http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-a-night-of-sleep-deprivation-does-to-your-brain
Sleep well to make sure your brain works well.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-a-night-of-sleep-deprivation-does-to-your-brain
Sleep well to make sure your brain works well.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Sleep Deprivation Disrupts Brain-Cell Communication, Study Finds
https://science.slashdot.org/story/17/11/06/2327251/sleep-deprivation-disrupts-brain-cell-communication-study-finds?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
A new study published in the journal Nature Medicine found that sleep deprivation causes the bursts of electrical activity that brain cells use to communicate to become slower and weaker. “The finding could help explain why a lack of sleep impairs a range of mental functions, says Dr. Itzhak Fried, an author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles,” reports NPR.
Sleepless Night Leaves Some Brain Cells As Sluggish As You Feel
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/11/06/562354635/sleepless-night-leaves-some-brain-cells-as-sluggish-as-you-feel
When people don’t get enough sleep, certain brain cells literally slow down.
A study that recorded directly from neurons in the brains of 12 people found that sleep deprivation causes the bursts of electrical activity that brain cells use to communicate to become slower and weaker, a team reports online Monday in Nature Medicine.
The finding could help explain why a lack of sleep impairs a range of mental functions, says Dr. Itzhak Fried, an author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“You can imagine driving a car and suddenly somebody jumps in front of the car at night,” Fried says. “If you are sleep-deprived, your cells are going to react in a different way than in your normal state.”
The research adds to the evidence showing it’s important to avoid driving when you’re sleepy, Fried says.
Drowsy driving in the U.S. is responsible for more than 70,000 crashes a year according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on estimates and statistics gathered by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Is Why You Feel So Spaced Out When You Don’t Get Enough Sleep
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/why-feel-spaced-out-dont-get-enough-sleep/
A new Nature Medicine study has now revealed why you feel so spaced out after a lack of sleep: your neurons fire far more slowly, which means that your short-term memory recall is inhibited. Your brain is essentially running in slow-motion.
Tomi Engdahl says:
You Can Stay Alert Without Drinking Caffeine – Try These Science-Based Tricks The Next Time You Feel Tired
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/you-can-stay-alert-without-drinking-caffeine-try-these-science-based-tricks-next-time-you-feel-tired/all/
Even after a good night’s sleep, all it takes is one rough commute or frustrating meeting to majorly wear us down.
That’s probably why countless people reach for an afternoon cup of coffee, tea, or — god forbid — tiny bottles filled with foul-tasting herbs and a megadose of caffeine.
Read on for 10 tips and tricks that can help you make it through the day without that habit-forming caffeine hit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Changing a gadget’s nighttime screen hue makes no difference to sleep (UPDATED)
http://www.ledsmagazine.com/articles/2018/02/changing-a-gadget-s-nighttime-screen-hue-makes-no-difference-to-sleep.html?eid=293591077&bid=2008473
A warm Apple iPad can be as guilty as a cold one at disrupting an important nighttime hormone, study shows. It’s the brightness that really counts.
In a small study bucking the theory that bedtime exposure to blue wavelengths in particular can disturb sleep, a well-known academic group has implicated the entire spectrum of light emitted by Apple iPads, and declared that Apple’s “Night Shift” lighting feature can be ineffective.
The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggested that lowering screen brightness, rather than varying the color temperature, can reduce the chance for sleep disturbance.
An LRC researcher tests the orange goggles that filtered out blue light. The study showed 23% melatonin suppression with no Night Shift, 19% with Night Shift set at cold, and 12% with Night Shift at warm. LRC said all three percentages reflected “statistically significant” melatonin suppression.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Is What Sleep Deprivation Does To Your Body And Brain As Time Goes By
http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/this-is-what-sleep-deprivation-does-to-your-body-and-brain-as-time-goes-by/all/
Sleep, on a personal level, is incredibly frustrating. Wasting around seven to eight hours of every single day of our adult life on it seems like a colossal waste of time to me when there’s so much fun to be had while conscious, but it’s difficult to deny the vital health benefits that regular, unbroken, proper sleep – as elusive as that is – brings about.
Sleep deprivation (SD), whether intentional or inadvertent, takes them away, and it’s indubitable that you’ll miss them the moment they’re gone.
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This Is What Sleep Deprivation Does To Your Body And Brain As Time Goes By
39 SHARES
HEALTH AND MEDICINE
This Is What Sleep Deprivation Does To Your Body And Brain As Time Goes By
BY ROBIN ANDREWS
17 MAR 2018, 22:00
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Sleep, on a personal level, is incredibly frustrating. Wasting around seven to eight hours of every single day of our adult life on it seems like a colossal waste of time to me when there’s so much fun to be had while conscious, but it’s difficult to deny the vital health benefits that regular, unbroken, proper sleep – as elusive as that is – brings about.
Sleep deprivation (SD), whether intentional or inadvertent, takes them away, and it’s indubitable that you’ll miss them the moment they’re gone. So let’s journey, step-by-step, through what you enjoy when you sufficiently snooze, and what the myriad effects of a total loss of sleep may be, with the caveat that some of these effects remain decidedly enigmatic.
