By HENRY ALFORD COILED viper-like within the word “insomnia” is the terrifying “omnia.” Why does sleeplessness seem all-powerful? Because some nights I can’t get down into the Valley regardless of how many Dolls I lash to my burro. I’m not alone. It’s difficult to go to a Manhattan cocktail party these days and not get roped into a discussion of someone’s insomnia or the relative merits of melatonin and “snore absorption rooms.” If you find yourself buttonholed by a well-heeled but heavy-lidded person, prepare for a slightly defensive diatribe called “Why I Have Recently Purchased a $60,000 Mattress.” Glamorous (and sometimes dubious-sounding) treatments continue to pop up, a fact underlined by last week’s designation by the National Sleep Foundation as sleep awareness week. Europe’s first “nap bar” recently opened in Paris, giving the weary a place to rest on a massage chair or zero-gravity chair. The Grand Resort Bad Ragaz in Switzerland will film your sleeping patterns during the night and then analyze them and suggest cures. At La Mansión del Rio in San Antonio, you’re encouraged to put some of the resort’s “worry dolls” (one doll for each of your worries) under your pillow so that, through Indian magicking, you’ll awake liberated, fresh, burden-free — a person who can crush a plaything solely with the force of his head. In Midtown Manhattan, the Benjamin Hotel employs a sleep concierge, on call to help guests choose from 12 free sleep-friendly pillows, as well as field requests for sleep aids like massages and midnight snacks (e.g., hot chocolate or milk and cookies). © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16532 - Posted: 03.17.2012

By RONI CARYN RABIN Talk about sleepless nights. Patients taking prescription sleep aids on a regular basis were nearly five times as likely as non-users to die over a period of two and a half years, according to a recent study. Even those prescribed fewer than 20 pills a year were at risk, the researchers found; heavy users also were more likely to develop cancer. Unsurprisingly, the findings, published online in the journal BMJ, have caused a quite a stir. Americans filled some 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year, up from 47 million in 2006, according to IMS Health, a health care services company. Panicked patients have been calling doctors’ offices seeking reassurance; some others simply quit the pills cold turkey. Some experts were quick to point out the study’s shortcomings. The analysis did not prove that sleeping pills cause death, critics noted, only that there may be a correlation between the two. And while the authors suggested the sleeping pills were a factor in the deaths, those who use sleep aids tend as a group to be sicker than those who don’t use them. The deaths may simply be a reflection of poorer health. Still, the findings underscore concern about the exploding use of sleeping pills. Experts say that many patients, especially the elderly, should exercise more caution when using sleep medications, including the non-benzodiazepine hypnotics so popular today, like zolpidem (brand name Ambien), eszopiclone (Lunesta) and zaleplon (Sonata). © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16505 - Posted: 03.13.2012

By Melissa Dahl One of the less-talked-about side effects of being blind: fielding many (many!) questions from us sighted folks -- enough questions, apparently, to program a YouTube channel. Tommy Edison, who is blind, hosts the popular YouTube series "The Tommy Edison Experience," where he answers viewer questions: How do blind people use an ATM? How do blind people use paper money? In one of his latest videos, he posts his answer to a fascinating question: How do blind people dream? Edison explains that he's been blind since birth, so, no, he doesn't "see" in his dreams. "I think because I’ve never seen in real life, that my sub-conscious doesn’t know what it’d be like to see, either, so, no. I don’t see in my dreams,” Edison explains in the video. “I mean, the way it works for me, is just the way my life occurs, right? So it’s all smell, sound, taste and touch," he continues. "That’s all there is. Just like your life works. I mean, you see in your life, so, obviously, you’d see in your dreams." To someone who's always been able to see, though, that description might be surprising. (Edison dreams in Smell-O-Vision?) Most sighted people remember the images and emotions from a dream -- but smells, sounds, tastes and touches, maybe not so much. "You guys, you’re visually driven," Edison said to me in a phone interview. "I don’t know, 'cause I’ve never seen, but I would think if there was something very prevalent -- like if there was a fire in your dream -- I would think you would remember the smell of it. Or take a bite of the hamburger, and it tastes like lobster -- that’s going to be a funny thing you'd remember." © 2012 msnbc.com

