By Carolyn Y. Johnson Sleep is mysterious, and it took sleepy animals, serendipity and competition to begin to unravel its precise biology. In the late 1990s, Dr. Masashi Yanagisawa at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center discovered two brain chemicals in rodents that seemed to be instrumental in stimulating hunger. He called them “orexins,” a play on “orexis” the Greek word for appetite. At the same time, Dr. Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University School of Medicine was hunting for the root cause of an inherited form of narcolepsy in Doberman pinschers, Labrador retrievers and Dachshunds. In back-to-back studies published in the summer of 1999, these two lines of research unexpectedly converged, breaking open the neurobiology of sleep and identifying a root cause of the sleep disorder narcolepsy, which affects an estimated one in every 2,000 people in the United States. A new narcolepsy drug based on these insights was approved in August. On Wednesday, Dr. Yanagisawa, now at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, shared the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award with Dr. Mignot, for their work into the nature of sleep. The prestigious prizes are often called “America’s Nobel.” “Their work has cracked open a molecular dissection of sleep regulation, reinforced the immune system’s involvement in human narcolepsy, and pointed toward new treatments for this illness and other sleep disturbances,” the Lasker citation said. The field is now a major target of pharmaceutical companies, but their basic science research was supported largely by philanthropy and federal funding. Thirty years ago, it was far from clear that these scientists were studying the same problem. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 30409 - Posted: 09.12.2026

By Carolyn Y. Johnson Many people have a cartoonish idea of narcolepsy, perhaps picturing someone falling asleep standing up. What people don’t understand is that sleepiness can infiltrate every aspect of daily life, said Julie Flygare, 42, who was diagnosed with the sleep disorder in 2007, during her second year of law school. It interferes with memory, attention and weighs down everyday existence like a “heaviness on the skull,” she said. While taking her current medications, Ms. Flygare has four to six precious hours of wakefulness a day, and still needs a nap. Positive feelings, like, say, the joy of hitting a volley in tennis, trigger episodes of cataplexy; her muscles go slack and her grip on the racket loosens. She, like many other patients, struggled for years to be correctly diagnosed and to find the right combination of stimulants or other drugs to ease her symptoms. Since then, Ms. Flygare has been waiting, and pushing for, a drug aimed not just at alleviating sleepiness, but at replacing a crucial missing brain chemical. Last month, she saw it happen. A first-of-its-kind drug for the sleep disorder narcolepsy was approved by the F.D.A., offering a new treatment for people who live with the debilitating fog of sleepiness. The new drug developed by Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., called Orzeyful, marks a long-sought success in the quest to mimic an essential brain peptide called orexin, which is missing in people with type 1 narcolepsy. About 120,000 people in the United States suffer from this type of narcolepsy, which causes pervasive sleepiness and episodes of cataplexy. Other companies, including Alkermes and Eli Lilly, are chasing close behind. To test narcolepsy treatments, doctors use a “maintenance of wakefulness test” in which a person sits in a dim room for 40 minutes. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Sleep
Link ID: 30408 - Posted: 09.12.2026

By Ailie McWhinnie Whether in a deep burrow under frozen winter ground or aboard a far-future interplanetary spaceship, hibernation has long mesmerized sci-fi enthusiasts and nature lovers alike. But exactly how animals lower their body temperatures and metabolisms to enter this state has remained mysterious. “Very little has been known about these mechanisms, especially the neuronal mechanisms,” says Takeshi Sakurai, a sleep and hibernation researcher at the University of Tsukuba. Now, in a preprint posted on bioRxiv, researchers studying hibernating Syrian hamsters have pinpointed for the first time a brain circuit that regulates an animal’s entry into hibernation. The results reveal a “key, really, in the network” and provide “more solid [evidence] than anything we had before” of an ancient hibernation circuit within the mammalian brain, says Matteo Cerri, a physiologist at the University of Bologna who studies hibernation and was not involved in the work. For those pursuing synthetic hibernation, it’s good news. A dormant hibernation circuit across species could help scientists figure out how to induce hibernation in people therapeutically, or even—in a much more distant goal— to enable long-distance space travel. Whereas many animals rely on their environment for heat, birds and mammals can raise and control their body temperatures. The benefit is a high and fairly constant metabolic rate, but the energetic cost is enormous. When this cost gets too high—in particularly cold or food-scarce times, for instance—some animals cope by hibernating. Hibernating animals enter long, deep bouts of a state called torpor in which their body temperature and metabolism drop, usually broken up by brief awakenings. When faced with similar challenges, other animals can enter shorter, shallower one-off bouts of torpor whose relationship to true hibernation has long been debated. Many birds and mammals do neither. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 30387 - Posted: 08.29.2026

