How isn’t there a pill or something that we can take and only need like an hour or 2 of sleep?
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We don’t fully understand why we need sleep at all. We know the effects, but we don’t know exactly how the effects are connected with the cause. We’re a long way away from replicating sleep.
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A fundamental limit at play here is the physics of how cells do what they do to regenerate the human body. As everyone else has pointed out, not only do we barely understand the role/mechanisms of sleep, but the biological processes that we do observe (e.g., expelling waste products from the brain, tissue regeneration, etc.) involve moving lots of small molecules in/out of cells, between organs, through the bloodstream, and so on. The rates/speeds at which these processes can occur is, for now, limited by laws of physics (e.g., diffusion) that we don’t yet have the means to manipulate safely.
Assuming a regular 7-8 hour session of sleep ultimately represents a ‘checklist’ of things your body needs to do before it’s ready to function properly, the question you’re effectively asking is whether we can find a way to get the body to speed thru said checklist 100-200% faster.
A fundamental limit at play here is the physics of how cells do what they do to regenerate the human body. As everyone else has pointed out, not only do we barely understand the role/mechanisms of sleep, but the biological processes that we do observe (e.g., expelling waste products from the brain, tissue regeneration, etc.) involve moving lots of small molecules in/out of cells, between organs, through the bloodstream, and so on. The rates/speeds at which these processes can occur is, for now, limited by laws of physics (e.g., diffusion) that we don’t yet have the means to manipulate safely.
Assuming a regular 7-8 hour session of sleep ultimately represents a ‘checklist’ of things your body needs to do before it’s ready to function properly, the question you’re effectively asking is whether we can find a way to get the body to speed thru said checklist 100-200% faster.
A fundamental limit at play here is the physics of how cells do what they do to regenerate the human body. As everyone else has pointed out, not only do we barely understand the role/mechanisms of sleep, but the biological processes that we do observe (e.g., expelling waste products from the brain, tissue regeneration, etc.) involve moving lots of small molecules in/out of cells, between organs, through the bloodstream, and so on. The rates/speeds at which these processes can occur is, for now, limited by laws of physics (e.g., diffusion) that we don’t yet have the means to manipulate safely.
Assuming a regular 7-8 hour session of sleep ultimately represents a ‘checklist’ of things your body needs to do before it’s ready to function properly, the question you’re effectively asking is whether we can find a way to get the body to speed thru said checklist 100-200% faster.
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