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 9: Hearing, Vestibular Perception, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 16501 - Posted: 03.12.2012

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff Parents may want to pay a bit more attention to how their toddlers sleep -- whether they snore, gasp for breath, or breathe with their mouth open -- since a new study published today in Pediatrics links these disordered breathing behaviors to a higher likelihood of behavioral problems all the way through second grade. Examining surveys filled out by more than 8,000 British parents, researchers from New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that those who reported that their children snored or had other breathing abnormalities while sleeping from the age of 6 months to 7 years were 50 percent more likely than their peers who breathed normally to exhibit some sort of behavioral problem such as hyperactivity, frequent temper tantrums, or anxiety. Children who fell into the “worst case” group, where snoring and other breathing issues started early, occurred frequently, and lasted into elementary school, were more than twice as likely to wind up with behavior issues. Nearly 18 percent of them had some sort of behavioral problem by age 7 compared with slightly more than 8 percent of those who didn’t snore. (The researchers took into account differences between the groups on characteristics including body mass index, premature birth, and whether their mothers smoked during pregnancy.) © 2012 NY Times Co

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16484 - Posted: 03.08.2012

By Linda Searing, THE QUESTION Prescription sleep medications, also called hypnotics, rank among the most-advertised and most-prescribed drugs in the United States. Might these pills be doing more than helping people get a good night’s sleep? THIS STUDY analyzed data on 34,205 adults (average age, 54), including 10,531 people prescribed such sleeping pills as Ambien, Lunesta, Restoril and Sonata. Compared with people who took no sleeping pills, those taking the drugs were more likely to have died in a 21 / 2-year span, with the risk rising along with the amount of medication. People who were prescribed 18 or fewer sleeping pills a year were 3.6 times as likely to die as those who took none of the drugs; risk was 4.3 times as high for those prescribed 18 to 132 doses and 5.3 times as high for those taking more than 132 pills a year. Also, people taking the highest doses were 35 percent more likely to have developed a major cancer, not including melanoma, during that period. The increased risks for death and cancer were found to be not attributable to preexisting diseases. WHO MAY BE AFFECTED? Adults who take sleeping pills. Studies have found that more than a fourth of U.S. residents do not get enough sleep, and about 10 percent of the population has chronic insomnia. The study authors wrote that an estimated 6 to 10 percent of Americans take sleeping pills. CAVEATS The results suggest an association, but the study was not designed to prove absolute cause and effect. The data did not include information on social and psychological disorders because that information was protected by law in the state where participants lived. The data were based on the number of doses prescribed in a year, not the actual number taken. © 1996-2012 The Washington Post

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16478 - Posted: 03.06.2012

By Rachael Rettner Caffeine will get you going during the day but could leave you tossing and turning at night unless you're a "night owl" to begin with, a new study suggests. In the study, "morning people" who consumed caffeine during the day appeared more likely than late risers to awaken in the middle of their nighttime sleep. The researchers said this is the first study to link caffeine intake with "chronotype," the categorizing of people by the time of day they are most alert and active. The findings are preliminary and more research is needed to confirm them, the researchers added. Fifty college students were asked to record their caffeine consumption and their sleeping and waking times for a week. The students wore wrist devices that monitored their movements, to assess whether they had periods of wakefulness after they had fallen asleep. The researchers also measured caffeine levels in the students' saliva over the week. As college students, they tended to be so sleep-deprived that, for most, "it didn't matter how much caffeine they had"  they slept well whenever they finally hit the sack, said study researcher Jamie Zeitzer, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford University. However, for the early risers, the more caffeine in their bodies, the more time they spent awake during the night after initially falling asleep. This was not seen in the night owls. © 2012 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 4: The Chemical Bases of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Link ID: 16466 - Posted: 03.03.2012

