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By Meghan Bartels No matter how much trouble your pet gets into when they’re awake, few sights are as peaceful as a dog curled up in their bed or a cat stretched out in the sun, snoring away. But their experience of sleep can feel impenetrable. What fills the dreams of a dog or cat? That’s a tricky question to answer. Snowball isn’t keeping a dream journal, and there’s no technology yet that can translate the brain activity of even a sleeping human into a secondhand experience of their dream world, much less a sleeping animal. “No one has done research on the content of animals’ dreams,” says Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University and author of the book The Committee of Sleep. But Rover’s dreamscape isn’t entirely impenetrable, at least to educated guesses. First of all, Barrett says, only your furrier friends appear to dream. Fish, for example, don’t seem to display rapid eye movement (REM), the phase of sleep during which dreams are most common in humans. “I think it’s a really good guess that they don’t have dreams in the sense of anything like the cognitive activity that we call dreams,” she says. Whether birds experience REM sleep is less clear, Barrett says. And some marine mammals always keep one side of their brain awake even while the other sleeps, with no or very strange REM sleep involved. That means seals and dolphins likely don’t dream in anything like the way humans do. But the mammals we keep as pets are solidly REM sleepers. “I think it’s a very safe, strong guess that they are having some kind of cognitive brain activity that is as much like our dreams as their waking perceptions are like ours,” she says. That doesn’t mean that cats and dogs experience humanlike dreams. “It would be a mistake to assume that other animals dream in the same way that we do, just in their nonhuman minds and bodies,” says David Peña-Guzmán, a philosopher at San Francisco State University and author of the book When Animals Dream. For example, humans rarely report scents when recounting dreams; however, we should expect dogs to dream in smells, he says, given that olfaction is so central to their waking experience of the world. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 29176 - Posted: 03.05.2024

By Carolyn Todd Any sleep tracker will show you that slumber is far from a passive affair. And no stage of sleep demonstrates that better than rapid eye movement, or REM, commonly called dream sleep. “It’s also called paradoxical sleep or active sleep, because REM sleep is actually very close to being awake,” said Dr. Rajkumar Dasgupta, a sleep medicine and pulmonary specialist at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Before scientists discovered REM sleep in the 1950s, it wasn’t clear that much of anything was happening in the brain at night. Researchers today, however, understand sleep as a highly active process composed of very different types of rest — including REM, which in some ways doesn’t seem like rest at all. While the body typically remains “off” during REM sleep, the brain is very much “on.” It’s generating vivid dreams, as well as synthesizing memories and knowledge. Scientists are still working to unravel exactly how this strange state of consciousness works. “It is fair to say that there is a lot left to learn about REM sleep,” Dr. Dasgupta said. But from what researchers do understand, REM is critical to our emotional health and brain function — and potentially even our longevity. Where does REM sleep fall in the sleep cycle? Throughout the night, “We’re going in and out of this rhythmic, symphonic pattern of the various stages of sleep: non-REM 1, 2, 3 and REM,” said Rebecca Robbins, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate scientist in the division of sleep and circadian disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29128 - Posted: 02.03.2024

Ashley Montgomery In December 1963, a military family named the Gardners had just moved to San Diego, Calif. The oldest son, 17-year-old Randy Gardner, was a self-proclaimed "science nerd." His family had moved every two years, and in every town they lived in, Gardner made sure to enter the science fair. He was determined to make a splash in the 10th Annual Greater San Diego Science Fair. When researching potential topics, Gardner heard about a radio deejay in Honolulu, Hawaii, who avoided sleep for 260 hours. So Gardner and his two friends, Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano, set out to beat this record. Randy Gardner spoke to NPR's Hidden Brain host Shankar Vedantam in 2017. When asked about his interest in breaking a sleep deprivation record, Gardner said, "I'm a very determined person, and when I get things under my craw, I can't let it go until there's some kind of a solution." Of his scientific trio, Randy lost the coin toss: He would be the test subject who would deprive himself of sleep. His two friends would take turns monitoring his mental and physical reaction times as well as making sure Gardner didn't fall asleep. The experiment began during their school's winter break on Dec. 28, 1963. Three days into sleeplessness, Gardner said, he experienced nausea and had trouble remembering things. Speaking to NPR in 2017, Gardner said: "I was really nauseous. And this went on for just about the entire rest of the experiment. And it just kept going downhill. I mean, it was crazy where you couldn't remember things. It was almost like an early Alzheimer's thing brought on by lack of sleep." But Gardner stayed awake. The experiment gained the attention of local reporters, which, in Gardner's opinion, was good for the experiment "because that kept me awake," he said. "You know, you're dealing with these people and their cameras and their questions." The news made its way to Stanford, Calif., where a young Stanford sleep researcher named William C. Dement was so intrigued that he drove to San Diego to meet Gardner. © 2024 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 29120 - Posted: 01.31.2024

