sleep
clock | May 18, 2008This is the third part of the series on the topic, from April 01, 2006...
This being the National Sleep Awareness Week and in the heels of the recent study on sleep of adolescents, it is not surprising that this issue is all over the media, including blogs, these days.
I have covered this issue a couple of times last week, e.g., here, here and here. Recently, Lance Mannion wrote an interesting post on the topic, which reminded me also of an older post by Ezra Klein in which the commenters voiced all the usual arguments heard in this debate.
There are a couple of more details that I have not…
clock | May 17, 2008
Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26, 2006. Also check my more recent posts on the subject here and here...
I am glad to see that there is more and more interest in and awareness of sleep research. Just watch Sanjay Gupta on CNN or listen to the recent segment on Weekend America on NPR.
At the same time, I am often alarmed at the levels of ignorance still rampant in the general population, and even…
clock | May 16, 2008This kind of ignorant bleating makes me froth at the mouth every time - I guess it is because this is my own blogging "turf".
One of the recurring themes of my blog is the disdain I have for people who equate sleep with laziness out of their Puritan core of understanding of the world, their "work ethic" which is a smokescreen for power-play, their vicious disrespect for everyone who is not like them, and the nasty feeling of superiority they have towards the teenagers just because they are older, bigger, stronger and more powerful than the kids. Not to forget the idiotic notions that kids…
clock | May 15, 2008My regular readers are probably aware that the topic of adolescent sleep and the issue of starting times of schools are some of my favourite subjects for a variety of reasons: I am a chronobiologist, I am an extreme "owl" (hence the name of this blog), I am a parent of developing extreme "owls", I have a particular distaste for Puritanical equation of sleep with laziness which always raises its ugly head in discussions of adolescent sleep, and much of my own research is somewhat related to this topic (see the bottom of this post for Related Posts).
So, I was particularly pleased when Jessica…
clock | May 15, 2008To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms:
We systematically varied input parameters related to the number of food and sleep sites, the degree to which food and sleep sites overlap, and the rate at which food patches were depleted. Our results reveal that: (1) the costs of traveling between more spatially separated food and sleep clusters select for monophasic sleep, (2) more rapid food patch depletion reduces sleep times, and (3) agents spend more time attempting to acquire the 'rarer' resource, that is, the average time spent sleeping is positively correlated…
edyong | May 13, 2008Three-toed sloths have a reputation for being some of the sleepiest of all animals, largely due to a single study, which found that captive sloths snooze for 16 hours a day. That certainly seems like a sweet deal to me, but it seems that the sloth's somnolent reputation has been exaggerated.
A new study - the first ever to record brain activity in a wild sleeping animal - reveals that wild sloths are far less lethargic than their captive cousins. In their natural habitat, three-toed sloths sleep for only 9.6 hours a day, not much more than an average first-year university student.
Wild…
clock | May 13, 2008One of the latest additions (just two days ago, I think) to the Directory of Open Access Journals is a journal that will be of interest to some of my readers - The Open Sleep Journal. The first volume has been published and contains several interesting articles. One that drew my attention is The Phylogeny of Sleep Database: A New Resource for Sleep Scientists (PDF download) by Patrick McNamara, Isabella Capellini, Erica Harris, Charles L. Nunn, Robert A. Barton and Brian Preston. It describes how they built a database that contains information about sleep patterns in 127 mammalian species…
clock | April 7, 2008
This post is perhaps not my best post, but is, by far, my most popular ever. Sick and tired of politics after the 2004 election I decided to start a science-only blog - Circadiana. After a couple of days of fiddling with the templae, on January 8, 2005, I posted the very first post, this one, at 2:53 AM and went to bed. When I woke up I was astonished as the Sitemeter was going wild! This post was linked by BoingBoing and later that day, by Andrew Sullivan. It has been linked by people ever since, as recently as a couple of days ago, although the post is a year and a half old.…
clock | March 12, 2008POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY in SLEEP MEDICINE
Charles A. Czeisler, Steven W. Lockley, Christopher P. Landrigan, Laura K. Barger
Harvard Work Hours, Health and Safety Group
Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
The Harvard Work Hours Health and Safety Group focuses on understanding the consequences of extended work hours and disordered sleep schedules on health and safety across a range of professions and populations. We also develop and test countermeasures to prevent the increased risk of accidents and injury for both worker health and…
purepedantry | March 11, 2008The association between sleep and memory performance has been relatively well-documented. Studies in animals and humans have shown memory deficits in both declarative and procedural memory associated with sleep deprivation. (The subject is slightly complicated because whether sleep deprivation affects a task can depend on particular task demands and may vary from study to study. See this review for more details.)