The belief that older people tend to suffer worse sleep may be false - in fact the reverse may be true, according to US researchers. A telephone survey of more than 150,000 adults suggested that, apart from a blip in your 40s, sleep quality gets better with age. Those in their 80s reported the best sleep, says the study in Sleep journal. A UK sleep researcher said while poor health could affect sleep, it was a "myth" that age alone was a factor. While universities have equipment which can measure sleep duration and disturbance in study volunteers, this does not always match the volunteer's own opinion on their night's rest. The research, conducted by the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology at the University of Pennsylvania, instead focused on asking large numbers of randomly selected people about their sleep. They were also asked about their race, income, education, mood and general health. While being depressed or having health problems was linked to poor sleep quality, once the researchers had adjusted the results to compensate for this, a distinct pattern emerged. BBC © 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16456 - Posted: 03.01.2012

By Stephen Dougherty Today anesthetics are considered as routine as a trip to the dentist. They have been around at least since the 18th century when a talented chemist named Humphry Davy discovered the mysterious effect of nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Davy, young and ambitious, set out to rigorously test the gas’s effect, inhaling nitrous oxide daily for several months. Under slightly less rigorous conditions, Davy shared the gas with a distinguished group of friends including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Watt, and Robert Southey—who wrote in a letter that “the atmosphere of the highest of all possible heavens must be composed of this gas.” These early trials laid the foundation for anesthesia’s emergence in medicine today. Yet in the modern era, despite tremendous advances in the quality and selectivity of anesthetics, we still have a poor understanding of how anesthetics work in the brain. Highlighting these fundamental gaps in knowledge, a group of researchers recently made a surprising discovery about how we transition out of consciousness and back. The common view holds that going under (induction) and coming back up (emergence) are the same process, albeit in different directions. However, a recent study published in the journal PLoS ONE suggests that going under is not the same as coming back up. The researchers, led by Dr. Max Kelz at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, observed that less anesthetic is required to keep the brain anesthetized than to induce unconsciousness. To explain these observations, the researchers have introduced a concept they call “neural inertia,” referring to the brain’s resistance to transitions between consciousness and unconsciousness. © 2012 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16455 - Posted: 03.01.2012

By Michelle Roberts Health reporter, BBC News Sleeping pills used by thousands of people in the UK appear to be linked with a higher death risk, doctors warn. The American study in BMJ Open compared more than 10,000 patients on tablets like temazepam with 23,000 similar patients not taking these drugs. Death risk among users was about four times higher, although the absolute risk was still relatively low. Experts say while the findings highlight a potential risk, proof of harm is still lacking. They say patients should not be alarmed nor stop their medication, but if they are concerned they should discuss this with their doctor or pharmacist. UK guidelines for NHS staff say hypnotic drugs should only be used for short periods of time because of tolerance to the drug and the risk of dependency. But they make no mention of an associated death risk, despite other studies having already reported this potential risk. The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency said it would consider the results of this latest study and whether it has any implications for current prescribing guidance. BBC © 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16448 - Posted: 02.28.2012

By Laura Sanders Sleep deprivation makes the brain groggy, but as waking hours mount nerve cells grow increasingly jumpy, a new study shows. This amped-up state may explain why seizures and hallucinations can accompany an all-nighter. More generally, the results help clarify what goes wrong in a brain deprived of shut-eye. “It’s an important finding,” says neuroscientist Christopher Colwell of UCLA. “Sleep deprivation is an area of huge interest because most of us do not get enough sleep.” By subjecting six people to a night of sleep deprivation and measuring their brain responses, Marcello Massimini of the University of Milan and colleagues found that people’s brains become more reactive as hours awake accumulate. To look for signs of altered brain function, the team delivered a jolt of magnetic current to the participants’ skulls that kicked off an electrical response in the nerve cells (an effect like the noise made when a hammer strikes a bell). With electrodes on the scalp, the team measured the strength of this electrical response in the frontal cortex, a brain region that’s involved in making executive decisions. After a night of sleep deprivation, participants’ electrical responses were stronger than they were the previous day, the scientists report online February 7 in Cerebral Cortex. This overreaction disappeared after a night’s sleep. The results offer support for a theory of why people sleep: During waking hours, the brain accumulates connections between nerve cells as new things are learned. Sleep, the theory says, sweeps the brain of extraneous clutter, leaving behind only the most important connections. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 16383 - Posted: 02.16.2012

