Chapter 4 – Operating System
Cybernetic Energy Level – Ensuring Your Powerpack is Fully-Charged
The Essence of Total Success
Thus far, we have discussed methods to increase the amount of time and space available to you. Expanding the limits of these two factors will enable you to be more flexible and more effective when tackling your projects. However, increased time and space is of no value to you if you do not have the energy (and thus desire) to attend to your objectives. There are three areas that we need to look at, when it comes to energy levels. The first one is the quality and quantity of sleep we are getting. The second has to do with the types of foods we eat. Finally, we must look at how well our body is toned through the use of proper exercise.
Cyborg Cynoozing – Sleep and its Many Faces
Making the best of this organic constraint
One of the key variables involved in determining your energy level is sleep. Humans need restful sleep in order to recharge themselves. Mental performance is drastically diminished due to sleep deprivation or disturbance. Even with cybernetic assistance (see Chapter Nine) the organic component of the cyborg still has a requirement for an absolute minimum level of daily sleep.
The management of sleeptime is a critical endeavour. Inappropriate or inadequate sleep results in dire consequences. Many people will remember the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989, in which a ship carrying oil crashed and produced an environmental nightmare. A recent report from the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research concluded that the major factor involved in the accident was the “severe fatigue” of the ship’s third mate who was in charge at the time. The commission called for more research to combat the nationwide “silent epidemic” of sleep disorders. Experts speculate that sleep problems cost society some $50 billion annually. Nearly 40 million Americans have sleep problems, and virtually no-one in America is getting enough quality sleep.
Most adults need about 8 hours of sleep, daily, to function properly. The reality, however, is that most people don’t get that much sleep done. Teenagers, in particular, sleep about 2 hours less than they did 80 years ago. James Walsh, director of the Sleep Disorders Research Center at Deaconess Hospital, says that “America has a sleep debt and in our opinion it’s every bit as important as the national debt.”
Inadequate sleep causes many problems, including damage to mental and physical health, impaired mental functioning, and host of other problems. Every nuclear accident, including Chernobyl, has occurred in the wee hours of the morning – a time when humans are naturally “down,” regardless of when they went to bed. Experts stress that a lot more research and attention must be paid to the problems of sleep. There is a tendency for most people to shrug it off and just try to “live with it.” In fact, sleepiness causes more problems than alcohol-related incidents.[4]
Scientific research on sleep has been rather disappointing, and yet we still do not have a clear idea why we need to sleep. There has been an attempt at isolating a “sleep substance” in the human brain – a substance which may be responsible for the induction of sleep – but there have been no solid conclusions.[5]
There is very little we can ascertain about why we need to sleep. One theory holds that nature selected this trait for humans so that we would not be exposed to the higher risks of night-time, during the earlier periods of our evolution. By forcing humans to sleep, and thus remain stationary, nature prevented our ancestors wandering around and falling into holes or the jaws of nocturnal predators. In addition, sleep may be a way of forcing us to save our energies, so that we will be more successful in our tasks (e.g., obtaining food) during the daytime when we can see properly. However, this energy-conservation theory does not answer the question why nature did not instead give us night-vision capability. In any case, since evolution has been kind enough to endow us with the many advantages that we already have – for example, the expanded frontal-lobes in the brain, the articulate fingers of the hand, and the architecturally magnificent structure of the foot – the general consensus is that the act of sleeping must somehow be absolutely vital to our survival, otherwise it should have been eliminated through the millennia.
Such inquiries and speculation into the purposes of sleep are interesting yet does not truly concern us right now. The fact is, we have to sleep. If we don’t sleep, we cannot perform at satisfactory levels. Therefore, a pragmatic approach is necessary and we have to pay careful attention to the many factors influencing our sleep. Our highest priorities are to maximize the effectiveness of our sleep, and minimize the time we actually spend sleeping. In order to do these things, we must first understand the basic mechanisms and principles behind sleep.
When we normally refer to sleep, we think of it as a single process, one that is defined as the opposite of wakeful activity. In fact, a complete “set” of sleep consists of subsets of different “types” of sleep. Scientists categorize the different types of sleep by the brainwave patterns they elicit. Brainwave patterns are measured by EEG – electroencephalogram – machines, and show the unique configurations of electrical activity in the brain. Different brainwave patterns mean that the brain is operating in different “modes” of thought, much the same way that the different ways that electricity surges through a computer’s circuitry determine the different functions the computer is performing.