By Sara Reardon Lustful male marsupials sacrifice their sleep for weeks to make more time for mating1. The antechinus, an Australian marsupial roughly the size of a gerbil, is a rare example of a mammal that mates during a certain season and never again. Roughly every August, male antechinus enter a three-week breeding frenzy in which they mate with every female they can and then die en masse. “It’s very short, very intense,” says zoologist Erika Zaid at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Males generally live for only one year; females can live for at least a year longer and produce more than one litter. To find out how males make enough time for sex in their short lives, Zaid and her colleagues trapped ten male and five female dusky antechinus (Antechinus swainsonii) and kept them in separate enclosures so they couldn’t mate. They attached activity monitors to the animals’ collars and collected blood samples to measure biomarkers. The researchers found that captive males, but not females, moved around much more and slept less during breeding season than they did the rest of the year. On average, the males’ sleep time per day was around 20% lower during the breeding season than during the non-breeding season ― and one male’s sleep time per day was more than 50% lower. At the end of breeding season, two of the males died within a few hours of one another. The other eight became sterile. To determine whether sleep loss occurs in the wild, Zaid and her colleagues trapped 38 animals from a related species called agile antechinus (A. agilis) before and during breeding season and measured the animals’ oxalic acid, a chemical in the blood whose levels drop when an animal is short on sleep. Males’ oxalic acid levels fell sharply during the breeding season. Unlike the captive females, wild females showed drops as well, suggesting that males were waking them up for shenanigans. Mysterious death © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 29113 - Posted: 01.27.2024

By Lauren Peace Tampa Bay Times Nina Shand couldn’t stay awake. She had taken afternoon naps since she was a teenager to accommodate her “work hard, play hard” attitude, but when she was in her mid-20s the sleepiness became more severe. Menial computer tasks put her to sleep, and a 20-minute drive across her city, St. Petersburg, Florida, brought on a drowsiness so intense that her eyelids would flutter, forcing her to pull over. She knew something was really wrong when she no longer felt safe behind the wheel. In 2021, she received a diagnosis: narcolepsy, a rare disorder that causes excessive daytime sleepiness. Her doctor prescribed her Adderall, the brand-name version of the amphetamine-powered medication commonly known for treating attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. It worked. For the first time in years, Shand, now 28, felt energized. She was no longer struggling at work, sneaking naps, or downing coffees to trick her body into staying awake. She felt hope. But by 2022, a national Adderall shortage meant pharmacies were no longer able to fill her prescription. Shand and countless others across the country were being turned away, left to piece together a new — and often less effective — treatment plan with doctors scrambling to meet their needs. More than a year later, the shortage continues. In October, Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives implored the FDA and Drug Enforcement Administration to work with drug manufacturers to ensure better supply. “We cannot allow this to be the continuing reality for Americans,” read their letter, led by Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.). But for now, it is.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29102 - Posted: 01.16.2024