By Tina Hesman Saey On February 2, groundhog weatherman Punxsutawney Phil roused from hibernation to predict six more weeks of winter. Scientists may snicker at people who think they can learn about the arrival of spring from a furry rodent, but researchers aren’t laughing when it comes to learning about human health from animals that check out for the winter. Understanding how hibernators, including ground squirrels, marmots and bears, survive their long winter’s naps may one day offer solutions for problems such as heart disease, osteoporosis and muscular dystrophy. Despite appearances, hibernation is not the same as going to sleep for a long time. It is extreme living by any measure. For about half the year, hibernating animals stay in their dens or burrows in a state of suspended animation, waking up every now and again to go to the bathroom. Most hibernators eat or drink nothing, living solely off the fat they built up before winter began. To make fat stores last, animals lower their metabolism and body temperatures. Black bear body temperatures drop to about 33º Celsius (about 91º Fahrenheit), but the bodies of most small mammal hibernators, such as ground squirrels and woodchucks, plunge to nearly freezing. Some Arctic ground squirrels hold steady at subzero temperatures. For all these animals, heartbeats and breathing nearly cease. These are feats of physiological daring that non-hibernators, including humans, could never survive. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of Internal States
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 16372 - Posted: 02.14.2012

By Tina Saey Some people can forgo sleep and still stay sharp. But a new experiment with fruit flies suggests even those gifted people may be making an evolutionary trade-off that ensures sleep is here to stay. A variation in a single gene enables a strain of fruit flies to miss 12 hours of sleep without building up a sleep debt. The flies, nicknamed “rovers” for their active behavior, can also learn and remember things after a sleepless night, scientists report online January 30 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But, scientists say, the flies that cope well with sleep deprivation appear more vulnerable to vagaries in food supply. The findings may eventually help scientists answer one of the most “fundamental questions in the sleep field, that is ‘what is the core function of sleep?’ ” says David Raizen, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study. In the study, Marla Sokolowski, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and her colleagues describe how fruit flies with naturally differing versions of the foraging gene behave differently. Flies with the rover version of the gene make more of a protein called protein kinase G or PKG. Rovers also move around more in search of food than flies with the “sitter” version of the gene, which produces lower levels of PKG. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16317 - Posted: 01.31.2012

by Debora MacKenzie Sleeping sickness is a formidable foe, killing thousands in Africa every year. There are only five drugs to combat the parasite, which is carried by tsetse flies, and they can have severe side effects. Worse, the parasite is becoming resistant. "If we knew how the drugs work, we could perhaps design better ones," says David Horn of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. To investigate, Horn's lab exploited a phenomenon called RNA interference (RNAi) – the ability of certain small RNA molecules to block the activity of individual genes. Horn's team used a previously created DNA library, in which the parasite's genome was cut into chunks, and these were put into bacteria in a way that generated the interfering RNAs. Each of these inactivated a parasite gene with the corresponding genetic code. The researchers then exposed parasites to all of the interfering RNA molecules as well as each of the five drugs. If the parasites survived, it meant that the RNA sequences that had bound to them must have blocked a gene or genes needed for that drug to work. They then mapped those RNA sequences in the parasite's DNA. This revealed 55 genes that the drugs interact with – a step towards working out how they kill the parasite and finding safer drugs with the same effect. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16299 - Posted: 01.26.2012

