The sky is still pitch black when the alarm starts beeping.  It’s Monday morning, 3:00 a.m.  You awake after just three hours of sleep, refreshed, relaxed and ready to jump-start the day.  No, this isn’t a dream: in the not-so-distant future scientists may finally break the sleep barrier, allowing humans to function on just a few hours of sleep per day.  For anyone who considers caffeine an essential nutrient, that’s great news.

Today, the sleep business is big business.  According to the National Sleep Foundation over 126 million Americans have difficulty sleeping at least once a week and many in the health care industry are sounding the alarm of an impending “sleep epidemic.”  Americans are gobbling up sleeping pills like breath mints; the prescription sleep aid market is expected to grow to over $5.5 billion as new drugs are released to treat insomnia and other sleep disorders.

But what if the answer turns out to be that we don’t need more sleep, but less?

In the U.K, Ministry of Defense researchers have been able to reset soldier’s body clocks so they can go without sleep for up to 36 hours.  Tiny optical fibers embedded in special glasses project a ring of bright white light around the edge of a soldier’s retina, fooling him into thinking he just woke up. It’s an interesting concept for soldiers in combat situations, but as anyone who has ever pulled an all-nighter knows, staying awake is only half the battle.  Sleep deprivation causes significant cognitive impairment, including slower reaction times and decreased memory function.

Enter the sleep scientists at Wake Forest University who have been studying a drug that could reverse the effects of sleep loss, in effect a sort of “hang over pill” for a bad night’s sleep. The drug, known as Ampakine, has been shown to reverse memory loss and psychomotor degradation after 30 hours of sleep deprivation.

What’s this all mean for the future?  What if researchers could develop a prophylactic against the effects of sleep loss that would allow us to function - effectively and efficiently - on just a few hours of sleep a night?  Breaking the sleep barrier could fundamentally change the routine of daily life.  In 2020 imagine that a 17-hour work day is the norm: business, home life, school and recreation all blend together in seamless shifts of just a few hours each.  The sleep patterns of knowledge workers could be mapped, networked and optimized to create a truly 24/7 company.  Gone are excuses that we simply “don’t have the time” to work out, or read, or learn another language. Freed from the biological mandate of sleep, could we become a more creative society?

 

(Note: This was originally written for this FringeHog podcast.  I found it this morning about 2am while I was cleaning out old computer files because I couldn’t sleep).

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