By Laura Sanders In this busy holiday season, many of us multitask. Arctic reindeer are no exception. Reindeer can eat and sleep at the same time, a new study suggests. This timesaving strategy, described December 22 in Current Biology, adds to the number of ingenious ways animals can catch some z’s under tough conditions (SN: 11/30/23). Arctic reindeer are quite busy in the summer — eating when the sun shines around the clock and the food is abundant. Like other ruminants, reindeer spend a considerable amount of time chewing on regurgitated food, making it smaller and easier to digest. Finding time to sleep amid all this cud chewing might be tough. But not if the reindeer could sleep while they chewed. To find out if the reindeer could actually sleep-eat, neuroscientist Melanie Furrer and chronobiologist Sara Meier, along with their colleagues, trained four female Eurasian tundra reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) to tolerate a pen and electrodes on shaved patches of skin. The process involved some kicks and lots of lichen treats, “which is like candy to them,” says Meier, of the University of Zurich. The researchers were looking for the brain waves that appear during non-REM sleep, a deep, restorative sleep phase. These waves appeared when the reindeer were chewing cud, though the chewing motion itself made it hard to say whether the signal was identical to that of a regular sleep session. “We couldn’t go into detail by looking only at the brain waves, because we have this chewing in there that disturbs it a bit,” says Furrer, also of the University of Zurich. Still, other signs also pointed to sleep while chewing. The reindeer were calm while chewing, often with their eyes closed. “They were in a very relaxed state that resembles the body position of non-REM sleep,” Furrer says. Ruminating reindeer were also harder to disturb; rustling from neighboring reindeer was less likely to get a look from a ruminating reindeer. When reindeer are kept awake, they need catch-up recovery sleep. But time spent chewing decreased this time spent in recovery sleep, the researchers found. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 29072 - Posted: 12.31.2023

By Roberta McLain Dreams have fascinated people for millennia, yet we struggle to understand their purpose. Some theories suggest dreams help us deal with emotions, solve problems or manage hidden desires. Others postulate that they clean up brain waste, make memories stronger or deduce the meaning of random brain activity. A more recent theory suggests nighttime dreams protect visual areas of the brain from being co-opted during sleep by other sensory functions, such as hearing or touch. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, has proposed the idea that dreaming is necessary to safeguard the visual cortex—the part of the brain responsible for processing vision. Eagleman’s theory takes into account that the human brain is highly adaptive, with certain areas able to take on new tasks, an ability called neuroplasticity. He argues that neurons compete for survival. The brain, Eagleman explains, distributes its resources by “implementing a do-or-die competition” for brain territory in which sensory areas “gain or lose neural territory when inputs slow, stop or shift.” Experiences over a lifetime reshape the map of the brain. “Just like neighboring nations, neurons stake out their territory and chronically defend them,” he says. Eagleman points to children who have had half their brain removed because of severe health problems and then regain normal function. The remaining brain reorganizes itself and takes over the roles of the missing sections. Similarly, people who lose sight or hearing show heightened sensitivity in the remaining senses because the region of the brain normally used by the lost sense is taken over by other senses. Reorganization can happen fast. Studies published in 2007 and 2008 by Lotfi Merabet of Harvard Medical School and his colleagues showed just how quickly this takeover can happen. The 2008 study, in which subjects were blindfolded, revealed that the seizing of an idle area by other senses begins in as little as 90 minutes. And other studies found that this can occur within 45 minutes. When we sleep, we can smell, hear and feel, but visual information is absent—except during REM sleep. © 2023 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 10: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 7: Vision: From Eye to Brain
Link ID: 29045 - Posted: 12.13.2023

