How to Sleep 4 Hours Per Night
A good night’s sleep just takes too long.
Scientists may soon be able to cut those eight wasted hours down to three or four. The technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), involves an electromagnetic coil that emits pulses of skull-penetrating, neuron-activating magnetic energy. Depending on where the wand is and how fast it pulses, TMS can play all kinds of tricks. It can make a thumb twitch, create the illusion of a flash of light, or even treat depression. Hmm…. could it make you rob a bank?
Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin set out to see if TMS could switch on certain sleep phases. Working with 16 sleeping men, Tononi and his team located a spot on the skull that they could zap to induce the brain waves characteristic of deep, non-REM sleep. Although Tononi’s volunteers got only a few minutes of artificial sleep—not enough for the volunteers to draw meaningful subjective conclusions about sleep quality—previous studies have indicated that TMS applied at certain frequencies during sleep can improve memory. Imagine 15 hour workdays if this became the norm.