By Amanda Heidt Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug designed to treat the root cause of narcolepsy, a condition that affects millions of people by causing extreme sleepiness during the day and wakefulness at night. The success of the drug, called oveporexton and marketed as Orzeyful, is being celebrated by those who struggle with narcolepsy. “It’s the best thing that has ever happened to me,” says Tyler Chapman, who volunteered for one of the clinical trials that contributed to the drug’s approval. But it’s also being watched with anticipation by researchers, who see it as the first in a line of therapies for sleep disorders that are likely to be approved in the coming years. These emerging treatments, known as orexin agonists, are exciting because they promise not just to alleviate symptoms of narcolepsy but also to target the disease’s biological cause — and might even have implications for other neuropsychiatric disorders. With this new strategy against narcolepsy, pharmaceutical companies have jumped at the chance to tap into a market that is projected to top US$6.4 billion annually by the early 2030s. “This is a tremendously exciting time for patients and for clinicians and scientists who have been working towards this for many years,” says Barry Lubarsky, the vice-president of medical affairs at the pharmaceutical company Alkermes, which is based in Dublin and is developing its own narcolepsy treatment. A chance to feel normal For Chapman, a 19-year-old student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the milestone is life changing. Chapman had long struggled with his condition, at times sleeping for 16 hours a day, struggling in school and relying heavily on coffee. When he laughed, it would sometimes trigger his body to collapse, even though he remained fully conscious — a symptom known as cataplexy. Instead of experiencing all that university life has to offer, Chapman says that he rarely went out. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Narcolepsy; Sleep
Link ID: 30379 - Posted: 08.19.2026

By Jake Buehler This nose grows. During harsh Japanese winters, long-clawed shrews’ snouts temporarily expand. The seasonal swelling is the opposite of the previously known winter pattern in shrews, in which the brain and surrounding cranium shrink. The findings complicate our understanding of an already extreme adaptation for harsh, frigid conditions, researchers report August 19 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The temporary dwindling and regrowth of the brain and skull tissue in shrews is part of Dehnel’s phenomenon, first described by Polish zoologist August Dehnel in 1949. The phenomenon involves winter reductions in body size and internal organ mass. It’s thought to be an adaptation for surviving winter. Paring back tissues cuts food energy costs, which is useful when calories are scarce. The new findings add an unexpected wrinkle to our understanding of the phenomenon. Yugo Ikeda, a mammalogist at Toyo University in Tokyo, and his colleagues knew about these “mind-boggling” seasonal shifts. Some other animals like weasels, voles and moles experience similar winter changes. But scientists didn’t know if any shrews outside of Europe also went through these changes. Northeast Asia, for instance, has extreme, snowy winters that might present a challenge to local small mammals. The researchers carefully measured the dimensions of 136 skulls from museum specimens of long-clawed shrews (Sorex unguiculatus), a species native to the region. The shrews were collected between 1948 and 1988 on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Ikeda and his colleagues took photos of the skulls and used software to measure dozens of physical landmarks across them. The team then compared the skull dimensions with the season in which the shrews were collected. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 30378 - Posted: 08.19.2026