The EEG patterns of sleep can themselves be broken down into four basic categories. When our brains are functioning normally in a wakeful mode, such as when we go about our daily activities, the EEG pattern of our brains would show beta waves. When we initially close our eyes and start to go to sleep, our brainwaves are mostly alpha. We relax our bodies, and our internal temperature starts to drop (the dropping of temperature is an evolutionary method of saving energy). Alpha waves can be elicited simply by shutting our eyes, and relaxing. After relaxing, we gradually enter deeper and deeper sleep. Our brainwaves become less active, and we are categorized as entering SWS, or slow wave sleep. When we are totally relaxed, and are deeply asleep, our brains finally elicit delta waves.
Sometime into the night, our brains switch from delta mode into theta mode. In this mode, our brains suddenly “awaken” even though the rest of the body is fast asleep. In fact, the characteristics of theta waves are somewhat similar to beta waves, and this creates an interesting phenomenon: We are sleeping, but our brain is wide awake. This type of sleep is known as paradoxical sleep. It is during this stage when we start to dream. Most people tend to think that we dream throughout the night. This is not so. We dream only intermittently, and only during theta stage. In addition, our eyes do a very interesting thing: They move. These rapid eye movements – or REM – occur only during the dreaming stages. When theta waves are present, our minds are in maximum creative mode. That is why dreams are so full of imagination and creativity. Otherwise, during our delta phase, our minds are essentially blank. Interestingly enough, during REM sleep, a biological mechanism kicks in and our bodies are virtually paralyzed for the duration. One theory holds that this was nature’s way of ensuring that we don’t physically act out our dreams. Research into sleepwalking speculates that the disorder is related to a fault in this paralysis mechanism.
REM sleep lasts for only a relatively brief amount of time. A dream that, upon waking, feels like it’s been going on for the entire night, may only have lasted less than an hour. Your time spent each night consists mostly of blank or “passive” delta sleep, and not “active” (dream) sleep. Therefore, for us to be able to obtain the rest we need every time we sleep, our bodies have to be able to enter the delta phases. If it cannot, because of interference from the environment or because of chemicals in our bodies, then we do not obtain restful sleep, and feel sluggish and groggy upon waking up.
The relationship between sleep and learning ability has been well-documented. Not only do we require fresh minds in order to maintain attention spans and concentrate on new information, but the act of sleeping seems to have a consolidation effect, organizing the information learned that day and registering it into their respective places in our memories. Sleep also induces maximum creativity, during the theta stage, and this may be one reason why some people go to bed with a problem, and wake up with the solution. Their imagination was active during REM sleep, and found a solution to the problem by considering all kinds of possibilities.
Before we continue our discussion regarding sleep, there is something else I must mention. All lifeforms on this planet are governed by cycles, or rhythms. These cycles vary between animals, and between functions within the same animal. Cycles can vary in length and classification. Some are annual cycles, while others have a monthly basis, and still others operate on a daily or even hourly schedule. An example of an annual cycle would be the blooming of flowers in the spring. A monthly cycle would be the normal menstruation periods of females. Finally, the best example of a daily cycle is the cycle of sleep. You can think of these natural cycles as biological clocks – or endogenous cycles (driven by internal clocks rather than by external events).
Daily cycles are called circadian rhythms (from the Latin circa meaning “around” and dia meaning “day”). Sleep cycles are both endogenous cycles and also circadian rhythms. Because of some warped sense of humour on the part of mother nature, the circadian rhythm of sleep in humans is, on average, based on a 25-hour cycle! In other words, we operate on an approximately 25-hour day, biologically, instead of the actual, physical 24-hour day.6 The implications of this are enormous. It means that if left to our own devices, and if all other variables were the same, we would go to sleep and wake up one hour later every day. This is one of the biggest reasons why most people find it hard to get out of bed at the same time every morning. Unfortunately for us, we have to live with this fact. So the next time someone yells at you and says you’re a lazy bum for sleeping so late, you can reply: “You know, there is a desynchronization between my circadian rhythm and the arbitrary and external concept of a 24-hour day.” I doubt that too many people will accept that as an excuse if you’re late for school or work, but at least you sounded really smart for about five seconds.
