned two decades, Aschoff’s bunker experiments would become a pioneering study in the field of chronobiology, changing the way we think about time today…
What Is Chronobiology? Does it explain why we’re having so much trouble sleeping? Find out here.
* Moby
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As we hit the hay, we might spare a thought for Urbain Le Verrier; he died on this date in 1877. An astronomer and mathematician who specialized in celestial mechanics, he’s best remembered for predicting the existence and position of the planet Neptune using only mathematics. Le Verrier sent the coordinates to Johann Gottfried Galle at the New Berlin Observatory, asking him to verify. Galle found Neptune in the same night he received Le Verrier’s letter– this date in 1846. The planet was within 1° of the predicted position.
“To sleep, perchance to dream”*…
On a typical workday morning, if you’re like most people, you don’t wake up naturally. Instead, the ring of an alarm clock probably jerks you out of sleep. Depending on when you went to bed, what day of the week it is, and how deeply you were sleeping, you may not understand where you are, or why there’s an infernal chiming sound. Then you throw out your arm and hit the snooze button, silencing the noise for at least a few moments. Just another couple of minutes, you think. Then maybe a few minutes more.
It may seem like you’re giving yourself a few extra minutes to collect your thoughts. But what you’re actually doing is making the wake-up process more difficult and drawn out…
Journalist (and professional poker player) Maria Konnikova on why “Snoozers are, in fact, losers.”
* Shakespeare, Hamlet
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As we ruminate on rest, we might spare a thought for a man who seems barely to have slept at all, Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he died on this date in 1778. The Father of the Age of Reason, he produced works in almost every literary form: plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works– more than 2,000 books and pamphlets (and more than 20,000 letters). He popularized Isaac Newton’s work in France by arranging a translation of Principia Mathematica to which he added his own commentary.
A social reformer, Voltaire used satire to criticize the intolerance, religious dogma, and oligopolistic privilege of his day, perhaps nowhere more sardonically than in Candide.
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”*…
Dive into the diurnal at: “A history of what we do in the dark.”
* Mary Oliver
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As we go dark, we might recall this item from John Stow‘s Survey of London (original spelling: A Survay of London), published in 1598:
William Foxley slept in the tower 14 days & more without waking.
In the yeare 1546. the 27 of April, being Tuesday in Easter weeke, William Foxley, Potmaker for the Mint in the tower of London, fell asleepe, and so continued sleeping, and could not be wakened, with pricking, cramping, or otherwise burning* whatsoeuer, ti…ll the first day of the tearme, which was full xiiii. dayes, and xv. nights, or more, for that Easter tearme beginneth not afore xvii. dayes after Easter. The cause of his thus sleeping could not be knowne, though the same were diligently searched after by the kings Phisitians, and other learned men: yea the king himselfe examining the said William Foxley, who was in all poynts found at his wakening to be as if hee had slept but one night. And he lived more then fortie yeares after in the sayde Tower, to wit, vntil the yeare of Christ, 1587, and then deceased on Wednesday in Easterweeke.
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