I don’t drink coffee which might explain why I often feel myself dragging throughout the day. You know that 3:30 feeling that those Five Hour Energy commercials talk about? Well, I also have an 8:15 feeling, a 10:30 feeling, and a 2 pm feeling. This is okay for a lonely office drone like me. But if I was in the Army this would obviously not be okay. Lives could be lost if I’m unable to operate at a high level due to sleep deprivation. For this reason most military training involves strenuous physical activity combined with limited sleep, so as to condition the body to get use to functioning while tired. But what if there was a better way? What if there was a way to know how to optimize each soldier’s performance by giving them exactly how much caffeine they need, tailored to their specific body chemistry? Well, now there is.
As Quartz puts it:
“The Army wants you….awake. Since at least WWII, US military scientists have been tinkering with the human brain to keep pilots, soldiers and staff alert despite lack of sleep. Their enemies have as well: The Nazis infamously plied their ranks with methamphetamines (also known as speed).
But how can people stay awake safely (and ethically)?
Few substances are as safe as caffeine used daily by 85% of the US population. Researcher Jaques Reifman, who works on high-performance biotechnology software for the US Army, sought to design an algorithm for caffeine-dosing strategies. His research, accepted into the peer-reviewed Journal of Sleep Research, developed software to learn people’s unique physiology and determine how best to counter lack of sleep under any conditions.
The Army’s plan was to develop a tool that prescribes exactly how much caffeine to consume, and when, to achieve optimal performance, Reifman said in an interview.”
Like the Internet and GPS, some technologies developed for military use often wind up in the hands of civilians, which means in the near future we may all know exactly how much caffeine we need to optimize our performance. That’s good news for us and bad news for Starbucks’ bottom line.
Is a coffee algorithm the Greatest Idea Ever?
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