There is some more information about our circadian rhythms that you need to know. Scientists have determined that not only do we operate on a 25-hour biological clock, but that we are predisposed to sleep again several hours after waking up. In other words, we like afternoon naps.[7] Some cultures, such as that of Mexico, revolve around the siesta – the afternoon nap. Everybody goes home and catches a few winks before going back to work. (That sort of makes the North American lunch-break a pretty pathetic invention!) Apparently, nature had a field day with our genes. It made us walking and talking monuments to tardiness and sloth!
But that can’t really be the case. Why would evolution make such a big mistake? In fact, it turns out that it was not nature, but humans who have made the mistake. Humans invented the 9-to-5 work day. Humans invented the 8 hour sleep schedule. To understand the mistake we have made, we will need to understand the difference between monophasic sleep, and polyphasic sleep[8].
Monophasic sleep is the “norm” for North American culture. We sleep at night, and work during the day. Polyphasic sleep consists of multiple sleep/wake incidents scattered throughout the day. A sleep schedule with an afternoon nap is an example of polyphasic sleep. In fact, it is biphasic.
There is evidence to suggest that humans were originally suited to a polyphasic sleeping routine, rather than the arbitrary monophasic one that we are used to. For starters, almost all animals in nature conform to polyphasic behavior. In addition, polyphasic behavior is the predominant mode of sleeping for human infants, and even in the later years, children have to slowly be weaned from the afternoon nap. Furthermore, when people are isolated from the external environment – so that they cannot determine the actual time of the day from natural cues such as sunlight, or artificial cues such as clocks or television programs – they tend to exhibit more napping behavior instead of retaining the single monophasic sleep period during the “night.” Finally, it appears that naps – relatively brief sessions of sleep – are more effective in refreshing the mind, than longer periods of sleep.[9] In a sense, we were taught to “unlearn” this natural way of sleeping, when we had to adjust to the arbitrary 9-to-5 schedule.
How has modern society thrown our sleep mechanisms into chaos? There are many aspects to this question, but one important element that almost all sleep researchers agree on is the invention of night light, from candles all the way to the modern halogen lamp. With the added ability to see in the dark, humans found themselves capable of work even after the sun has set. Having broken free of this constraint, and by using artificial cues – such as clocks and watches – to keep track of time, humans were able to operate on a totally artificial and arbitrary sleep/wake schedule. The increased demand for more attention to the increasing amounts of information in our modern society have discouraged the “unproductive” act of sleeping, as people everywhere try to squeeze more and more “wake” time out of the 24-hour day. Unfortunately for most people, they remain caught in the time-honoured tradition of a monophasic sleep/wake schedule. Sleep research has already found evidence to support the hypothesis that polyphasic schedules are more efficient. In this section, I will show you how we – as cyborgs – can achieve the goal of minimizing sleep time, with a level of effectiveness hardly ever approached by other non-cybernetic human units.
The Biphasic Mode – Making use of a Siesta
When in Mexico do as the Mexicans
A biphasic sleeping schedule takes advantage of the higher effectiveness and rejuvenation capability of short naps. The method I detail here is somewhat biased towards the bigger segment of “main” sleeptime at night. This method is good for people who do not want to entirely forfeit the traditional daytime-wake/nighttime-sleep behaviour. Therefore, it is not as efficient as other methods, but nevertheless a better way of sleeping than the pure monophasic method.
For starters, we should find some way of accommodating the need for an afternoon nap. Studies have shown that this need not be a lengthy period of rest. In fact, 30-minutes of restful sleep are adequate to satisfy the natural desire for a nap, and to effectively refresh our minds for coping with the second half of the day. Business executives who allow themselves this advantage usually take their naps during their lunch hour. Since only a half-hour is necessary, this can be successfully incorporated into their schedule.
The two biggest impediments to effective sleep are light and sound. If either of these are present, the effectiveness of sleep could be reduced, or prevented altogether. Research has found that the worst kinds of sound and light are the intermittent types – those that have no predictable pattern. These interruptions prevent the body from entering delta sleep. It seems as though your body doesn’t “dare” go to sleep when so much unpredictable activity is happening around it. This is most likely a survival instinct.