By Kristen French When evolutionary anthropologist David Samson was living and working among the Hadza tribe in northern Tanzania, he noticed something puzzling: Their sleep was highly fragmented, short in duration, and low in “efficiency,” or actual time spent sleeping versus time in bed. This broken sleep was partly the consequence of activity and noise well into the night in the camps. People stayed up late telling stories, sharing food, and dancing. Yet, the Hadza uniformly reported high satisfaction with their sleep. It challenged the so-called Paleo sleep hypothesis, the notion that hunter-gatherer sleep must be optimally long and deep, but also ran counter to the medical orthodoxy that unbroken sleep is essential to a good night’s rest. Samson traveled to Tanzania to hang out with the Hadza because he was trying to untangle what he calls the sleep paradox: Sleep is critical to human functioning, and yet, we sleep fewer total hours than any other ape, and are still arguably the most evolutionarily successful of the primates. This riddle sent him climbing into chimpanzee nests high in the trees and exploring the sleeping huts and practices of communities around Africa and Madagascar. The stories he collected, people he met, and research findings he uncovered are vividly described in his new book The Sleepless Ape: The Story of Sleep in Human Evolution. I spoke with Samson about what we really need for a good night’s sleep, why we may be on the cusp of a “sleep enlightenment,” and the origins of what he calls the “lie-down-and-die” model of Western sleep. What is the paradox of human sleep? You can just say, “Oh, here’s where humans are relative to other primates on sleep.” But that misses the deeper evolutionary story. When I was a postdoc at Duke University about a decade ago, new data was emerging showing that even after controlling for brain size, body size, social order, and actual phylogenetic relatedness, humans are weird outliers—we’re the shortest sleeping primates, yet we pack in the most REM sleep relative to this short duration.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 30374 - Posted: 08.15.2026

By Emily Laber-Warren When sunlight hits an octopus, it can trigger a swift color change and instant camouflage, thanks to light-sensitive molecules embedded in the creature’s skin. When sunlight falls on a bird’s skull, similar compounds deep in the animal’s brain register changes in day length and help drive decisions on when to mate or migrate. Photosensitive proteins called opsins that respond instantly to sunlight can be found within and outside the eye in nearly every animal, and they govern not only vision but also a range of behaviors. Until about a quarter-century ago, though, the scientific consensus was that in humans, the only role for opsins was to help us see. But a surge of research over the past couple of decades has increasingly revealed that, like honeybees, zebra fish, rodents and other creatures, we harbor opsins that aren’t involved in vision, both in our eyes and throughout our bodies. These molecules appear to play a broad role in human biology, affecting mood, metabolism, sleep, thinking and social behavior. Since life’s beginnings, organisms on this sunbaked planet have had to evolve ways to protect against ultraviolet light, which can damage DNA. But it shouldn’t be surprising that, as dangerous as sunlight can be, most animals also rely on it to regulate key aspects of physiology, including body temperature, navigation, growth and sexual development. Across the animal kingdom, researchers are discovering that light-sensing opsins are involved in an array of biological processes beyond vision. These include camouflage; sensing seasonal changes via lengthening or shortening day lengths; synchronizing with the 24-hour cycle — as well as mood, healing and more.

Keyword: Vision; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 30347 - Posted: 07.29.2026

Max Kozlov How does the brain know when it’s time to wake up? Researchers have identified1 a chemical signal that serves as a timer in the mouse brain, logging both the length of a single sleep session and the number of interruptions and predicting how likely an animal is to wake up at any given moment. This signal could offer a new way to measure ‘sleep debt’, or accumulated sleep loss. Such a biomarker could one day lead to methods for checking whether someone is sleep-deprived, says Ketema Paul, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the research. “We really don’t have what a lot of people call the sobriety test for sleep,” Paul says, adding that such a test could be useful to ensure that people in high-stakes occupations, such as driving trucks or working in a hospital emergency department, are able to remain alert. “The negative effects of sleep loss can have serious negative consequences.” Previous sleep research has focused mostly on the brain circuitry that snaps people awake in seconds or on how sleep debt accrues after days of bad sleep. But the intermediate time scale — how the brain keeps track of the minutes or hours spent in a single continuous session of sleep — has remained a mystery. To investigate, Yao Chen, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and her team searched for molecular signals that shift gradually during a sleep session. The researchers used a specialized fluorescent sensor in the brains of mice to watch, in real time, the effects of protein kinase A, or PKA — an enzyme also found in humans and previously linked to wakefulness2. This enzyme adds chemical ‘tags’ to proteins on the surface of brain cells. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 30346 - Posted: 07.29.2026

