The brain may be about to have its Ozempic moment

(economist.com)

54 points | by Anon84 2 hours ago

17 comments

  • kbrannigan 1 hour ago
    To get a job at our company take three pills of brainOzempic every day to maximize productivity.

    We have our NeuroLinkBrain Implant plugin to AI agent , so that you can vibe code 24/7 . To maximize shareholder value.

    • anakaine 21 minutes ago
      I reckon I'll buy some landscaping machinery and a truck before I ever sign up for that distopian nightmare. At least sound ordinance would prevent 24/7 operation.
      • bowmessage 12 minutes ago
        No more sound ordinance, just install Neuralink and receive free auto-mute during sleeping hours.
    • seeknotfind 20 minutes ago
      Is this supposed to be scary or amazing?
      • alimhaq 11 minutes ago
        Your comment is probably the most disturbing thing I’ve ever read on this website
        • rc5150 2 minutes ago
          I dunno, there's been a whole lot of fascist bootlicking going on lately under the guise of good faith discussion. That's pretty disturbing to me.
    • vhcr 12 minutes ago
      Isn't this already happening with ADHD drugs?
      • yuye 4 minutes ago
        A lot of people with ADHD that have success with medication can tell you that it's not just about work.

        It also helps with non-work stuff that's just not fun to do, such as chores or filing your taxes. It even helps you stick with hobbies you actually enjoy but your brain gets bored of.

        • chocrates 1 minute ago
          Don't tell me psychiatrist but I take my addon Ritalin at night so I can play games or read a book. I just can't do it without it
      • rc5150 4 minutes ago
        on the recreational level, maybe, but from a therapeutic perspective for people who actually benefit from its prescribed use its absolutely game-changing to live a life without (or with mitigated) executive dysfunction.
  • derefr 17 minutes ago
    My partner has had idiopathic hypersomnia (sleeps 12 hours most days, as much as 18 hours some days) for a few years now, and so far nothing we’ve tried has worked without awful side effects (e.g. constant heart palpitations and panic attacks.)

    I had been looking into orexin agonists (along with other things like H3 autoreceptor antagonists) back when they were just a concept. It’s good to see them finally reaching commercialization. Although they’re not approved by our own (Canadian) regulatory body quite yet.

    Now that they’re approved in the US, though, I’m looking very much forward to seeing how these drugs perform in off-label-ish treatment of the various other sleep disorders that I’m sure clinicians will now begin throwing them at.

    • chasebank 1 minute ago
      Have they tried GHB? I know it's used in narcolepsy patients with great success. If you "microdose" it, it's also one of the best drugs on the planet. Slippery slope, though.
  • fedpost 21 minutes ago
    Well, they're filming the next season of black mirror right now, it's probably not too late to throw this one in there.
  • SoupBread 1 hour ago
    It sounds like is a genuine treatment for those who suffer from narcolepsy, and everything else is merely speculative and has seem pretty bad side-effects.
    • bitexploder 49 minutes ago
      There is evidence that some forms of ADHD are effectively just the brain falling asleep rapidly and then waking up. This form cam be attenuated with norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor alone. Presents with ADHD like symptoms. But it’s a new thing most likely. Called “Cognitive Disengagement Syndrome”.
  • wewewedxfgdf 29 minutes ago
    I like sleep - it's not a problem to be solved.
  • Anon84 2 hours ago
  • WalterGR 1 hour ago
    • Kinrany 46 minutes ago
      Interesting comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49264602

      > IMO the much more likely explanation is that the brain uses contrastive learning somewhere. [...] Instead of using calculus and outer products to calculate derivatives, you feed real data and false data forward through the network and each neuron tracks and trains on the difference.

      • Kinrany 38 minutes ago
        Separately, do I understand the idea correctly:

        - when learning on the real examples, just propagate forward

        - when learning on the fake examples, first generate them by propagating white noise backward

        • inigyou 16 minutes ago
          That's a technique that was tried in machine learning and worked (although obviously not optimally or we'd all be using it by now) and then we hypothesised that animal brains use it because it would explain sleep.
      • Kinrany 39 minutes ago
        I'm curious if there is an explanation for it not being more common to sleep like dolphins do, small parts of the brain at a time.
  • fishfasell 58 minutes ago
    Despite the stigma surrounding semaglutide, its impact across various health conditions has been remarkable. Bringing that same level of innovation to cognitive disorders could be truly transformative for society
  • fennec-posix 2 hours ago
    If this means I don't have to take Methylphenidate to function 100% all the time and as a result feel tremendously anxious 100% all the time. SIGN ME UP.
    • didgeoridoo 44 minutes ago
      Adding guanfacine (Intuniv) to my methylphenidate took the weird anxious-angry edge off. Would be nice to not have to take one med to fix the side effects of the other, though.
      • fennec-posix 27 minutes ago
        Interesting, will check it out. Cheers!
        • genghisjahn 22 minutes ago
          My son takes the methylphenidate / guanfacine combo as well and it’s been a game changer.
      • hirvi74 21 minutes ago
        Any other benefits?
    • SV_BubbleTime 44 minutes ago
      You sure about that math?
      • fennec-posix 27 minutes ago
        I'm honestly not sure about anything man
  • almost_usual 1 hour ago
    Sleep less and sit more. What a species we’ve become.
  • madhacker 52 minutes ago
    "Others are exploring their use for treating sleep apnoea, which is a far more common disorder." CPAP biomedical equipment manufacturer watch out!
  • livinglist 1 hour ago
    24/7 stock market, least sleep needed, most AI piled, I’m very excited!
    • inigyou 14 minutes ago
      Cryptocurrency markets are open 24/7 btw.

      Everyone involved in a stock market agrees it's quite useful to have a separation between days, although you could have a 23.5/7 stock market with only half hour day-ends. That's when things like index rebalancing, addition, removal, stock splits occur. You say whoever holds stock X at end of a certain day holds stock Y+Z at the start of the next day (due to a company splitting up) and there's no need to argue about which millisecond a trade occurred. (It's your own damn fault if you were trying to buy the stock in the milliseconds before closing, but some exchanges run a special closing auction with a different algorithm to prevent races). It's also the time you can deploy software, which you can't do during the day. Maybe half an hour is too short for all this stuff. Or maybe it should be a 12 hour window once a week instead.

  • copperx 2 hours ago
    A better modafinil? Sign me up.
  • EA-3167 1 hour ago
    The second I read the print in Nature a bit ago I knew some version would show up here. I swear I’ve met deployed Marines less obsessed with staying awake through chemistry than some people here.
  • ValdikSS 1 hour ago
    Hooray fatal insomnia
  • acosmism 1 hour ago
    wow. now i'm really excited for the future
  • steele 1 hour ago
    [flagged]