In order to minimize the distractions of light and sound, I have found that simple solutions work best. The use of an eyeshade, or some kind of cloth wrapped comfortably around the eyes, works to block out light. To diminish the volume of disturbing noise, I use earplugs. There are many types of earplugs available from your local pharmacy, but the best ones I find are the soft spongy types. Other earplugs are either too hard and feel bulky, or are made of materials such as down or wool, which have fibers that can become itchy or cause allergic reactions in some people. By blocking out noise and light, you help the body enter restful sleep. A loud alarm clock (which pierces the earplug barrier) placed nearby will serve to awaken you so that you don’t sleep past the absolute minimum time necessary for refreshment.
One excellent method of ensuring effective siestas is through the use of a cybernetic brain machine. These devices are covered in Chapter Nine. For now, let me just say that I use a subliminal cassette program that is exactly 30-minutes in length. The subliminal programming induces theta and delta brainwaves, and essentially what it does is “force” me to go to sleep. At the end of the program, the subliminals automatically induce beta waves and wakes me up. Unless I am truly fatigued, I have no problems with this. The 30-minute nap session feels like several hours, and afterwards I feel totally refreshed and ready for the second half of the day. This is an excellent example of using cybernetic assistance to make our natural biology cooperate with us.
The Polyphasic Mode – Maximizing Organic Sleeptime
The Leonardo da Vinci secret
Almost everyone has heard of Leonardo da Vinci. We regard him as a great painter, and inventor. But did you know that he had a very big advantage over most other people? He slept for only 1.5 hours every night. In effect, he had 22.5 hours of wakeful activity every day!
This remarkable “secret” is narrated by Giancarlo Sbragia, a playwright and actor who lives in Rome.10 He claims that he might have come across da Vinci’s secret via, of all people, a psychic medium! In any case, it is an intriguing and fascinating method of minimizing sleep without drastic reduction in wakeful performance.
The da Vinci method, briefly, required the person to operate on a 4-hour basis. (This is in line with the scientific conclusion of the human tendency to gravitate towards a 4-hour schedule, as discussed in preceding sections). At the end of every 4-hour wake phase, the person sleeps for 15 minutes. Then, the cycle is reset, and the person operates in a wakeful state for another 4 hours before he sleeps again.
Although intriguing, it may be very difficult for most people to achieve this schedule. Sbragai himself stated that it was necessary for him to learn certain meditation techniques in order to execute this sleep schedule properly. For most people without these skills, I venture to speculate that it would be quite impossible to sleep for only 15 minutes for every 4 hours of being awake. Therefore, I have modified the da Vinci method.
The modified version that I will now describe is called CyberSleep®. Instead of sleeping for 15 minutes, the person sleeps between a half-hour to one-hour. The method also requires an extended sleep of 2 hours during the early morning period. This is to acknowledge the decreased performance capacity of people during those hours – as I had mentioned before.
To establish the specific times for CyberSleeping – times which are most effective for you and your work schedule – first write down all the things that you have to be awake for every day. If you have to work from 9-to-5, write this down, but include any possible lunch-breaks or other times you can fit a short nap into. If you are a student, write down all the starting and ending times of your classes. Do this for every day of the week.
Now, look at your schedule and determine which periods of time are available for you to put in CyberSleep naps (between a half-hour to one-hour duration). Try to fit in as much nap time as possible, and as evenly distributed over the 24-hours as possible. Remember to allocate a 2-hour sleep period somewhere in the early morning (between 2 am and 5 am).
When determining your polyphasic schedule, keep in mind that you should try to keep wake-periods to about 4 hours, and try not to extend or shorten these periods any more than absolutely necessary. A flexibility of about one hour is probably tolerable, but any more variation than that and you may find it harder to go to sleep during the sleep-periods, or harder to obtain the full benefits of each short nap.
One final point that I must mention is that Sbragai said that one of the hardest things to do with his sleep schedule was finding enough things to do. As a result, there is a high probability of boredom, especially during the late evening and early morning hours when everyone else is sleeping and shops and businesses are closed. It is up to you to find enough work to keep yourself busy and useful. Otherwise, you may want to revert back to the less efficient sleep schedules so that you can “fill in the blanks” with sleep.