By Alissa de Chassey A hallmark of deep sleep—slow-wave brain activity that arises when cortical neurons cycle on and off synchronously between 0.5 and 4 Hertz—may drive some of sleep’s restorative functions, according to a new study published last month in Nature Neuroscience. “We provided direct evidence that these on and off patterns are what really matter,” says study investigator Chiara Cirelli, professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. As slow waves travel across the cortex during deep sleep, the excitatory synaptic strength that accrued during waking hours gradually returns to a baseline, a process that helps to consolidate memories, according to the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis of sleep that Cirelli and her husband, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, proposed more than two decades ago. Computational models and studies of anesthetized animals support the idea, but the field has lacked evidence from non-anesthetized animals. “Anesthesia and sleep may share some features, but definitely overall they are not the same thing,” Cirelli says. She and her colleagues used optogenetics to induce sleep-like on/off firing patterns in select regions of the cortex in awake mice. “The idea was to induce these patterns in awake mice, and see whether this is enough to get sleep benefits,” Cirelli says. As expected, the animals showed a decreased need for sleep; reduced neuronal synchrony and synaptic strength during sleep; and improved memory consolidation afterward. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30327 - Posted: 07.18.2026

By Nora Bradford General anesthesia shuts off conscious awareness, but what do our brains process while we’re under? Individual neurons in a brain region known for its role in memory consolidation can detect unexpected sounds, decode the nuances of language and even predict upcoming word types in a sentence, all while a patient is fully anesthetized, researchers report May 6 in Nature. Scientists have been gathering mounting evidence that even when unconscious, our brains can track certain aspects of speech. “The field was already moving toward a more nuanced picture [of what the unconscious brain can do], but this study pushes the boundary considerably further,” says Athena Akrami, a neuroscientist at University College London who was not involved with the research. To peer into the unconscious brain, neurosurgeon Kalman Katlowitz of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and colleagues monitored activity in the hippocampi of seven anesthetized patients. The team used a technology developed within the last few years called a Neuropixels probe. These high-density microelectrodes can record the electrical activity of hundreds of individual neurons simultaneously, rather than listening to the collective activity of groups of neurons. The team inserted these probes into patients’ hippocampi, in tissue slated for surgical removal as part of epilepsy treatment. While the patients were under general anesthesia, the researchers played various sounds through headphones. For some patients, this consisted of a series of uniform pure tones interspersed with occasional, unexpected “oddball” tones of a different frequency. For others, the researchers played 10 to 20 minutes of educational videos and storytelling podcasts, like The Moth Radio Hour, to evaluate how the brain processes natural speech. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Consciousness; Sleep
Link ID: 30265 - Posted: 06.03.2026

By Sara Novak Whether tucked away in a colony of coral, hidden in the darkness of an aquatic cave or floating catatonic just above the ocean floor, fish take opportunities for rest and recovery, just as we do. Like humans, most fish are diurnal, meaning they sleep mostly at night; while they don’t have eyelids, and therefore can’t shut out the darkness, light does disrupt their sleep. And just like us, when they snooze they’re motionless and slow to respond to environmental stimuli. If you deprive them of sleep, they will make up for the loss by sleeping longer the next night. Now, a new study, released this month in Nature Communications, shows just how much fish sleep really does resemble our own. By tracking eye movements of zebrafish, the researchers were able to identify four different substates of sleep, akin to the “stages” of sleep that scientists have described in humans. “There’s complexity to their sleep structure,” said Jennifer Mengbo Li, a co-author of the study and a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. Three of the four substates happen at night, lasting a total of 10 hours. The first — and deepest — is characterized by a stone-cold stare. As the waking hours near, a second, lighter substate sets in: The zebrafish’s eyes twitch, sideways in the same direction, before moving slowly back to center. In the third substate, entered as morning approaches, both eyes turn to the same side and stay there. During the fourth and final substate, which takes place in brief bursts during the day, the zebrafish’s eyes move back and forth, as if sweeping the surroundings for potential risks. But the eyes can be deceiving: These five-to-10-minute naps are deep enough that much of the brain activity is suppressed, and the zebrafish are hard to wake up. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 30263 - Posted: 05.30.2026

