Sleep:
Two of my SciBlings have recently covered papers that my readers should find interesting: Joseph: Bright Light and Melatonin Treatment Improves Dementia: A study published in JAMA indicates that treatment with bright light alone (1,000 lux), or bright light combined...
Posted on June 12, 2008 9:29 PM • 0 Comments •
Circadian Math: 1 Plus 1 Doesn't Always Equal 2: Like a wristwatch that needs to be wound daily for accurate time-telling, the human circadian system -- the biological cycles that repeat approximately every 24 hours -- requires daily light exposure...
Posted on June 10, 2008 8:59 AM • 1 Comments •
From November 01, 2005, a review of a review......
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Posted on May 22, 2008 7:55 AM • 1 Comments •
What it really means when we are talking about babies "sleeping through the night"
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Posted on May 20, 2008 4:58 PM • 5 Comments •
The fourth part of a four-part series on the topic, this one from April 02, 2006.......
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Posted on May 19, 2008 4:59 PM • 1 Comments •
This is the third part of the series on the topic, from April 01, 2006......
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Posted on May 18, 2008 4:57 PM • 2 Comments •
Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26,...
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Posted on May 17, 2008 4:53 PM • 1 Comments •
This kind of ignorant bleating makes me froth at the mouth every time - I guess it is because this is my own blogging "turf". One of the recurring themes of my blog is the disdain I have for people...
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Posted on May 16, 2008 4:59 PM • 4 Comments •
My regular readers are probably aware that the topic of adolescent sleep and the issue of starting times of schools are some of my favourite subjects for a variety of reasons: I am a chronobiologist, I am an extreme "owl"...
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Posted on May 15, 2008 7:53 PM • 23 Comments •
To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms: We systematically varied input parameters related to the number of food and sleep sites, the degree to which food and sleep sites overlap, and the rate at...
Posted on May 15, 2008 7:39 AM • 0 Comments •
One of the latest additions (just two days ago, I think) to the Directory of Open Access Journals is a journal that will be of interest to some of my readers - The Open Sleep Journal. The first volume has...
Posted on May 13, 2008 11:11 AM • 0 Comments •
This post is perhaps not my best post, but is, by far, my most popular ever. Sick and tired of politics after the 2004 election I decided to start a science-only blog - Circadiana. After a couple of days...
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Posted on April 7, 2008 4:57 PM • 2 Comments •
On Brain Rules...
Posted on March 20, 2008 12:02 AM • 0 Comments •
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY in SLEEP MEDICINE Charles A. Czeisler, Steven W. Lockley, Christopher P. Landrigan, Laura K. Barger Harvard Work Hours, Health and Safety Group Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School The Harvard Work Hours...
Posted on March 12, 2008 6:45 AM • 0 Comments •
Book excerpt in today's Wall Street Journal: Chapter 6: Wired: It is likely that insomnia will increase with the expansion of the 24-hour economy into more and more lives, and more of each life, because wakefulness and the wired world...
Posted on February 29, 2008 7:02 AM • 0 Comments •
Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance: A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a new study. People Had More Intense Dreams After Sept....
Posted on February 3, 2008 9:28 PM • 0 Comments •
Keystone sleep/circadian meeting. Jay Dunlap, Emmanuel Mignot and Amita Seghal are organizing a Keystone meeting on Genetics and Biochemistry of Sleep in Lake Tahoe, March 7-12 (click here to see large):...
Posted on January 28, 2008 9:16 AM • 0 Comments •
Sleeping & Dreaming exhibit hosted by Wellcome Trust will be open until 9 March 2008: Why are scientists still perplexed by sleep? What do the insights that our dreams bring us mean? And is a life without sleep conceivable? Sleeping...
Posted on January 21, 2008 6:09 PM • 0 Comments •
The panel discussion from the 'Waking Up To Sleep' (February 9th and 10th, 2007) conference has been filmed and the video is now online. A very interesting discussion on the evolution and adaptive function of sleep. Watch it here. More...
Posted on January 8, 2008 5:50 PM • 0 Comments •
Dmitriy Kruglyak posted a summary of last week's Cephalon webcast. The topic was Sleep Apnea, something I guess a number of my readers would be interested in. So, go ahead and listen to the podcast and read Dmitry's summary and...