The Anchor Method
Flexibility in an Inflexible Society
The da Vinci and CyberSleep methods are, admittedly, relatively esoteric and eccentric (but what revolutionary idea isn’t). Therefore, it may be hard to execute them successfully given the proliferation of monophasic schedules with the majority of the human population, and the general consensus to operate on it as a basis. An alternative method is available to increase flexibility in sleeptime, but allow a person to still increase overall sleep efficiency.
The method is called the Anchor Method. It is was introduced by two researchers – Minors and Waterhouse – in 1981, and is based on an 8-hour total sleep time. The anchor methods requires sleep to be “anchored” to an unvarying 4-hours of sleep every night at the same time, but allows the remaining 4-hours to be taken at any other time during the day, as the person desires. The “flexible” 4-hour portion must be used as a whole and not fragmented into component naps.
The anchor method allows a person to sleep with a relatively traditional uninterrupted “anchor sleep” period, but reduces that inflexible portion to 4-hours, and provides freedom to adapt to changing demands via the “non-anchor” portion of the total sleep time.
Core Sleep
The Absolute Minimum
Scientists have determined that there is an absolute minimum amount of time that the average human person requires for normal functioning. They call this core sleep and any additional sleep time as optional sleep. Core sleep is usually 5 hours for most humans. This varies dramatically in some people, sometimes to the point of virtually not needing sleep at all. But 5 hours is the average amount, and is really all that is necessary for us to obtain the physiological benefits.
For those people who may be able to operate with only core sleeping, it may be possible to dispense altogether with the polyphasic methods. By sleeping between the hours of, for example, 1 am to 5 am, a person would have at his command a day of 19 hours.
A variation in this core sleep method would be to add an additional 30-minutes of nap time during the afternoon, around 1 PM.
System Shutdown – Induction of Sleep
Keeping the jumping sheep well away
Thus far we have discussed several modes of sleeping which can increase our overall time available for activities. We now focus our efforts onto the bigger problem: Getting quality sleep by getting to sleep. Inability to enter sleep essentially renders our carefully plotted sleep-periods worthless, and throws our entire plan into havoc.
The first thing to know is that the best way of making your body sleep quickly is to not let it sleep for a while. In other words, by forcing yourself to be awake for extended periods of time, you will ensure that your mind is fully ready to enter sleep once the opportunity is available. This method of forcing yourself to stay awake is useful for initializing a new sleep regime. For example, when converting from monophasic sleep into a polyphasic sleep schedule, it is best to try to stay awake for maybe 36 hours, and then allow yourself a half-hour or one-hour sleep period, to initialize the cycle. Then you wake up, and work for 4-hours, and sleep again. After a few days, your body should adapt to this new sleeping regime, and your circadian rhythms will be entrained to the new schedule.
An important point to note regarding sleep, and which is very much related to trying to keep yourself awake, is that certain chemicals affect your body’s ability to “recharge” during the actual sleep periods. The two major enemies to quality sleep are caffeine and nicotine. Other stimulants are also detrimental to a good night’s sleep, but these two substances are readily available and easily exposed to. Perhaps it is of interest to you to know that caffeine, for example, can take up to 24 hours before your body totally eliminates it from the system. Caffeine and nicotine can affect your body so much that delta mode is hardly entered into, regardless of how long you have been able to sleep. People pulling “all-nighters” by drinking lots of coffee, smoking cigarettes, and restricting their sleep usually end up in less-than-perfect states of mind when morning arrives. The student cramming for an exam in such a manner will not have the full complement of his mental faculties available during the actual exam, and suffers from lowered concentration ability, higher risks of making careless mistakes, a dramatic reduction in memory recall, and a diminished proficiency to think logically. On top of all this, the stimulants in his bloodstream make him nervous and panicky. Lucky (or blessed) indeed is the person who can pull off an A+ in such a state of disarray!