Andrew Gregory in Chicago Poor sleep may be fuelling the global rise in under-50s being diagnosed with cancer, two large studies suggest. The number of younger people diagnosed with the disease has risen by almost 80% in three decades. Worldwide cases of early-onset cancer increased from 1.82m in 1990 to 3.26m in 2019, while cancer deaths among people in their 40s, 30s or younger rose by 27%. Experts are still trying to understand the reasons behind the increase. However, research presented at the world’s largest cancer conference, the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago, suggests irregular sleeping patterns in younger people may be a contributing factor. Two studies led by MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, one of the world’s leading cancer research organisations, analysed health data for more than 18 million adults in the US aged between 18 and 50. Researchers found that people with poor sleeping patterns were more likely to develop early-onset bowel, breast, uterine or ovarian cancer. In some cases, under-50s diagnosed with insomnia were three times more likely to develop cancer within five years. “These findings suggest that sleep disruption may represent a clinically relevant, potentially modifiable risk factor in early-onset cancer risk stratification and warrants further investigation,” the researchers said. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30260 - Posted: 05.30.2026

Pien Huang Adults should be getting at least seven hours of sleep each night, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "Below that, there's clear evidence that you're going to feel lethargic during the day," says James Rowley, a pulmonologist and the program director of the Sleep Medicine Fellowship at Rush University Medical Center, as well as a past president of the AASM board of directors. Rowley also says not getting enough sleep is linked with cardiometabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity, as well as cardiovascular problems. But many in the U.S. are not sleeping enough. A new data brief, published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), finds that 30.5% of U.S. adults surveyed in 2024 are getting less than the recommended amount. The results have not changed much since 2020, when CDC researchers found that just under 30% of U.S. women and men were sleeping less than seven hours a night. Some people are working multiple jobs or shifts that cut into their sleeping time. But others are just doomscrolling, says Rowley, who was not involved in the paper. "Many patients tell me they go to bed with their cellphone, laptop or tablet," he says. "Patients tell me they see one YouTube video and before they know, it's an hour later." Some people are gaming, and others are watching TV late into the night. For many, that time could be better spent sleeping — an activity in which the brain repairs and restores itself. "A lot of people could go to bed earlier if they chose to," Rowley says. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30232 - Posted: 05.06.2026

By Jake Currie Ever wonder why jet lag is such a horribly uncomfortable experience? It’s because your biological clock doesn’t just regulate your sleep cycle, it affects a whole host of other bodily functions, like hormone levels, metabolism, your immune activity, and more. That means when your circadian rhythms get disrupted, it can throw a wrench into a variety of systems. It also means that time of day can be an important factor when considering medical treatments. For example, aortic valve replacements performed in the afternoon are associated with fewer adverse side effects. Unfortunately determining what “time” your internal clock reads is a little more difficult than glancing at a watch, in part because everyone’s biological clock ticks at a slightly different pace. Right now, the single most accurate test involves repeatedly measuring the levels of melatonin in the saliva during the hours leading up to bedtime, which is difficult to do outside of a laboratory or hospital environment. Now, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, chronobiologists have developed a way to get an accurate read of your biological clock from a simple hair sample. By measuring the transcriptional activity of clock genes in hair follicle cells and performing an analysis using artificial intelligence, they’ve been able to accurately pinpoint the biological clock’s time. “In these cells, we measure the activity of 17 genes that are part of the molecular clock or are controlled by it,” study author Achim Kramer of Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin explained in a statement. “Using machine learning, this pattern can be used to calculate at what point in the daily rhythm the person is currently at. A single sample is sufficient for this.”

