Sleeping in Virtual Reality, Elephant Seals and Fighting Alzheimer’s Disease
VR Sleep Rooms?
If you’re still trying to absorb the sudden arrival of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, don’t look now but here comes the next big, brave-new-world disrupter, the metaverse.
The metaverse is envisioned as a vast network of online virtual worlds – a sort of ultimate World Wide Web that you experience through virtual reality. Facebook is so high on the concept that they recently changed their name to Meta in order to poise themselves for its coming.
The technology is still in its infancy but there’s already a growing subculture of young, early adopters who spend a lot of their time wearing VR headsets, living, playing and socializing in virtual environments.
And some of them are so into it that they’re even sleeping in virtual reality now.
VR sleep rooms are fully-immersive virtual environments designed to create the ideal setting for relaxation and good sleep. They can simulate the perfect bedroom or hotel room with soft lighting and music or a gentle rainstorm pattering against the window if it suits your mood. Or if you like sleeping under the stars, you could opt for a nice campsite with a clear night sky overhead and a campfire crackling away. Other settings are more fantastical like the lounge of a luxury starship as it orbits an exotic alien planet.
Users report that VR sleep rooms help them fall asleep easier and more soundly because it takes them out of their real environment – blocking out light and sound – and puts them in a place that feels worlds away from their real-life worries and obligations.
A few VR sleep environments incorporate biofeedback signals, using changes in lighting and color as cues to promote relaxed breathing and a slowdown of heartrate and brainwaves. Some sleep researchers are becoming interested in VR technology as a possible alternative to sleep medications for the treatment of insomnia.
The big roadblock to sleeping in virtual reality is that it’s not at all comfortable to sleep with a heavy VR headset pressing down on your face. And the bulky hardware pretty much restricts your sleep position to lying on your back or reclining in a chair.
It’s probably a common scenario for a user to fall asleep in the virtual environment and doze for a few minutes to an hour, then get up, take off the equipment and sleep solidly for the rest of the night in the real world. Perhaps as equipment gets smaller and more wearable, sleeping all night in VR could become a doable thing.
The strangest aspect of VR sleep rooms is the number of people who go there in order to sleep in groups. In reality, the users may be hundreds of miles away from each other, but in VR, they’re all gathered together as avatars in one room to sleep. This is seriously weird.
Inside The Cozy But Creepy World Of VR Sleep Rooms
People who do this say that it’s mostly not a sexual thing. Instead it’s motivated by a craving for social interaction and companionship as they drift off to sleep. Somehow that almost makes it seem even weirder. But what do I know? Sleeping in groups was the norm for most of human history, so maybe this is just a high tech way of coming full circle.
Okay, I have to be honest. I don’t really get this stuff. I grew up playing Pong on a black-and-white Zenith. I’ve personally never done virtual reality. Which explains the sort of dad jeans, out of touch tone of this post as I struggle to understand it all.
But it seems likely that virtual reality and the metaverse will grow and eventually become a significant part of our lives, even in sleep.
Elephant Seals Get by on Two Hours of Sleep
Scientists have recently solved a mystery about elephant seals and their sleep. They’ve found that when the seals are out to sea, they sleep less than two hours a day, and they do it in a way that’s particularly fascinating.
Northern elephant seals are massive, with males weighing up to 5,500 lbs. and measuring 14 to 16 feet long. They spend most of their time – 8 or 9 months of the year – out at sea hunting food. But twice a year, along the Pacific Coast, they come up on land, once to breed, and then again a couple of months later to shed their skin.
On land, they are quite sedentary and sleep about 10 hours a day. But when out at sea, they are tireless hunters, covering as many as 60 miles a day, feeding on fish. They’re able to dive as deep as 5000 ft. below surface with each dive lasting 20 to 60 minutes, only coming up to the surface for 2 to 3 minutes between dives to breathe and rest. They are capable of holding their breath for up to 100 minutes.
If elephant seals have one big problem in life it’s this: As they’re hunting for food, they are being hunted as well, by sharks and killer whales.
Scientists wanted to know how the seals slept during this time with the constant need to evade predators and come up for air.
To find the answer, researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz captured several juvenile female elephant seals off a beach at Año Nuevo State Park in California. They attached recording equipment, small enough to be unobtrusive to the seals, to log their movements and monitor their brainwaves, then released them back into the sea.
The results of the study appeared in the journal, Science. Researchers found that, while out at sea, the seals get less than 2 hours of sleep in short 10 minute segments. These brief naps include periods of full REM which is not seen in other marine mammals.
But the most fascinating thing about the seal’s sleep is the way they do it. When they fall asleep, they go into long, spiraling “drift dives” in which they slowly sink down towards the seafloor, occasionally even hitting the bottom and remaining there until they wake.
The scientists learned that they are actually safer as they do this than when they’re awake because they reach depths where the predators don’t go.
Sleep Medication Could Help with Alzheimer’s
A new study suggests that the prescription sleep aid suvorexant, sold under the brand name Belsomra, could be useful in fighting Alzheimer’s disease. Suvorexant is a dual orexin receptor antagonist. It helps people fall asleep by blocking the neurochemical messenger orexin from promoting wakefulness.
Scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have been investigating a link between Alzheimer’s and poor sleep. Specifically, they’ve been looking at how sleep loss can lead to high levels of plaques in the brain of a protein called beta-amyloid and another known as tau protein. These proteins are known to cause the neuron-killing “tangles” in brain tissue that lead to memory loss and cognitive decline.
The study was made up of a small group of test subjects between the ages of 45 and 65, who had no symptoms of cognitive impairment. They were each given a 20 mg dose of suvorexant. The results were a statistically significant, 10% to 20% overnight drop in amyloid beta levels and a 10% to 15% drop in tau levels as compared to subjects who were given a placebo. The levels were measured from the subjects’ cerebrospinal fluid. The study recorded a further drop in protein levels over a successive night of testing.
Researchers emphasize that the study is small but consider it “proof of concept” that the plaque-causing proteins can be reduced by the drug. Suvorexant has been on the market since 2014 as a sleep aid and is already FDA-approved as safe. This would be a real advantage if the drug is proven effective against Alzheimer’s because it could be put into use more rapidly.
The study’s senior author, Dr. Brendan Lucey commented, “We don’t yet know whether long-term use is effective in staving off cognitive decline, and if it is, at what dose and for whom.” But added, “If we can lower amyloid every day, we think the accumulation of amyloid plaques in the brain will decrease over time.”
“Future studies need to have people taking these drugs for months, at least, and measuring the effect on amyloid and tau over time,” Lucey said. “We’re also going to be studying participants who are older and may still be cognitively healthy, but who already have some amyloid plaques in their brains.”