By Siddhant Pusdekar In the deepest stage of sleep, slow waves of electrical activity travel through your brain. They help consolidate memories and flush out the buildup of unwanted chemicals, getting you ready for the day. This midnight orchestra is responsible for many of the benefits of a good night’s sleep, such as improved attention, mood and energy levels. Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, recently found that for some people, these waves could also serve as early warning signs of diabetes. The results, published in July in Cell Reports Medicine, suggest that getting a restful sleep may help control high blood sugar. People with type 2 diabetes are unable to metabolize sugar, leading to a damaging excess concentration in the blood. The approximately 515 million people globally with type 2 diabetes can manage blood sugar through diet, exercise and medications such as insulin. But researchers and clinicians have observed that quality of sleep seems to influence blood sugar, too. “We have known that something magic happens during sleep,” says New York University neuroscientist Gyorgy Buzsaki about the links between sleep and metabolism. Yet the mechanism behind that relationship has been a mystery, he says. To investigate, the July study’s co-lead author Raphael Vallat, then a postdoctoral researcher at U.C. Berkeley, analyzed blood glucose and sleep measurements from two large independent public datasets. In the first analysis, Vallat and his colleagues examined sleep patterns measured from polysomnography, a standard assessment that doctors recommend for people with sleep problems. The procedure, typically conducted at night, involves placing a bunch of wires on different parts of the head to record activity in specific brain regions. The ends of the wires act like “microphones” that “hear” brain waves, explains Vyoma Shah, a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and co-lead author of the paper. Squiggles of different shapes and sizes on the polysomnography graphs represent the ebbs and flows of electrical activity in people’s head as they sleep throughout the night. It is only a surface-level view, however. © 2023 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 29035 - Posted: 12.09.2023

By Jake Buehler Nesting chinstrap penguins take nodding off to the extreme. The birds briefly dip into a slumber many thousands of times per day, sleeping for only seconds at a time. The penguins’ breeding colonies are noisy and stressful places, and threats from predatory birds and aggressive neighbor penguins are unrelenting. The extremely disjointed sleep schedule may help the penguins to protect their young while still getting enough shut-eye, researchers report in the Dec. 1 Science. The findings add to evidence “that avian sleep can be very different from the sleep of land mammals,” says UCLA neuroscientist Jerome Siegel. Nearly a decade ago, behavioral ecologist Won Young Lee of the Korea Polar Research Institute in Incheon noticed something peculiar about how chinstrap penguins (Pygoscelis antarcticus) nesting on Antarctica’s King George Island were sleeping. They would seemingly doze off for very short periods of time in their cacophonous colonies. Then in 2018, Lee learned about frigate birds’ ability to steal sleep while airborne on days-long flights. Lee teamed up with sleep ecophysiologist Paul-Antoine Libourel of the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center in France and other researchers to investigate the penguins’ sleep. In 2019, the team studied the daily sleep patterns of 14 nesting chinstrap penguins using data loggers mounted on the birds’ backs. The devices had electrodes surgically implanted into the penguins’ brains for measuring brain activity. Other instruments on the data loggers recorded the animals’ movements and location. Nesting penguins had incredibly fragmented sleep patterns, taking over 600 “microsleeps” an hour, each averaging only four seconds, the researchers found. At times, the penguins slept with only half of their brain; the other half stayed awake. All together, the oodles of snoozes added up, providing over 11 hours of sleep for each brain hemisphere across more than 10,000 brief sleeps each day. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 29028 - Posted: 12.02.2023

By Timmy Broderick Smell is probably our most underappreciated sense. “If you ask people which sense they would be most willing to give up, it would be the olfactory system,” says Michael Leon, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine. But a loss of smell has been linked to health complications such as depression and cognitive decline. And mounting evidence shows that olfactory training, which involves deliberately smelling strong scents on a regular basis, may help stave off that decline. Now a team of researchers led by Leon has successfully boosted cognitive performance by exposing people to smells while they sleep. Twenty participants—all older than 60 years and generally healthy—received six months of overnight olfactory enrichment, and all significantly improved their ability to recall lists of words compared with a control group. The study appeared in Frontiers in Neuroscience. The scientists are unsure about how the overnight odors may have produced this result, but Leon notes that the neurons involved in olfaction have “direct superhighway access” to brain regions related to memory and emotion. In participants who received the treatment, the study authors observed physical changes in a brain structure that connects the memory and emotional centers—a pathway that often deteriorates as people age, especially in those with Alzheimer's disease. Previous successful attempts to boost memory with odors typically relied on complicated interventions with multiple exposures a day. If the nighttime treatment proves successful in larger trials, it promises to be a less intrusive way to achieve similar effects, says Vidya Kamath, a neuropsychologist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the recent study. Larger trials may also help answer some remaining questions. The new study used widely available essential oils such as rose and eucalyptus, but researchers aren't sure if just any odor would get the same results. They don't know how much an odor's qualities—whether it's foul or pleasant to people, for example—affects the cognitive gains. It is also unclear how much novelty plays a role, says Michał Pieniak, a psychology researcher at the University of Wroclaw in Poland who has studied olfactory training. © 2023 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 29010 - Posted: 11.18.2023