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 30187 - Posted: 04.04.2026

Sleeping for 11 minutes more each night, doing 4.5 additional minutes of brisk walking and eating an extra 50g or so of vegetables each day can significantly reduce a person’s risk of heart attack, a study has found. Academics found these small changes could help people avoid major cardiovascular events, including heart attacks and strokes, by about 10%. Small behaviour changes were more “achievable and sustainable”, the research team said. The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, was conducted by experts from Australia, Chile and Brazil who examined data on more than 53,000 middle-aged UK adults taking part in the Biobank study. Researchers looked at sleep habits and levels of exercise through data from wearable technology such as smartwatches. People also self-reported on their dietary habits. The researchers found that 2,034 major cardiovascular events occurred during an eight-year follow-up period. They were able to identify the “optimal” way people could avoid these incidents, including a good diet, eight to nine hours sleep each night and a minimum of 42 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity each day. Combining these measures leads to a 57% lower risk of heart attacks and strokes. They also found the “clinically relevant” combination of behaviours that could reduce people’s risk, including more sleep, better diet and more moderate-to-vigorous activity. According to the NHS website, moderate activity can include brisk walking, dancing, pushing a lawn mower, water aerobics and riding a bike. Vigorous activity includes running, swimming, skipping and aerobics. Dr Nicholas Koemel, the study’s lead author and a research fellow at the University of Sydney, said: “We show that combining small changes in a few areas of our lives can have a surprisingly large positive impact on our cardiovascular health. “This is very encouraging news because making a few small, combined changes is likely more achievable and sustainable for most people when compared with attempting major changes in a single behaviour. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30172 - Posted: 03.25.2026

By Marlowe Starling The passage of the sun across the sky — dawn, day, dusk, night — drives the clock of life. Some species wake with the sun and sleep with the moon. Others do the opposite, and a few keep odd hours. These naturally driven, 24-hour biological cycles are known as circadian rhythms, and they do more than cue bedtime: They regulate hormones, metabolism, DNA repair, and more. When life falls out of sync, there can be dire consequences for health, reproduction, and survival. Lacking watches, many species keep time using an internal system — a set of interacting genes and their protein products that effectively keeps track of a 24-hour period — that is calibrated by sunlight. This kind of circadian clock is widespread, found even in single-celled algae, which suggests that biological timekeeping evolved billions of years ago. Across animals, most species have the same genetic system, using genes known as CLOCK, BMAL1, and CRY, or recognizable homologues. This form of biological clock mechanism appears even in ancient lineages, including sponges and some jellyfish. But is this the only way to do it? In a pea-size jelly off the coast of Japan, biologists are examining a different kind of timekeeping. Somewhere over the course of their evolution, the class of hydrozoans — which includes certain kinds of jellyfish, hydras, and colonial siphonophores such as the Portuguese man-of-war — lost the genes that operate circadian clocks in the rest of the animal kingdom. Yet a newly discovered hydrozoan jellyfish species has a mysterious circadian clock that regularly tracks 20-hour periods, suggesting that its mechanism evolved independently. The findings, published (opens a new tab) in PLOS Biology in January 2026, push the limits of what chronobiologists consider “circadian.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Evolution
Link ID: 30169 - Posted: 03.21.2026

By Bethany Brookshire When solving a puzzle, the answer could lie in your dreams. In a study of lucid dreamers, playing soundtracks linked with unsolved puzzles helped the sleepers solve the problems the next day, researchers report February 5 in Neuroscience of Consciousness. Stories of brilliant insights after a nap or daydream abound, but scientists have struggled to successfully influence people’s dreams and rigorously test the idea. “This study provides one of the first experimentally grounded demonstrations of such a link,” says Giulio Bernardi, a cognitive neuroscientist at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy, who was not involved with the work. Whether we remember our dreams or not, we have countless dreams in our sleep, according to Karen Konkoly, a cognitive neuroscientist who performed the study at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. “Your dreams are such a big part of your inner life,” she says. And in the right circumstances, manipulating those dreams could help people think of problems in new ways. While some scientists have shown that sleeping on a problem increases the odds of solving it the next day, others have shown no benefit. Of course, it might help only if you actually think about the problem in your sleep. Konkoly and her colleagues were especially interested in helping sleepers think about specific topics using targeted memory reactivation, or TMR. “It’s this research technique where you have a sensory stimuli that’s associated with a memory,” Konkoly says. “It could be a very soft sound or a smell that’s presented to a sleeper, and it functions to remind the sleeping brain of the full memory.” While people dream in every stage of sleep, the effects of TMR have been strongest in deep, slow-wave sleep, she says. Konkoly wanted to look at the effects of TMR at a different sleep stage — rapid eye movement sleep, which could be helpful for creative thinking. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Sleep; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30145 - Posted: 03.04.2026