By Laura Sanders A night of shut-eye sears bad feelings into the brain, while waking hours take the emotional edge off, a new study finds. Though preliminary and somewhat inconsistent with earlier research, the results suggest that staying awake after something awful happens might be a way to blunt the emotional fallout of traumatic experiences, researchers report in the Jan. 18 Journal of Neuroscience. Sleep is known to lock in memories, particularly emotional ones, but scientists didn’t know whether accompanying feelings are locked in, too — a question that’s particularly relevant to people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. “If we really want to know if this is relevant to trauma survivors, then we need to know if sleep not just changes the memory, but if it changes how you feel about it if you experience it again,” says study coauthor Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In the study, Spencer and her colleagues showed pictures of neutral scenes, such as a street, or negative scenes, such as an upsetting car crash, to 106 young adults. Participants then rated the emotion inspired by the image on a one-to-nine scale ranging from sad to happy. Afterward, participants were either sent to bed for a full night’s sleep or asked to stay awake for 12 hours. Then the researchers retested the participants by showing some of the same pictures mixed in with new images. As expected, the people who slept were better at remembering which images they had seen the day before. But the memory wasn’t the only thing that stuck around: Sleepers held on tighter to their feelings, while the sadness scores given by people who stayed awake tended to be weaker in the second session. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2012

Related chapters from BP6e: 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: 16281 - Posted: 01.21.2012

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR One in 10 infants and toddlers have problems sleeping at night and may be at greater risk of developing a sleep disorder as they get older, a new study suggests. The new research is a rare look at a problem that many parents and even pediatricians sometimes fail to notice. The study, which looked at children ages 6 months to 3 years, found that sleep problems were common in this age group. But parents did not always perceive red flags like loud and frequent snoring — which can be a risk factor for obstructive sleep apnea, a potentially serious breathing disorder — as problems that warranted mentioning to their pediatricians. The findings also challenged a widespread notion that children who have sleep troubles early on tend to outgrow them. In the study, children who had one or more sleep problems at any point in early childhood were three to five times as likely to have a sleep problem later on. “The data indicate that sleep problems in children are not an isolated phenomenon,” said Dr. Kelly Byars, an associate professor at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and an author of the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics. “If you have it early and it’s not remedied, then it’s likely to continue over time.” The warning signs of a disorder can vary widely. But some indicators of a potential problem in children are loud snoring several nights a week, frequent bouts of getting up in the middle of the night, nightmares or night terrors, and routinely taking longer than 20 minutes to fall asleep. © 2012 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16220 - Posted: 01.07.2012

By Courtney Humphries A video screen shows a man in his late 60s lying awake on an operating table. Just outside the camera's view, a doctor is moving his finger in front of the man's face, instructing him to follow it back and forth with his eyes. Seconds later, after a dose of the powerful anesthetic drug propofol, his eyelids begin to droop. Then his pupils stop moving. Only the steady background beeping of the heart monitor serves as a reminder that the man isn't dead. "He's in a coma," the doctor, Emery Brown, explains. "General anesthesia is a drug-induced reversible coma." As an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Brown is constant witness to one of the most profound and mysterious feats of modern medicine. Every day, nearly 60,000 patients in the United States undergo general anesthesia, enabling them to survive even the grisliest operations unaware and free of pain. But though doctors have been putting people under for more than 150 years, what happens in the brain during general anesthesia is a mystery. Scientists don't know much about the extent to which these drugs tap into the same brain circuitry we use when we sleep, or how being anesthetized differs from other ways of losing consciousness, such as slipping into a coma following an injury. Are parts of the brain truly shutting off, or do they simply stop communicating with each other? How is being anesthetized different from a state of hypnosis or deep meditation? And what happens in the brain in the transition between consciousness and unconsciousness? "We know we can get you in and out of this safely," Brown says, "but we still can't quite tell you how it works." © 2011 Technology Review