As is well known, you go through various phases of sleep, which form part of multiple cycles. When you engage in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, you dream, and perhaps sleep-walk or talk, but this only makes up a small portion of your presumably nocturnal activities.
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For the majority (75 percent or so) of your snoozing, you enter non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, which comes in three distinct phases. During N1, you fluctuate between being awake and asleep, and not too much happens to you on a physiological level – although some of you may experience hypnic jerks, sudden muscle spasms that may shake you awake.
When N2 occurs, sleep begins in earnest, and you become unaware of your surroundings. Breathing and heart rate remain regular, but your core body temperature drops. N3, however – colloquially referred to as “deep sleep” – is where all the good stuff tends to happen.
As your blood pressure drops and stays low – which boosts cardiovascular health – your muscles relax and your breathing slows, and the blood supply to your muscles increases. Tissue growth and repairs are prioritized, and hormones vital to your proper functioning are released, including those that regulate feelings of hunger.
Your hippocampus, which deals with memory consolidation – among other things – shows plenty of electrical activity as you slumber. Although much remains unclear, recent studies have suggested that short-term memories acquired throughout the day appear to be progressively transferred to the cortex for long-term “storage” at night.
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Something that falls away immediately after just one less night of sleep is those all-important cognitive reasoning and retention functions. From grammatical reasoning and spatial planning to memory recall activities, our abilities begin to drop off to varying degrees.
It appears that there’s far less activity going on in the frontal and parietal lobes, which deal with problem-solving and decision making. As noted by a landmark 2017 review on the subject, your visual cortical regions also show an increasingly reduced signal over time during visual working memory tasks. Reaction times and learning also fall by the wayside.
The brain’s reward system is also shown to be sensitive to SD, which can cause changes in how a person seeks out risks, sensations, and takes impulsive actions. Essentially, the more SD you experience, the more of a clumsy fool you’re likely to become.
The 2017 review also notes that based on the “limited evidence to date”, SD begins to trigger reductions in the brain’s “intrinsic connectivity profile”, essentially meaning that the wiring linking up parts of your brain become less effective. A separate study highlights that brain cells themselves are less able to communicate with each other too. This is also one of the reasons why you become physically uncoordinated as SD worsens.
This, along with reduced blood flow to said regions, is thought to be connected to not just cognitive, but “emotional impairments”.
SD makes the person less able to display positive emotions, and less able to recognize them in other people. Negative emotional experiences become increasingly harder to deal with as the days go on, and some people may experience a state of delirium and even hallucinations.
Physical health is inextricably linked with mental health, too. Those that sleep well are far less likely to experience depression, anxiety, and other related mental health problems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How the Moon Messes With Your Sleep
A new look at old data gives credence to a long-suspected phenomenon
http://science.time.com/2013/07/25/how-the-moon-messes-with-your-sleep/
We are all, quite literally, lunatics—and I mean that in the nicest way possible. It is the moon, after all, that is responsible for the luna part of that word—and the moon has always made us at least a little crazy. Over our long history we have been charmed by it, spooked by it, seduced by it.
The human menstrual cycle is the best-known example of the way our bodies—over millions of years of evolution—have synchronized themselves to the rhythms of the moon. Less well-known is the lunar link to the electrochemistry of the brain in epileptic patients, which changes in the few days surrounding a new moon, making seizures more likely. And then there are the anecdotal accounts of the effects the moon has on sleep
People have long reported that it is harder to get to sleep and remain asleep when the moon is full, and even after a seemingly good night’s rest, there can be a faint sluggishness—a sort of full-moon hangover—that is not present on other days. If you’re sleeping on the prairie or in a settler’s cabin with no shades, the simple presence of moonlight is an inescapable explanation. But long after humans moved indoors into fully curtained and climate-controlled homes, the phenomenon has remained. What’s never been clear is whether it’s the real deal—if the moon really does mess with us–or if it’s some combination of imagination and selective reporting, with people who believe in lunar cycles seeing patterns where none exist. Now, a report in the journal Current Biology suggests that the believers have been right all along.
On average, the subjects in the study took five minutes longer to fall asleep on the three or four nights surrounding a full moon and they slept for 20 fewer minutes. In addition, EEG activity related to deep sleep fell 30%, melatonin levels were lower and the subjects reported feeling less refreshed the next day than on other days. The subjects slept in a completely darkened lab with no sight of the moon, and none of them—at least from what was known—appeared to have given any thought at all to lunar cycles.
In terms of scientific reliability, all of this is both good and not so good. A study can’t get more effectively double-blind
Even if the moon has as significant an effect on sleep as the study suggests, what’s less clear is the mechanism behind it. Dark labs eliminate the variable of light, so that can’t be it. And before you ask, no, it’s not gravity either.
https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0960982213007549
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.wired.com/story/youre-not-getting-enough-sleep-and-its-killing-you/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=psocial_atlantic&utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=owned