By Jocelyn Solis-Moreira When the alarm goes off in the early morning, it’s tempting to hit the snooze button and curl back under the warm covers for a few more minutes of slumber. This repeated postponing of the buzzer is often thought of as a bad habit—one that creates not only a lazy start to a day but also a fragmented sleep pattern that’s detrimental to health. Now, however, a growing body of recent research is contradicting this notion. A new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research found that people who regularly press the snooze button lost only about six minutes of sleep per night—and that it didn’t affect their morning sleepiness or mood. In fact, tests showed that it actually improved cognition. This adds to research in 2022 that also found chronic snoozers generally felt no sleepier than nonsnoozers. “Snoozing for a limited time in the morning is probably not bad for you,” says the new study’s lead author Tina Sundelin, a sleep researcher at Stockholm University. She says that her study is one of few that have directly tested snoozing’s effect on sleep health, and it supplies evidence that snoozing doesn’t break up sleep in a harmful way. Scientific American spoke with sleep experts on the science of snoozing and how the habit may actually be good for you—if you do it right. The Potential Benefits of Snoozing Snoozing does shorten sleep, Sundelin says, but she maintains that it’s not as bad as scientists once thought. Past research has suggested that the extra minutes snoozers get don’t really help them feel more rested—and repeatedly waking up and trying to sleep again has been thought to prevent the restorative stages of sleep, including rapid-eye movement (REM). Other research has suggested that waking someone in the middle of their sleep cycle causes them to feel sleepier throughout the day. “If you disturb someone’s sleep, it’s not good-quality sleep, and they often feel tired afterwards—but this [idea] is based on a whole night of sleep fragmentation,” explains Sundelin, who adds that most theories about snoozing are “inferred from what we know about sleep in general.” © 2023 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 29005 - Posted: 11.15.2023

By Regina G. Barber What your parents didn't tell you about pulling an all-nighter? It might just ease depression for several days. At least, that's what researchers found happened to mice in a study published in the journal Neuron Thursday. Most people who've stayed up all night know the "tired and wired" feeling they get the next day. The body might be exhausted, but the brain feels jittery, hyperactive or even giddy. Even after these changes wear off, sleep loss can have a strong antidepressant effect in people that lasts several days. But researchers hadn't figured out why sleeplessness might have this effect —until this study from neurobiologists at Northwestern University. To study all of this, the team looked at the effects of sleep loss in mice. They induced sleep loss in some of the mice, while the others got a typical night's rest. They found that after this sleepless night, the mice were more excitable, more aggressive, more sexual and less depressed than mice that got a regular amount of sleep. Of course, researchers can't just ask mice whether they feel "less depressed." Instead, they created a depression-like state in all the mice before either disrupting their sleep or allowing them to rest by repeatedly giving them small shocks. In response to these shocks, the mice entered a depressive-like state and eventually stopped trying to escape their cages. Then, they tested the mice's response to shocks again. The ones that had stayed up all night showed a reversed depressive state, indicated by more attempts to escape the shocks. Dopamine is responsible for the brain's reward response. Changes in the brain's dopamine system have also been implicated in conditions like depression and in sleep regulation. And so, to see how the mice's brains responded to their sleepless night, the researchers measured dopamine neuron activity. They saw that sleep-deprived mice showed higher dopamine activity in three regions: the prefrontal cortex, nucleus accumbens and hypothalamus. © 2023 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 28985 - Posted: 11.04.2023

