Deconstructing The Lulz

faetrouble:

nightsinwonderland:

math-erin:

sterwood:

A type of insomnia without dibilitating effects. People with nonsomnia tend to range from only needing a few hours of sleep per week, to a few hours of sleep every few months. And again: There’s no documented side effects, as far as I’m aware. Memory rentention is the same, there’s no loss in problem solving skills, or generally no loss of cognitive faculties. The one reported side effect is depression, but that’s just due to being awake when everyone they know is asleep.

Nonsomnia really complicates standard ideas of why we need to sleep. Mostly I hear that sleep is necessary for organizing and retaining memories. But nonsomnia throws a wrench in this theory, because of the fact - as I’ve mentioned - there’s no problems with memory with people that have nonsomnia. This is further complicated by the fact that nonsomnia isn’t genetic, from what I understand, but is usually due to some sort of damage in the brain (stroke, or something - there’s really not enough informaton on nonsomnia to tellhowit happens, but we are rather certain it’s not genetic).

I don’t know. Nonsomnia’s really interesting to me.

HOW is this a thing? I don’t understand.

This sounds interesting in theory but

not a single major medical, psychiatric, or scientific website lists it at all. Nor does wikipedia. The tumblr tag is pretty much the first time it comes up. There is only one scientific article that references it- from 1973. This article details one specific case of it happening.

Furthermore it’s been proven that, while we still don’t know the function of sleep, without slow-wave sleep and REM sleep, rats die. (I challenge you to find an ethics board that would let you try this with human patients.) 

As there were no follow up articles written about this patient, and no further cases reported, I’d suggest that this was a very bizarre fluke at most, however, unfortunately it is also possible that this patient was tested before reaching the point at which her sleep deprivation also killed her. 

It’s worth noting that regardless of what sensationalized news and magazines tell you, we still don’t know the function of sleep. We know that people show some kinds of deficits when prevented from sleeping, but we do not know if those are direct functions of sleep or functions that are sacrificed as a compensatory mechanism when sleep is lost. We just don’t know much yet about sleep.

It is also worth noting that while we may speculate about the cause of depression in a patient like this, we again, cannot eliminate enough variables to conclude a cause. Furthermore as depression is not just a change in thoughts, but a change in physical chemicals, it is rarely situational, and nearly always has biological underpinnings. 

In short, I find this extremely unlikely- perhaps it occurred once in 1973, or perhaps not. At any rate, no cases have turned up since then that have been confirmed, and the medical community as a whole has not done any research on this condition. All “facts” listed above appear to be speculation based on a single article that did not cover a large time span nor have a large sample size, making the conclusions drawn in the article extremely unlikely to apply to a larger population, and all further extrapolation even harder to believe. 

Sorry, just your friendly neighborhood neuroscience major, here to tell you that sometimes you’ve got to use google scholar. Remember kids- if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is!

Nights, can I just

Baby

Your scientific refuting was beautiful

I’m basically crying over here from the loveliness of all of that

MARRY ME

Oh, wow, this was from a while ago. I just noticed this.

Point being, I doubt your reading comprehension skills (the both of you), or at least your abilities to check back in to the discussion to get some context for what was said. I didn’t cite articles, because as I was saying earlier, most of this information I had received from my neuroscience roommate, whose been doing some general research into the topic in his off-time (not as something rigorous, but as a slow perusal).

Also, there’s lots of points wrong with what nightsinwonderland wrote. 

• I know nonsomnia’s a thing. Like, you’ll find it in almost any beginner’s textbook on psychology. That’s where I first heard about it: from a PSY 101 class I took a few years ago (and this was before any discussion my roommate and I had about this)
• Any cursory look at what I wrote should show you that I said ‘depression’ in a colloquial fashion, not as in ‘clinical depression’ or anything like that. It’s equivalent to anyone saying something like “I’m sad because ‘x’”, and not as an admission of a disorder or anything.
• Also, when looking up ‘nonsomnia’, it’s good to keep in mind that I have no idea is this is the actual ‘scientific term’ to describe it, nor do I know whether it’s even the currently accepted colloquial one. Doing a google scholar search  on that term might not yield much precisely for this reason
• And, continuing, it might not yield much because google scholar, especially with scientific research, tends to list studies done within the past 10 years or so (it can stretch further, obviously, as you’ve even shown, but this is true for the great majority of scientific searches on there). 
• And finally, on the google scholar search issue, I don’t know how much it says about your ‘research’ into this topic when you considered the whole thing a done deal after the first page of results (actually, the very first result for ‘nonsomnia’, which was the 1973 article you referenced). Besides all the other reasons I’ve mentioned that your process of investigation was pretty piss-poor here, this is pretty bad in itself. 
• Also this ignores things I said (again, this whole context of the conversation thing) about how research into such a thing would be really difficult, given that it’s not a codified disorder (e.g. it’s not in the DSM, as far as I know), the amount of case studies into it is quite low (though, more than the single ‘one’ case you ‘cite’), and references to it may be buried in publications about other sleep disorders. Further, given the current deviation in the qualities that make up any diagnosis of non-somnia, it’s quite easy to imagine that people may have it, but have no idea that they do, and that may hinder any sort of research into it any further.
• And of course rats die without REM sleep. So do we. The point is that we don’t know the function of REM sleep, and what functions it actually regulates in the body (does it regulate memory retention, as is commonly believed, or something else entirely, as other research points to). I didn’t argue that REM sleep isn’t important (again, it’s called ‘reading’), but that things like nonsomnia, or even the great variation between people’s sleep schedule’s generally, put into question the tacit assumptions that go into our understanding of the function of REM sleep. I shouldn’t have to explain that.
• “We just don’t know much yet about sleep.” Good job! Your tried to use my very argument as an argument against me. Wonderful.

So, sorry, just your friendly neighborhood dude with a sense of decent research and reading comprehension here calling bullshit on your holier-than-thou approach to science based upon your pathetic appeals to authority (“neuroscience major”) and piss-poor ability to read and actually engage with what I wrote (which was, in the first place, a toss off comment, which - again - should have been obvious and which I shouldn’t have had to explain/make explicit).

Remember kids - just fuck off. I don’t even feel like parodying this properly.