Posted on December 18, 2007 12:29 PM • 0 Comments •
No, that is not a really nasty guy who hypnotizes people. It is a technical term used to describe the feeling of falling one sometimes experiences at the moment one drifts into sleep. It often makes the person wake up...
Posted on December 16, 2007 4:37 PM • 1 Comments •
Hmm, I did not know this - apparently the left hemisphere of the human brain falls asleep first, and the right one a little bit later in most people. I wonder if that has any connection with the reason we...
Posted on December 6, 2007 8:42 PM • 0 Comments •
All-Nighters Equal Lower Grades: With end-of-semester finals looming, here's an exam question: Will pulling an all-nighter actually help you score well? To the dismay of college students everywhere, the correct answer is "no." Morning Jolt Of Caffeine Might Mask Serious...
Posted on December 2, 2007 5:42 PM • 2 Comments •
Being out of town and all, I missed it, but NYTimes published a whole lot of articles about sleep yesterday. Of course, as I enjoy poking around bird brains, the article by Carl Zimmer - In Study of Human Patterns,...
Posted on October 24, 2007 10:11 PM • 2 Comments •
There is an intriguing article in Scientific American about the consequences of sleep deprivation. When the brain is finally allowed to catch up with sleep, it tries to make-up for the loss of slow-wave sleep, but it also tries to...
Posted on September 20, 2007 2:14 PM • 3 Comments •
From the Independent: The head has identified research which says that teenagers would be more likely to take in what they are learning if they started school two hours later. He is considering changing the school timetable for sixth-formers as...
Posted on September 18, 2007 12:09 PM • 4 Comments •
It is Marine Megavertebrate Week right now, so why not take a look at one of the most Mega of the Megaverts - the grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus): Do whales sleep? You may have heard that dolphins do - one...
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Posted on August 9, 2007 4:59 PM • 4 Comments •
There is nothing easier than taking a bad paper - or a worse press release - and fisking it with gusto on a blog. If you happen also to know the author and keep him in contempt, the pleasure of...
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Posted on August 8, 2007 4:57 PM • 0 Comments •
This post is perhaps not my best post, but is, by far, my most popular ever. Sick and tired of politics after the 2004 election I decided to start a science-only blog - Circadiana. After a couple of days...
Read on »
Posted on July 10, 2007 5:02 PM • 7 Comments •
Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26,...
Read on »
Posted on July 6, 2007 4:50 PM • 4 Comments •
In all animals, vertebrate and invertebrate alike, one of the defining features of sleep is the "rebound", i.e., the making up for sleep debt after an acute sleep deprivation event. However, the problem of modern society is a chronic sleep...
Posted on July 2, 2007 9:34 PM • 2 Comments •
I wonder if this new study was designed better than this one: In a detailed study that served to investigate the actual nature and content of sexual dreams across a large sample of dream reports from men and women,...
Posted on June 14, 2007 10:16 PM • 0 Comments •
More stuff from SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies: Sleep Deprivation Affects Eye-steering Coordination When Driving: Driving a vehicle requires coordination of horizontal eye movements and steering. Recent research finds that even a single...
Posted on June 14, 2007 2:26 AM • 1 Comments •
Children With Sleep Disorder Symptoms Are More Likely To Have Trouble Academically: Students with symptoms of sleep disorders are more likely to receive bad grades in classes such as math, reading and writing than peers without symptoms of sleep disorders,...
Posted on June 13, 2007 9:00 AM • 1 Comments •
Sleep Deprivation Affects Airport Baggage Screeners' Ability To Detect Rare Targets: A lack of sleep may affect the performance of airport employees, which can, in turn, compromise the safety of airline passengers. Sleep deprivation can impair the ability of airport...
Posted on June 12, 2007 7:54 AM • 1 Comments •
Wide Range Of Sleep-related Disorders Associated With Abnormal Sexual Behaviors, Experiences: A paper published in the June 1st issue of the journal SLEEP is the first literature review and formal classification of a wide range of documented sleep-related disorders associated...
