Oscar Allan The sluggish start to the day, the struggle to concentrate on everyday tasks and the lethargy that comes with just a few hours sleep, these are the symptoms that will be familiar to anyone who suffers with insomnia. But according to research, not all sleepless nights are the same. Brain scans have revealed evidence for distinct forms of insomnia, each with an associated pattern of neural wiring. And while the clinical distinction may mean little to those whose days are blighted by sleep deprivation, the discovery does raise the prospect of tailored interventions for people with different kinds of insomnia, which could lead to better treatments. Researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam analysed MRI scans from more than 200 insomniacs and dozens of sound sleepers and spotted structural changes that distinguished sleepers from the sleepless and five separate forms of insomnia. “If these subtypes differ in their biological mechanism, then patients in each subtype might benefit from different focused treatments,” said Tom Bresser, a neuroscientist and first author on the study. Insomnia is broadly defined as poor sleep, generally due to difficulties falling or staying asleep, which negatively affects daytime functioning. About a third of adults in western countries have sleep problems at least once a week, with up to 10% qualifying for a formal insomnia diagnosis. Chronic insomnia is diagnosed if someone suffers sleep problems on at least three nights a week for three months or more. The condition is nearly twice as common in women than men. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29401 - Posted: 07.23.2024

By Dana G. Smith Getting too little sleep later in life is associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. But paradoxically, so is getting too much sleep. While scientists are confident that a connection between sleep and dementia exists, the nature of that connection is complicated. It could be that poor sleep triggers changes in the brain that cause dementia. Or people’s sleep might be disrupted because of an underlying health issue that also affects brain health. And changes in sleep patterns can be an early sign of dementia itself. Here’s how experts think about these various connections and how to gauge your risk based on your own sleep habits. Too Little Sleep Sleep acts like a nightly shower for the brain, washing away the cellular waste that accumulates during the day. During this process, the fluid that surrounds brain cells flushes out molecular garbage and transfers it into the bloodstream, where it’s then filtered by the liver and kidneys and expelled from the body. That trash includes the protein amyloid, which is thought to play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease. Everyone’s brain produces amyloid during the day, but problems can arise when the protein accumulates into sticky clumps, called plaques. The longer someone is awake, the more amyloid builds up and the less time the brain has to remove it. Scientists don’t know whether regularly getting too little sleep — typically considered six hours or less a night — is enough to trigger the accumulation of amyloid on its own. But research has found that among adults aged 65 to 85 who already have plaques in their brains, the less sleep they got, the more amyloid was present and the worse their cognition. “Is lack of sleep sufficient to cause dementia? Probably not by itself alone,” said Dr. Sudha Seshadri, the founding director of the Glenn Biggs Institute for Alzheimer’s and Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. “But it seems to definitely be a risk factor for increasing the risk of dementia, and perhaps also the speed of decline.” © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Alzheimers
Link ID: 29400 - Posted: 07.23.2024

Anna Bawden The idea that night owls who don’t go to bed until the early hours struggle to get anything done during the day may have to be revised. It turns out that staying up late could be good for our brain power as research suggests that people who identify as night owls could be sharper than those who go to bed early. Researchers led by academics at Imperial College London studied data from the UK Biobank study on more than 26,000 people who had completed intelligence, reasoning, reaction time and memory tests. They then examined how participants’ sleep duration, quality, and chronotype (which determines what time of day we feel most alert and productive) affected brain performance. They found that those who stay up late and those classed as “intermediate” had “superior cognitive function”, while morning larks had the lowest scores. Going to bed late is strongly associated with creative types. Artists, authors and musicians known to be night owls include Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Joyce, Kanye West and Lady Gaga. But while politicians such as Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Barack Obama famously seemed to thrive on little sleep, the study found that sleep duration is important for brain function, with those getting between seven and nine hours of shut-eye each night performing best in cognitive tests. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29389 - Posted: 07.11.2024

Jon Hamilton About 170 billion cells are in the brain, and as they go about their regular tasks, they produce waste — a lot of it. To stay healthy, the brain needs to wash away all that debris. But how exactly it does this has remained a mystery. Now, two teams of scientists have published three papers that offer a detailed description of the brain's waste-removal system. Their insights could help researchers better understand, treat and perhaps prevent a broad range of brain disorders. The papers, all published in the journal Nature, suggest that during sleep, slow electrical waves push the fluid around cells from deep in the brain to its surface. There, a sophisticated interface allows the waste products in that fluid to be absorbed into the bloodstream, which takes them to the liver and kidneys to be removed from the body. One of the waste products carried away is amyloid, the substance that forms sticky plaques in the brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease. This illustration demonstrates how the thin film of sensors could be applied to the brain during surgery. There's growing evidence that in Alzheimer's disease, the brain's waste-removal system is impaired, says Jeffrey Iliff, who studies neurodegenerative diseases at the University of Washington but was not a part of the new studies. The new findings should help researchers understand precisely where the problem is and perhaps fix it, Iliff says. "If we restore drainage, can we prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease?" he asks. The new studies come more than a decade after Iliff and Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish scientist, first proposed that the clear fluids in and around the brain are part of a system to wash away waste products. The scientists named it the glymphatic system, a nod to the body's lymphatic system, which helps fight infection, maintain fluid levels and filter out waste products and abnormal cells. © 2024 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29369 - Posted: 06.26.2024