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16175 - Posted: 12.23.2011

People who like a lie-in may now have an excuse - it is at least partly down to their genes, according to experts. Experts, who studied more than 10,000 people across Europe, found those with the gene ABCC9 need around 30 minutes more sleep per night than those without the gene. The gene is carried by one in five Europeans, they say in their study, published in Molecular Psychiatry. The researchers said the finding could help explain "sleep behaviour". Over 10,000 people took part, each reporting how long they slept and providing a blood sample for DNA analysis. People's sleep needs can differ significantly. At the extreme, Margaret Thatcher managed on four hours of sleep a night while Albert Einstein needed 11. People from the Orkney Isles, Croatia, the Netherlands, Italy, Estonia and Germany took part in the study. All were asked about their sleep patterns on "free" days, when people did not need to get up for work the next day, take sleeping pills or work shifts. When the researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich compared these figures with the results of the genetic analysis, they found those with a variation of a gene known as ABCC9 needed more sleep than the eight-hour average. BBC © 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16109 - Posted: 12.06.2011

Sandrine Ceurstemont, New Scientist TV Feeling sleepy after your Thanksgiving dinner? You may have heard that turkey consumption is to blame since it contains a natural sedative called tryptophan. But now an animation produced by the American Chemical Society debunks this common myth and identifies what food in your feast is most likely responsible for your drowsiness. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16078 - Posted: 11.26.2011

By Scicurious Brain Now we come to the Ig Nobel Physiology Prize. Yawns are notoriously contagious in humans and in other social animals, especially primates. In humans, yawning has been thought to do various things, including cooling the brain, increasing arousal when you’re sleepy and, possibly, helping to synchronize group behavior. Could yawning be a form of unconscious empathy? This would mean that in order to have a contagious yawn, the animals involved would have to be capable of empathy, of fellow feeling. We know that dogs and primates, and humans, probably are, but that means we can’t really test for whether it’s empathy or not. We need a species that is social but probably can’t feel for its compatriots. That’s where tortoises come in. To test whether yawning requires empathy and thus get at the real purpose that yawning might serve, Anna Wilkinson of the University of Lincoln in England and her colleagues took a group of red-footed tortoises that lived together and trained one of them to yawn when exposed to a red square. Then they had tortoises watch the trained tortoise in action and checked them for yawns. The researchers also checked for yawns when no other tortoise was present and when the trained tortoise had no red square and so wasn’t yawning. What they got was a big, fat negative. The test tortoises showed no notice of the other animals’ huge yawns. This may mean that contagious yawning is not just the result of a fixed-action pattern triggered when you see someone else yawn. If that were the case, the tortoises would have yawned right along with their compatriots. Contagious social yawning may require something more, a social sense or a sense of empathy resulting from complex social interactions. Of course, it could also mean that tortoises are just a really bad choice for contagious yawning. But the social explanation seems a little more supported. —From the Scicurious Brain at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain © 2011 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep
Link ID: 16055 - Posted: 11.19.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey WASHINGTON — For young people, snoozing means big gains in memory. But in older folks some of sleep’s memory-boosting abilities are erased, a new study finds. Sleep has been shown in a wide variety of studies to increase people’s ability to recall words and objects and to improve physical skills. But that boost may be available only to the young, Lauri Kurdziel and Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst reported November 13 at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. Previously, the researchers had shown that a night of sleep improved young people’s ability to learn a series of button presses similar to playing a piano. Adults in the over-50 age group didn’t get a bump in performance from sleeping. But that difference may have been due to older folks’ slower reaction times. A new study, though, suggests that it’s sleep’s memory benefits that are reduced with age. Kurdziel and Spencer had a group of 18- to 30-year-olds and a group of 50- to 80-year-olds learn a sequence of colored doors that would lead them through 10 virtual rooms. The researchers then tested the participants’ memories 12 hours later, either in the evening of the same day or after a night of sleep. Young people who took the test after being awake all day made about 10 errors on average, but a night of sleep nearly halved the number of mistakes. In the over-50 group, a night of sleep didn’t help. The people made just as many errors after sleeping all night as they did if they took the test after being awake for 12 hours. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Related chapters from BP6e: 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, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 16034 - Posted: 11.14.2011