Posted on June 3, 2007 2:09 PM • 2 Comments •
Back in the late 1990s, when people first started using various differential screens, etc. looking for elusive "genes for sleep", I wrote in my written prelims (and reprinted it on my blog several years later): Now the sleep researchers are...
Posted on May 26, 2007 7:11 PM • 0 Comments •
If you watch Tony Wright on his webcam every single millisecond of his experiment, you will likely have some interesting experiences yourself, apart from seeing how sleep deprivation messes with his mind. And his health....
Posted on May 15, 2007 10:05 PM • 2 Comments •
Press-release just in - Deep Sleep: Researchers Discovery How To Simulate Slow Wave Activity: ----------snip------------- During slow wave activity, which occupies about 80 percent of sleeping hours, waves of electrical activity wash across the brain, roughly once a second, 1,000...
Posted on May 2, 2007 12:02 AM • 1 Comments •
It is Marine Megavertebrate Week right now, so why not take a look at one of the most Mega of the Megaverts - the grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus): Do whales sleep? You may have heard that dolphins do - one...
Read on »
Posted on April 18, 2007 1:06 PM • 5 Comments •
Good. Everyone expected it, but it is nice to have it tested and confirmed. Makes life easier and research cheaper. Measuring Movement To Assess And Manage Sleep Disorders: Actigraphy, the use of a portable device that records movement over extended...
Posted on April 9, 2007 1:35 AM • 0 Comments •
Sandra has a post about an interesting case of a person who commited a crime (and was acquitted) while sleepwalking. The term "sleep disorder" was used as a defence. But, is it a disorder at all? It naturally occurs in...
Posted on March 14, 2007 10:22 PM • 0 Comments •
The most exciting thing about this study is that this is, as far as I am aware, the first instance in which it was shown that a circadian clock gene has any effect on sleep apart from timing of it,...
Posted on March 12, 2007 12:46 AM • 1 Comments •
This is interesting: Study: Sleep linked to brain cell creation: The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science research on rats found that the hippocampus portion of the brain was directly affected by a lack of sleep for a long...
Posted on February 10, 2007 11:25 PM • 3 Comments •
Slow-wave Activity During Sleep Affected By Quality, Intensity Of Wakefulness: A study published in the February 1st issue of the journal SLEEP provides a first direct demonstration that the "quality" and "intensity" of wakefulness can affect slow-wave activity (SWA) during...
Posted on February 6, 2007 10:19 AM • 0 Comments •
If you discover a brain chemical which, when missing or malfunctioning (due to a mutation in its receptor) abruptly puts people and animals to sleep when they don't want to - a condition called narcolepsy - then you can work...
Posted on January 29, 2007 12:28 PM • 4 Comments •
Nicole Eugene recently defended her Masters Thesis called Potent Sleep: The Cultural Politics of Sleep (PDF) on a topic that I find fascinating: Why is sleep, a moment that is physiologically full and mentally boundless, thought to be a moment...
Posted on January 27, 2007 10:49 PM • 0 Comments •
I was too busy with the conference so I missed the NPR Morning Edition story on one of my favourite subjects: Adolescent Sleep, which was followed by two more stories on the same subject! I am glad to see this...
Posted on January 26, 2007 11:37 PM • 0 Comments •
Here is the second guest-post by Heinrich (from March 20, 2005):...
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Posted on December 20, 2006 11:02 AM • 0 Comments •
Jonah has a good rundown on a new paper on the neuroscience....
Posted on December 19, 2006 11:30 AM • 0 Comments •
Back in March 2005, I asked Heinrich of the She Flies With Her Own Wings blog to guest-post on Circadiana. He wrote two nice posts and this is the first of them (March 18, 2005). Perhaps I can get him...
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Posted on December 18, 2006 10:52 AM • 6 Comments •
Fluid Displacement From Legs To Neck Can Lead To Obstructive Sleep Apnea: When a person lies down, a small amount of fluid displaced from the legs to the base of the neck can narrow soft tissue around the throat and...
Posted on December 17, 2006 10:44 PM • 0 Comments •
Memory Improves After Sleep Apnea Therapy: Patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) may improve their memory by using continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). A new study published in the December issue of CHEST, the peer-reviewed journal of the American College...
