Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hrun0 | Hacker News Reader

> which is so newly discovered

It says that it was published in 2015, or am I missing something?

Am I missing something? 2015 for a paper feels relatively new enough that people might not know about it and it might not be in school books.

People learn in school, then after they estabilish their career, they have kids and other interests and this and that and they get intellectually stuck. Don't grow. Don't learn new things in their field of (supposed) expertise... I see this ALL THE TIME. Now if middle aged programmer refuses to learn new things, it's annoying to work with them, but you'll survive. If a middle aged physician refuses to learn new things, you're kinda fucked. Sadly, the amount of physicians out there who don't keep improving is pretty large given the importance of their job. Yes, the "pretty large" part is mostly anecdotal - my experience and experiences of my friends and family - but if I see the stuck programmers in my field, I'm pretty convinced there must be quite a few of the stuck physicians.

So yeah, 10 years in medicine? Seems like a brand new paper to me. I expect that knowledge to bubble its way to your average physician some time around 2040.

That’s why I am on hackernews though? If nobody posted that paper 8 years ago I’d be surprised.

5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20622712

I'm about the median age in the US and wouldn't expect anyone less than a decade younger than me to have been taught it in school unless they went for a degree in a related field, and possibly not even then. 2015 is after I finished grad school and something like a decade after I'd last taken a class where it might have been taught if it had already been around for enough years to make it into the curriculum.

Great points, I got my Ph.D. in neuroscience 20 years ago. There were disparate theories for why we sleep but no mechanistic description. Most of the research not specifically relevant to my own took 10-20 years to become influential. I’d be surprised if most textbooks for neuroscience-related fields being published today are including the glymphatic system, including psychology / psychiatry and medicine.

> so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school.

So with the slow pace knowledge makes it into the school curriculum, you likely wouldn't have heard about it in school unless you just left the system a year or two ago (if even then).

Exactly, my kids are in elementary school and I’ve been talking with superintendents and high school principals. It’s straightforward to teach kids about the brain as a muscle and sleep as critical to rest and recovery to best power cognition. The glymphatic system gives a clear mechanism and yet I haven’t found many places where it’s being taught as a core part of how to best use your brain. Sleep is still considered a nice to have for brain performance, not a driver of working smarter.

Ok I think I got confused. I thought OP meant that they will win the Nobel for this specific publication.

I guess I should have slept more

You are missing the context of age demographics. For example: in the United States of America about 63% of the population is over the age of 32 which represents roughly 200 million Americans which graduated Highschool before the year 2010.

And the majority of whoever is teaching university or even high school right now probably graduated themselves before 2015, when the article was published.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com