Anil Oza Scientists once considered sleep to be like a shade getting drawn over a window between the brain and the outside world: when the shade is closed, the brain stops reacting to outside stimuli. A study published on 12 October in Nature Neuroscience1 suggests that there might be periods during sleep when that shade is partially open. Depending on what researchers said to them, participants in the study would either smile or frown on cue in certain phases of sleep. “You’re not supposed to be able to do stuff while you sleep,” says Delphine Oudiette, a cognitive scientist at the Paris Brain Institute in France and a co-author of the study. Historically, the definition of sleep is that consciousness of your environment halts, she adds. “It means you don’t react to the external world.” Dream time A few years ago, however, Oudiette began questioning this definition after she and her team conducted an experiment in which they were able to communicate with people who are aware that they are dreaming while they sleep — otherwise known as lucid dreamers. During these people’s dreams, experimenters were able to ask questions and get responses through eye and facial-muscle movements2. Karen Konkoly, who was a co-author on that study and a cognitive scientist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, says that after that paper came out, “it was a big open question in our minds whether communication would be possible with non-lucid dreamers”. So Oudiette continued with the work. In her latest study, she and her colleagues observed 27 people with narcolepsy — characterized by daytime sleepiness and a high frequency of lucid dreams — and 22 people without the condition. While they were sleeping, participants were repeatedly asked to frown or smile. All of them responded accurately to at least 70% of these prompts. © 2023 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 28968 - Posted: 10.25.2023

By Hallie Levine Finding that a good night’s rest has become more elusive over the years? Live well every day with tips and guidance on food, fitness and mental health, delivered to your inbox every Thursday. Older people need about the same amount of sleep as younger ones — generally, seven to eight hours, says Rosanne M. Leipzig, a professor of geriatrics and palliative medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. But about 30 percent of older people get less than seven hours of sleep daily, and almost 20 percent report either frequent insomnia or poor sleep quality, according to a 2022 study published in the journal BMC Public Health. If you have been struggling with sleep, consider the following. How your sleep cycle changes Older adults tend to have less deep (what’s called non-REM) sleep, says Ronald Chervin, chief of the Division of Sleep Medicine at University of Michigan Health in Ann Arbor. So “you may find that you’re woken more by things that would not have disturbed you before,” Leipzig says. You may also notice that you become sleepy earlier in the evening. “As we get older, our circadian rhythm — the body’s internal clock — changes,” Chervin says. This may lead you to head off to sleep earlier at night and wake up earlier in the morning. In addition, at night, older people tend to produce less antidiuretic hormone — which “instructs” the kidneys to cut back on creating fluid — than they once did, Leipzig says. As a result, you may wake up more often at night with the need to urinate. Other medical conditions, such as prostate problems or diabetes, can also contribute to those middle-of-the-night bathroom visits.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 28964 - Posted: 10.17.2023

By Stephanie Pappas Your bedmate is whimpering in their sleep and perhaps thrashing about. It looks like a nightmare. Should you wake them? Nope, experts say. As terrible as whatever visions that are running through their head might be, waking someone from a nightmare is more likely to ensure that they’ll remember the bad dream. And if someone appears physically distressed in their sleep like this, it’s more likely that they’re having a night terror than a nightmare; night terrors are different neurological experiences. Nightmares are a normal part of dreaming, says Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School and author of The Committee of Sleep (Oneiroi Press, 2001). They almost always happen in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, the stage of sleep marked by brain activity that looks very similar to that of an awake brain. “Except for being scary, they look like every other dream,” Barrett says. During REM sleep, the brain areas responsible for long-term memory storage show altered activation, so people don’t tend to remember their nightmares unless those sleep tales are scary enough to wake them up. Once a dreamer awakens, their long-term memory regions come back on line. Most of the time, someone having a nightmare will be indistinguishable from a peaceful dreamer. During a nightmare, heart rate increases by seven beats per minute on average, says Michael Schredl, a dream and sleep researcher at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Germany. Otherwise the sleeper typically lies still in bed: during REM sleep, muscles are paralyzed, which keeps people from acting out their dreams. If someone is moving around, talking in their sleep or sleepwalking while appearing distressed, it’s more likely a night terror, which occurs during non-REM sleep, Schredl says.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 28946 - Posted: 10.07.2023