But to return to our discussion concerning sleep, we must try to totally eliminate these and other artificial stimulants in our bodies, by refraining from smoking and drinking coffee. I understand that these are terribly hard habits to break – I’ve been there – but if you are committed to utilizing a higher-performance sleep schedule, because you need the extra time, then you absolutely must allow your body the full potential to enter deep sleep. Otherwise, you simply will not be refreshed after the sleep period, and it would become impossible to maintain the sleep routine without seriously reducing your wakeful performance. Even with the use of subliminals to induce sleep, a body loaded with stimulant chemicals will be reluctant to succumb to the induction.
Speaking of chemicals, one substance that is naturally occurring in our bodies is serotonin. This is a neurotransmitter – a chemical that your body uses to transmit information between its nervous system. We will encounter neurotransmitters again in Chapter Nine when we discuss cognitive chemicals. In the meanwhile, I would just like to point out that serotonin is necessary for the proper maintenance of sleep. If its levels are too low, then it is harder for a person to enter deep sleep. Adequate levels of serotonin also ensure that the sleep latency period is reduced – the period of time it takes a person to “fall asleep” once the lights are off. With regards to our objective of sleep induction, it pays to have enough serotonin in our bodies. One way of getting this important neurotransmitter is through milk. Dairy milk contains L-Tryptophan, a substance which is the precursor of the serotonin neurotransmitter – your body transforms L-Tryptophan into serotonin (your body also requires a small amount of Vitamin B6 and magnesium to help convert L-Tryptophan into serotonin so take a multi-vitamin and mineral pill containing these nutrients along with your milk). That’s why sometimes you may have been told to try drinking a glass of warm milk if you can’t sleep. Unfortunately, dairy milk is also the source of many health problems. In fact, many health experts discourage people from eating or drinking dairy products of any kind. (Please see the health sources in Appendix B.) Therefore, for CyberSleep purposes, I recommend you treat drinking milk along the lines of taking sleeping pills – don’t overdo it.
The body’s levels of serotonin could also be affected by electromagnetic fields. This may sound somewhat paradoxical to a cyborg, who is half organic and half electromechanical. But even cyborgs have to sleep – and, like Philip K. Dick asked us, “Do androids [and cyborgs] dream of electric sheep?” – and we must take measures to ensure that we do not have extraneous magnetic influences that disturb the proper functioning of our bodies. Thus, when you go to bed, stay away from electrical appliances. Make sure your body – especially your head – is well away from electric wall outlets, or wires and cables that run from those outlets. Don’t put anything with a magnetic field near your bed – such as televisions, telephones, and especially HiFi speakers (such as those from a ghetto-blaster) because all these items have magnets inside them.
Another factor which influences our desire and ability to sleep is sunlight. Exposure to sunlight helps people to entrain their circadian rhythms to be awake during the sunlight periods. This is useful if that is what you want to do. However, a polyphasic sleep schedule usually requires sleep periods during the day, when there is usually plenty of sunshine. Therefore, we must again block out this natural cue of sunlight either by the use of eyeshades, or by sleeping in a room devoid of light. Sometimes, when I am using a polyphasic schedule, I find places that are totally dark – and safe! – to sleep in. I have successfully maintained these daytime sleep-periods in bathrooms, walk-in-closets, underneath a bed, in the trunk of a car (with folded-down seats), and even in a laundry room. The key things to note are that you must find a relatively dark and quiet place, and you must also be comfortable. I used to carry around an inflatable air mattress – a part of my camping equipment – to allow me to sleep pretty much anywhere I need to.
Recall the high priority I gave to the maintenance of the “zero zone,” or the sense of minimal stimulation and external influence. When utilizing non-traditional sleeping cycles, a zero zone is critical for success. Why is this? Well, the final factor that can disrupt the successful implementation of our sleeping schedule is, in fact, the most important one: Other people. And of all people, the ones who have the most potential to affect us are our friends. The reason why I say this is because even though our family and lovers may be closer to us, they will likely understand our situation, and allow us to continue our sleeping schedule. With friends, the willingness to leave us be would not be as high. I am not saying that our friends would be deliberately trying to screw up our lives. Instead, they may not understand or appreciate the importance of the situation, and may even try to “help” you adjust back to “normal” time, or try to “save” you from your crazy sleeping plan – which in their minds is obviously a sign of over-exertion and too much work. Therefore, you must try to make everyone around you understand what you are trying to accomplish. If you cannot successfully get the message across to them, it’s time to use some cyborg shielding!