Posted on December 13, 2006 11:37 PM • 1 Comments •
Now behind the Wall, but plenty of excerpts available in this March 26, 2005 post......
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Posted on December 13, 2006 10:53 AM • 1 Comments •
Recovering alcoholics with poor sleep perceptions will likely relapse: "The usual perception of alcohol's effects on sleep in nonalcoholics is that it helps sleep," explained Deirdre A. Conroy, the corresponding author who conducted the research while a postdoctoral fellow at...
Posted on November 26, 2006 10:08 PM • 0 Comments •
There is nothing easier than taking a bad paper - or a worse press release - and fisking it with gusto on a blog. If you happen also to know the author and keep him in contempt, the pleasure of...
Read on »
Posted on October 26, 2006 12:00 PM • 11 Comments •
Sleep: it's required: "....short sleep can hasten the arrival of the inevitable long sleep"...
Posted on October 24, 2006 9:03 AM • 0 Comments •
Occasionally, an article on sleep in the newspapers is actually good. Like this one....
Posted on October 20, 2006 9:55 AM • 1 Comments •
Shelley went to the Society for Neuroscience meeting and saw a talk on sleep deprivation, memory and hippocampus....
Posted on October 20, 2006 9:20 AM • 2 Comments •
Shorter Nightly Sleep In Childhood May Help Explain Obesity Epidemic: ------------------snip----------------------- This research shows that shorter sleep duration disturbs normal metabolism, which may contribute to obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Even two to three nights of shortened sleep...
Posted on October 19, 2006 8:26 PM • 0 Comments •
I tend to rant about sleep in adolescents for various reasons, but other people focus on other age groups. Infants are one such group, interesting because it takes a while for their circadian rhythms to consolidate resulting in "sleeping through...
Posted on October 18, 2006 10:00 AM • 4 Comments •
Nothing too complicated today, but something you should all know.
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Posted on October 16, 2006 10:00 AM • 0 Comments •
Study says no video games on school nights: According to Dr. Iman Sharif, the results were clear-cut. "On weekdays, the more they watched, the worse they did," said Dr. Sharif. Weekends were another matter, with gaming and TV watching habits...
Posted on October 5, 2006 11:59 AM • 2 Comments •
An article I really liked...
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Posted on October 4, 2006 11:58 AM • 5 Comments •
Since every chemical induces a different response in the body dependent on the time of day when it is administered, I am not surprised that this also applies to caffeine: A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded...
Posted on October 4, 2006 10:57 AM • 1 Comments •
No, not (just) that part - your brain. A new study shows that a single dose of Viagra makes symptoms of sleep apnea worse. And sleep deprivation resulting from sleep apnea may be one of the reasons why you may...
Posted on October 3, 2006 11:09 PM • 0 Comments •
You can see some highlights here....
Posted on October 1, 2006 2:43 PM • 0 Comments •
Over 1.6 Million Americans Use Alternative Medicine For Insomnia Or Trouble Sleeping: A recent analysis of national survey data reveals that over 1.6 million American adults use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to treat insomnia or trouble...
Posted on September 20, 2006 3:42 PM • 5 Comments •
The latest issue of Archives of Internal Medicine is devoted to sleep. The articles are freely available. Here is the press release: Incorporate Sleep Evaluation Into Routine Medical Care, Expert Says Sleep is an integral part of health, and assessment...
Posted on September 19, 2006 3:53 PM • 2 Comments •
I feel a professional duty to watch - once it is available - and review this movie about sleep deprivation and insomnia. Sounds pretty good and informed, as well as entertaining, at least according to the article: Night after night...
Posted on September 15, 2006 2:10 PM • 0 Comments •
Students not getting enough sleep: College students may believe they are being more productive when they sleep less, but in reality it is causing harm to their bodies. The National Sleep Foundation points out that receiving less than six hours...
Posted on September 15, 2006 8:57 AM • 1 Comments •
I've heard of this before, but now I see an actual study has been published: There's more to a good night's rest than going to bed early. Sleeping comes easiest and lasts longest for the wealthy, white, and female. Reporting...
Posted on September 12, 2006 12:59 PM • 1 Comments •
The fourth part of a four-part series on the topic.
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Posted on September 11, 2006 11:52 AM •