By Katherine Harmon Courage On the surface, sleep seems obvious, essential. It comes in long, languid, predictable waves, washing over humans and elephants, birds and fish and beetles. It comes bearing restoration, repair, learning. It follows an ancestral rhythm played deep within our cells, cued by the movement of our planet around our star. Perhaps we could believe this nice, simple fantasy, were it not for an irksome little eyeless fish. More than a decade ago, this fish—the Mexican tetra (Astyanax mexicanus)—caught the eye of a graduate student at New York University. It was not new to science—it had been the subject of fascination for aquarists and researchers for decades, who marveled at its ghostly appearance and the splash of skin where its eyes should have been. But other quirks of the fish turned out to be even more mysterious. In Manhattan, the fish were far from their place of origin: a collection of unassuming caves strung through northeastern Mexico. Inside these caves, it is pitch dark, always cool, quiet, and rather boring. A seemingly perfect place to sleep. So Erik Duboué, the curious graduate student, decided to test if these fish showed any unusual sleep habits. One night in 2009, he made a 2 a.m. visit to the lab and noticed something strange about these sightless fish: They seemed wide awake. On further investigation, he found that despite their soporific native environs, they actually hardly sleep at all. In fact, he discovered, they doze just about three and a half hours out of each 24-hour period. And their bouts of sleep seem to come on entirely randomly and only in brief spurts. Curiously, these eyeless cavefish seem to have been flourishing on this quiescence interruptus for hundreds of thousands of years. “What you have is a fish that is completely healthy—it just doesn’t need to sleep,” says Duboué, who is now a molecular geneticist at Florida Atlantic University. Since then, Duboué and others have been studying the strange sleep of these wakeful creatures—prodding them in the lab to rouse them from their occasional slumber and plumbing their DNA. Combined with investigations into other animals, as well as some peculiar experiments that have sent humans to sleep in caves, scientists are uncovering new, closely guarded truths about sleep that have eluded us in our bright, rhythmic world. © 2023 NautilusNext Inc.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 28941 - Posted: 10.03.2023

By Stephanie Pappas If you’ve ever awoken from a vivid dream only to find that you can’t remember the details by the end of breakfast, you’re not alone. People forget most of the dreams they have—though it is possible to train yourself to remember more of them. Dreaming happens mostly (though not always exclusively) during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. During this sleep stage, brain activity looks similar to that in a waking brain, with some very important differences. Key among them: during REM sleep, the areas of the brain that transfer memories into long-term storage—as well as the long-term storage areas themselves—are relatively deactivated, says Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard Medical School and author of the book The Committee of Sleep (Oneiroi Press, 2001). This may be a side effect of REM’s role in memory consolidation, according to a 2019 study on mice in the journal Science. Short-term memory areas are active during REM sleep, but those only hang on to memories for about 30 seconds. “You have to wake up from REM sleep, generally, to recall a dream,” Barrett says. If, instead, you pass into the next stage of sleep without rousing, that dream will never enter long-term memory. REM sleep occurs about every 90 minutes, and it lengthens as the night drags on. The first REM cycle of the night is typically just a few minutes long, but by the end of an eight-hour night of sleep, a person has typically been in the REM stage for a good 20 minutes, Barrett says. That’s why the strongest correlation between any life circumstance and your memory of dreams is the number of hours you’ve slept. If you sleep only six hours, you’re getting less than half of the dream time of an eight-hour night, she says. Those final hours of sleep are the most important for dreaming. And people tend to remember the last dream of the night—the one just before waking. © 2023 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 28939 - Posted: 10.03.2023

