The Future of Sleep

The JASONS are a semi-secret research arm of the Defense Department. They issue occasional papers about areas of interest, and when they do, Secrecy News from the Federation of Atomic Scientists is usually nice enough to let us know.

This latest report is at the intersection of neuroscience and war, the subject of a new blog I am writing called The Brain at War. A natural outgrowth of my interest in brain development and function has been an increasing interest in brain damage and dysfunction, especially dysfunction caused by injury in war. For more on Traumatic Brain Injury, PTSD and "normal" brain response to war check it out. We'll be looking at cutting edge imaging and diagnostic tools, developments in brain-mind theories and rehabilitation research. This is our project -

When you break your arm, you know what it means to say you're healed: you can do what you did before the injury. What does it mean to heal from a brain trauma?

In any case, the latest JASON report is of more interest here. Why? Lets start with the title of the research Human Performance. In many ways, thats what we're talking about when we look at brain development. I want the proto-human's brain to be a powerful tool, and want to give him/her every (ethical) opportunity and advantage. Not surprisingly the Pentagon wants the same thing, though we might draw the ethical line in different places.

JASON considers:

[T]he present state of the art in pharmaceutical intervention in cognition and in brain-computer interfaces, and considered how possible future developments might proceed and be used by adversaries.”

“The most immediate human performance factor in military effectiveness is degradation of performance under stressful conditions, particularly sleep deprivation.”

“If an opposing force had a significant sleep advantage, this would pose a serious threat.”

Military technologies have a way of becoming civilian technologies. Thank you for the internets DARPA! Will the threat of enemy advances in high-functioning-sleep-deprived-super-soldiers lead to actual American advances in high-functioning-sleep-deprived-super-soldiers? And will those actual advances lead to High school juniors who never sleep, always adding one more extra-curricular activity, chasing ever higher a seat at Harvard?

We're now into the third trimester, and the proto-human shows periods of activity and inactivity that are reminiscent of sleep. I don't quite know if they are sleep as such though. And will there come a day when sleep outside the womb will be as dim a memory for the proto-human as sleep inside the womb is for me?