What has received much less examination is the role of daytime sleep in aiding memory performance. Only a few studies have examined whether the "power nap" aids retention, and…
clock | February 29, 2008Book excerpt in today's Wall Street Journal: Chapter 6: Wired:
It is likely that insomnia will increase with the expansion of the 24-hour economy into more and more lives, and more of each life, because wakefulness and the wired world go together. The more interconnected we are, the more we communicate, and the more we communicate, the more we rely on our interconnected powers of thinking. In addition to work, many of our leisure pursuits, while seemingly soporific, actually undermine the likelihood of restful sleep, from drinking alcohol to surfing the net to watching thrillers on late-night…
clock | February 3, 2008Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance:
A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a new study.
People Had More Intense Dreams After Sept. 11, 2001, Sleep Research Shows:
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed our lives in a number of different ways, not only socially and politically, but also in the way in which we dream, according to a new study.
Election 2008: Sleep Deprivation A Tough Opponent For Presidential Candidates:
The field of presidential contenders…
clock | January 28, 2008Keystone sleep/circadian meeting. Jay Dunlap, Emmanuel Mignot and Amita Seghal are organizing a Keystone meeting on Genetics and Biochemistry of Sleep in Lake Tahoe, March 7-12 (click here to see large):
clock | January 21, 2008Sleeping & Dreaming exhibit hosted by Wellcome Trust will be open until 9 March 2008:
Why are scientists still perplexed by sleep? What do the insights that our dreams bring us mean? And is a life without sleep conceivable? Sleeping and dreaming is a nightly (or daily) occurrence for us all, yet we still know relatively little about this elusive phenomenon.
If you are in London between now and early March, try to go and see it (and let me know how it was - perhaps blog about it and send me the link).
clock | January 8, 2008The panel discussion from the 'Waking Up To Sleep' (February 9th and 10th, 2007) conference has been filmed and the video is now online. A very interesting discussion on the evolution and adaptive function of sleep. Watch it here.
More videos of individual talks are here (hat-tip to reader NBM)
Related: (Non) Adaptive Function of Sleep
clock | December 18, 2007Dmitriy Kruglyak posted a summary of last week's Cephalon webcast. The topic was Sleep Apnea, something I guess a number of my readers would be interested in. So, go ahead and listen to the podcast and read Dmitry's summary and you can ask him additional questions in the comments.
clock | December 16, 2007No, that is not a really nasty guy who hypnotizes people. It is a technical term used to describe the feeling of falling one sometimes experiences at the moment one drifts into sleep. It often makes the person wake up again. I have not experienced it as kid, and even now it happens to me only rarely, when I am extremely exhausted at the time I finally get to go to bed.
But if you want to know more about this phenomenon and little that is known about its causes, head on to Pure Pedantry where Jake Young explains it.
purepedantry | December 13, 2007I get a lot of random questions from friends and relatives. It is an occupational hazard. This one just came down the grapevine:
Do you know how sometimes when you're lying in bed, starting to fall asleep and all of a sudden it feels like you're falling?
What does that mean?
What you are talking about is a benign "condition" called a sleep start or a hypnic jerk. I hesitate to use the word condition because these are incredibly common -- around 70% of people have these.
What happens is that the whole body jerks one or two times right before sleep onset or during light sleep. This is often…
clock | December 6, 2007Hmm, I did not know this - apparently the left hemisphere of the human brain falls asleep first, and the right one a little bit later in most people.
I wonder if that has any connection with the reason we tend to focus on the right side of the face when someone is talking to us - checking the vigilance/sleepiness state of the person?