By Meghan Rosen Maybe TikTok showed you people putting a little tape on their lips. Or maybe Instagram served you ads for sticky mouth strips. On social media and beyond, a trend called mouth taping is keeping people’s mouths shut at night — helping them breathe through their nose. Zack Ford, age 38, first tried the trend last month, after recovering from surgery for a deviated septum. Surgery improved his nasal breathing, but at night, he was still sucking air through his lips. In the mornings, Ford says, he’d wake up with a dry mouth and a scratchy throat. Ford brought up mouth taping during an appointment with his doctor, who didn’t think there was harm in trying. That evening, Ford placed a small square of surgical tape over the middle of his lips and settled into bed. It was the best night’s sleep he’s had in recent memory, he says. “When I woke up, I was like, ‘Holy shit this works!’” Mouth taping’s benefits have been touted for everything from the dental to the somnial. People may seal their mouths shut to prevent teeth grinding, bad breath, snoring and sleep apnea — or even to boost fitness or get a stronger jaw. But there’s little data yet to support such claims, dentist Jonathan Quigley wrote in a June 23 letter in the British Dental Journal. Before advising patients, Quigley, who works at a dental clinic in England, would like to see more studies and have a better understanding of the potential risks and benefits. Could taping the mouth improve people’s sleep? Some evidence suggests that mouth taping may have merit for helping treat at least one ailment: sleep apnea. Even here, though, the science is skimpy, and the methods are varied. From a thin strip on the lips to a black patch across the mouth, tape types and techniques can differ between people, brands and studies, making it difficult to draw broad conclusions. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 28927 - Posted: 09.27.2023

By Carolyn Wilke Young jumping spiders dangle by a thread through the night, in a box, in a lab. Every so often, their legs curl and their spinnerets twitch — and the retinas of their eyes, visible through their translucent exoskeletons, shift back and forth. “What these spiders are doing seems to be resembling — very closely — REM sleep,” says Daniela Rößler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. During REM (which stands for rapid eye movement), a sleeping animal’s eyes dart about unpredictably, among other features. In people, REM is when most dreaming happens, particularly the most vivid dreams. Which leads to an intriguing question. If spiders have REM sleep, might dreams also unfold in their poppy-seed-size brains? Rößler and her colleagues reported on the retina-swiveling spiders in 2022. Training cameras on 34 spiders, they found that the creatures had brief REM-like spells about every 17 minutes. The eye-darting behavior was specific to these bouts: It didn’t happen at times in the night when the jumping spiders stirred, stretched, readjusted their silk lines or cleaned themselves with a brush of a leg. Though the spiders are motionless in the run-up to these REM-like bouts, the team hasn’t yet proved that they are sleeping. But if it turns out that they are — and if what looks like REM really is REM — dreaming is a distinct possibility, Rößler says. She finds it easy to imagine that jumping spiders, as highly visual animals, might benefit from dreams as a way to process information they took in during the day. Young jumping spiders have translucent skin. Behind their eyes, tube-shaped retinas move as the spiderlings look about. As shown in this sped-up video, researchers have also observed such retinal tube-shifting behavior in resting — possibly sleeping — spiders. In these intermittent, active bouts, the animals’ legs curl and their spinnerets twitch — suggesting that spiders may experience something like REM sleep. © 2023 Annual Reviews

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 28896 - Posted: 09.07.2023

By Maria Temming When Christopher Mazurek realizes he’s dreaming, it’s always the small stuff that tips him off. The first time it happened, Mazurek was a freshman at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. In the dream, he found himself in a campus dining hall. It was winter, but Mazurek wasn’t wearing his favorite coat. “I realized that, OK, if I don’t have the coat, I must be dreaming,” Mazurek says. That epiphany rocked the dream like an earthquake. “Gravity shifted, and I was flung down a hallway that seemed to go on for miles,” he says. “My left arm disappeared, and then I woke up.” Most people rarely if ever realize that they’re dreaming while it’s happening, what’s known as lucid dreaming. But some enthusiasts have cultivated techniques to become self-aware in their sleep and even wrest some control over their dream selves and settings. Mazurek, 24, says that he’s gotten better at molding his lucid dreams since that first whirlwind experience, sometimes taking them as opportunities to try flying or say hi to deceased family members. Other lucid dreamers have used their personal virtual realities to plumb their subconscious minds for insights or feast on junk food without real-world consequences. But now, scientists have a new job for lucid dreamers: to explore their dreamscapes and report out in real time. Dream research has traditionally relied on reports collected after someone wakes up. But people often wake with only spotty, distorted memories of what they dreamed. The dreamers can’t say exactly when events occurred, and they certainly can’t tailor their dreams to specific scientific studies. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2023.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 28891 - Posted: 08.30.2023