By Holly Barker Synaptic proteins degrade more slowly in aged mice than in younger mice, a new study finds. Microglia appear to unburden the neurons of the excess proteins, but that accumulation may turn toxic, the findings suggest. To function properly, cells need to clear out old and damaged proteins periodically, but that process stalls with age: Protein turnover is about 20 percent slower in the brains of older rodents than in youthful ones, according to an analysis of whole-brain samples. The new study is the first to probe protein clearance specifically in neurons in living animals. “Neurons face unique challenges to protein turnover,” says study investigator Ian Guldner, a postdoctoral fellow in Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab at Stanford University. For instance, their longevity prevents them from distributing old proteins among daughter cells. And unlike other proteins on the path to degradation, neuronal components must first navigate the axon—sometimes traveling as far as 1 meter, Guldner says. In the new study, Guldner and his colleagues engineered mice to express a modified version of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase—a component of the protein synthesis machinery—in excitatory neurons. Every day for one week, mice of different ages received injections of chemically altered amino acids compatible only with that mutant enzyme. Neurons used the labeled amino acids to replenish proteins, enabling the group to track how quickly those proteins degraded over the subsequent two weeks. “The achievement lies in the technical advance, namely by being able to look at protein degradation and aggregation specifically in neuronal cells,” says F. Ulrich Hartl, director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, who was not involved in the study. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Glia
Link ID: 30114 - Posted: 02.11.2026

By Marla Vacek Broadfoot Nearly 1 in 8 dementia cases — about half a million nationwide — may be linked to insomnia. The new findings, reported December 27 in the Journals of Gerontology: Series A, add weight to growing evidence that sleep is a modifiable risk factor for dementia, akin to hearing loss and hypertension. The study does not establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship between insomnia and dementia for individuals, says Yuqian Lin, a data analyst at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Rather, she says, it looks at the overall extent to which insomnia may contribute to dementia across the population. Lin and her colleagues analyzed data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study, or NHATS, a long-running survey of 5,900 U.S. adults ages 65 and older. Participants reported whether they had difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep or both. Dementia was identified using standard research tools that rely on cognitive testing and reports from family members or caregivers. To estimate the impact of insomnia on the population, Lin and her team calculated the proportion of dementia cases that could theoretically be prevented if insomnia-related sleep disturbances were eliminated. The calculation combined the prevalence of insomnia and dementia in the NHATS population with relative risk estimates drawn from recent large meta-analyses linking insomnia to dementia later in life. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 30105 - Posted: 02.04.2026

Andee Tagle He couldn't stop fixating on it. "I started getting into the frame of mind most people get sucked into. I worried, 'What's going on? Is there something wrong with me?'" he says. That fear of not being able to sleep is a phenomenon called "sleep anxiety," says Orma, who went on to become a specialist in insomnia treatment. Left untreated, that anxiety can prevent people from actually falling asleep. "The more you focus on it, the less chance you'll sleep, which then makes you more anxious. That's the cycle that spins," he says. One of the most powerful ways to overcome sleep anxiety is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). It's well studied, doesn't rely on sleep drugs and has been shown to be effective for clinical insomnia. Orma used this treatment to heal his sleep, and it's now the main focus of his therapy practice. Typically, a CBT-I program lasts about six to eight weeks, and each week, you and a provider work on a strategy to reset sleep behaviors and restructure your thinking around rest. But you don't have to be in an official program to benefit from CBT-I. Whether you're dealing with some sleep stress or just the occasional off-night, these CBT-I practices can help. Wake up at the same time every day Having a consistent wake-up time helps your body know when it's time to get sleepy, says Aric Prather, a sleep scientist and the author of The Sleep Prescription: 7 Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest. The sleepy cues are managed by your circadian rhythm, or your body's internal clock. A set wake-up time keeps your internal clock ticking on time. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 30082 - Posted: 01.17.2026