sleep
clock | December 2, 2007All-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 Sleep Problems:
With the holiday season's hustle and bustle in full swing, most of us will race to our favorite coffee shop to get that caffeine boost to make it through the day. However, that daily jolt that we crave might be the reason we need the caffeine in the first place.
Insufficient Sleep Raises Risk Of Diabetes, Study…
clock | October 24, 2007Being 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, Scientists Look to Bird Brains - was the one most interesting to me personally. But you may find the other articles interesting as well:
From Faithful Dogs and Difficult Fish, Insight Into Narcolepsy
At Every Age, Feeling the Effects of Too Little Sleep
In the Dreamscape of Nightmares, Clues to Why We Dream at All
An Active, Purposeful Machine That Comes Out at Night to Play
The…
sb admin | October 5, 2007
Via The Center for Narcolepsy at Stanford School of Medicine], this video explains:
Various narcoleptic episodes in dogs. Sporadic cases of narcolepsy in dogs is due to hypocretin peptide deficiency while the familial form is due to mutations in one of the two hypocretin receptor genes (hcrtr2). Various dogs are shown here in a clip narrated by Dr. Emmanuel Mignot.
Or for the tabloid take, watch Skeeter the Narcoleptic Poodle from Inside Edition. "Skeeter's troubles staying awake are heartbreaking..."
Visit the Sleep Foundation to learn more.
clock | September 20, 2007There 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 make up for the loss of REM sleep as well - by making it more intense! As a result, the dreams are like scenes from something like "Jumanji" - wild animals running around and other crazy stuff. A very good article about various ideas on the function of sleep and dreams.
clock | September 18, 2007From 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 a result.
"We have always assumed that learning early in the morning is best, probably because it is best for young children and adults," he writes. " Unfortunately, it is not true for teenagers. When teenagers are woken up at our morning time, their brain tells them they should be asleep. So they use stimulants such as coffee and cigarettes to get…
clock | August 9, 2007It 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 hemisphere at the time, while swimming, and not for very long periods at a time. A combined Russian/US team of researchers published a study in 2000 - to my knowledge the best to date - on sleep-wake and activity patterns of the grey whale: Rest and activity states in a gray whale (pdf) by Lyamin, Manger, Mukhametov, Siegel and Shpak.
The whale in the experiment rested in two…
clock | August 8, 2007There 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 destroying the article is even greater.
It is much, much harder to write (and to excite readers with) a blog post about an excellent paper published by your dear friends. But I'll try to do this now anyway (after the cut).
Paul Shaw is a friend, and Indrani Ganguli is a good, good, good friend. Faculty and graduate students in biology are usually a pretty smart lot. A subset of those, as self-…
clock | July 10, 2007
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 of fiddling with the templae, on January 8, 2005, I posted the very first post, this one, at 2:53 AM and went to bed. When I woke up I was astonished as the Sitemeter was going wild! This post was linked by BoingBoing and later that day, by Andrew Sullivan. It has been linked by people ever since, as recently as a couple of days ago, although the post is a year and a half old.…
clock | July 6, 2007Earlier 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, 2006. Also check my more recent posts on the subject here and here...
I am glad to see that there is more and more interest in and awareness of sleep research. Just watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN or listen to the recent segment on Weekend America on NPR.
At the same time, I am often alarmed at the levels of ignorance still rampant in the general population, and even more…
clock | July 2, 2007In 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 loss in humans - when you loos a couple of hours of needed sleep every day.
Now, a team at Northwestern studied the effects of chronic sleep loss and, lo and behold - bad news! There is no rebound after chronic sleep deprivation.
Chronically sleep deprived? You can't make up for lost sleep:
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In the study, the researchers kept…
clock | June 14, 2007I 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, approximately eight percent of everyday dream reports from both genders contain some form of sexual-related activity.
The percentage of women that reported such dreams can be due to the fact that either women actually experience more sexual dreams now than they did 40 years ago, or that they now feel more comfortable reporting such dreams due to changing social roles and attitudes…
clock | June 13, 2007More 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 night of sleep deprivation can impact a person's ability to coordinate eye movements with steering.
Extra Sleep Improves Athletes' Performance:
Athletes who get an extra amount of sleep are more likely to improve their performance in a game, according to recent research.
Going To Bed Late May Affect The…
purepedantry | June 13, 2007The SLEEP 2007 meeting is going on right now, so I have been trying to keep up with sleep-related news.
Here are two important stories:
First, college students who pull lots of all-nighters have lower GPAs:
A common practice among many college students involves "pulling all-nighters", or a single night of total sleep deprivation, a practice associated with lower grade-point averages compared to those who make time for sleep, according to a research abstract that will be presented Wednesday at SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS).
"Sleep…
clock | June 13, 2007Children 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, according to recent research.
Slow Wave Activity During Sleep Is Lower In African-Americans Than Caucasians:
Slow wave activity (SWA), a stable trait dependent marker of the intensity of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, is lower in young healthy African-Americans compared to Caucasians who were matched for age, gender and body weight,…
clock | June 12, 2007Sleep 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 baggage screeners to visually search for and detect infrequently occurring or low prevalence targets that may ultimately pose a threat to an airline and its passengers, according to new research.
Night Shift Nurses More Likely To Have Poor Sleep Habits:
Nurses who work the night shift are more likely to have poor sleep habits, a…
clock | June 3, 2007Wide 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 with abnormal sexual behaviors and experiences. These abnormal sexual behaviors, which emerge during sleep, are referred to as "sleepsex" or "sexsomnia".
See also this, this and this.
Why Patients With Obstructive Sleep Apnea Are At Higher Risk For Cardiovascular Disease:
Researchers have found that patients with…
clock | May 26, 2007Back 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 jumping on the bandwagon of molecular techniques. They are screening for differences in gene expression between sleeping and awake humans (or rats or mice), searching quite openly for the "genes for sleep". Every time they "fish out" a gene, it turns out to be Protein kinase A, a dopamine receptor, or something similar with a general function in the brain…
clock | May 15, 2007If 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.
clock | May 1, 2007Press-release just in - Deep Sleep: Researchers Discovery How To Simulate Slow Wave Activity:
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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 times a night. In a new paper being published in the scientific journal PNAS, Tononi and colleagues, including Marcello Massimini, also of the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, described the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to initiate slow waves in sleeping volunteers. The researchers…
clock | April 18, 2007It 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 hemisphere at the time, while swimming, and not for very long periods at a time. A combined Russian/US team of researchers published a study in 2000 - to my knowledge the best to date - on sleep-wake and activity patterns of the grey whale: Rest and activity states in a gray whale (pdf) by Lyamin, Manger, Mukhametov, Siegel and Shpak.
The whale in the experiment rested in two…