By Max Kozlov A crucial brain signal linked to long-term memory falters in rats when they are deprived of sleep — which might help to explain why poor sleep disrupts memory formation1. Even a night of normal slumber after a poor night’s sleep isn’t enough to fix the brain signal. These results, published today in Nature, suggest that there is a “critical window for memory processing”, says Loren Frank, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study. “Once you’ve lost it, you’ve lost it.” In time, these findings could lead to targeted treatments to improve memory, says study co-author Kamran Diba, a computational neuroscientist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. Neurons in the brain seldom act alone; they are highly interconnected and often fire together in a rhythmic or repetitive pattern. One such pattern is the sharp-wave ripple, in which a large group of neurons fire with extreme synchrony, then a second large group of neurons does the same and so on, one after the other at a particular tempo. These ripples occur in a brain area called the hippocampus, which is key to memory formation. The patterns are thought to facilitate communication with the neocortex, where long-term memories are later stored. One clue to their function is that some of these ripples are accelerated re-runs of brain-activity patterns that occurred during past events. For example, when an animal visits a particular spot in its cage, a specific group of neurons in the hippocampus fires in unison, creating a neural representation of that location. Later, these same neurons might participate in sharp-wave ripples — as if they were rapidly replaying snippets of that experience. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Sleep
Link ID: 29358 - Posted: 06.13.2024

By Francine Russo Desperate for sleep, you go to a sleep clinic, where your head is fitted with electrodes to record your brain waves through various sleep stages. In the morning, you report that you barely slept at all. Yet according to the test—polysomnography, the gold standard for sleep measurement—you slept all night. You’re not the classic example of a person with insomnia who waits for sleep to come, maybe checks the clock, paces, reads and waits for morning. What you have has been called subjective insomnia, paradoxical insomnia or sleep misperception. Scientists have doggedly attacked this stubborn puzzle for decades without result—until now. Now they say that you have not been misrepresenting your sleep; they have been mismeasuring it. The most recent studies, using far more enhanced measurement, have found that many people with subjective insomnia show different brain activity from good sleepers—throughout the night. Neuroscientist Aurélie Stephan and colleagues at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN) realized that something unusual was going on after they asked people in their study to put onto their head a net of 256 electrodes rather than the typical six to 20 used in sleep clinics. In one series of experiments, the researchers woke sleepers about 26 times on average during the night. The participants were asked whether they’d been asleep or awake and what they’d been thinking about. The most remarkable finding, Stephan says, is that these people showed pockets of arousal in the form of fast brain waves during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM is the stage in normal sleep when your brain should completely disconnect from the systems that keep you aware and vigilant, Stephan says. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29348 - Posted: 06.08.2024

By Andrea Muraski I had a nightmare last night. It began like many of my dreams do – I was on vacation with my extended family. This time, we were in Australia, visiting family friends in a big house. Things took a turn when — in some way that I can’t quite explain — I got mixed up in this Australian family’s jewelry theft and smuggling operation. And I lied about it in front of my relatives, to protect myself and my co-conspirators. Before I woke up, I was terrified I’d be sent to prison. The dream seems bizarre, but when I pick the narrative apart, there are clear connections to my waking life. For instance, I recently listened to a podcast where a pair of fancy hairpins suspiciously go missing during a family gathering. Moreover, I’m moving tomorrow and still have packing to do. When the movers arrive in the morning, if I haven't finished packing, I'll face the consequences of my lack of preparedness – a crime, at least to my subconscious. Dr. Rahul Jandial, neurosurgeon, neuroscientist and author of This is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life, says the major themes and images of vivid dreams like these are worth paying attention to, and trying to derive meaning from. (For me, I decided that the next time I have to move, I’m taking the day before off!) I spoke with Dr. Jandial about what else we can learn from our dreams, including some of modern science’s most remarkable findings, and theories, about the dreaming brain. 1. Dreams are not random From dream diaries recorded in ancient Egypt and China to reports from anthropologists in the Amazon, to surveys of modern Americans, evidence shows our dreams have a lot in common. For example, being chased and falling are pretty consistent. “Reports of nightmares and erotic dreams are nearly universal,” Jandial says, while people rarely report dreaming about math. Jandial says the lack of math makes sense because the part of your brain primarily responsible for logic — the prefrontal cortex — is typically not involved in dreaming. © 2024 npr

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29340 - Posted: 06.04.2024

By Elissa Welle A new study suggests that the brain clears less waste during sleep and under anesthesia than while in other states—directly contradicting prior results that suggest sleep initiates that process. The findings are stirring fresh debate on social media and elsewhere over the glymphatic system hypothesis, which contends that convective flow of cerebrospinal fluid clears the sleeping brain of toxins. The new work, published 13 May in Nature Neuroscience, proposes that fluid diffusion is responsible for moving waste throughout the brain. It uses a different method than the earlier studies—injecting tracers into mouse brain tissue instead of cerebrospinal fluid—which is likely a more reliable way to understand how the fluid moves through densely packed neurons, says Jason Rihel, professor of behavioral genetics at University College London, who was not involved in any of the studies on brain clearance. The findings have prompted some sleep researchers, including Rihel, to question the existence of a glymphatic system and whether brain clearance is tied to sleep-wake states, he says. But leading proponents of the sleep-induced clearance theory are pushing back against the study’s techniques. The new study is “misleading” and “extremely poorly done,” says Maiken Nedergaard, professor of neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Center, whose 2013 study on brain clearance led to the hypothesis of a glymphatic system. She says she plans to challenge the work in a proposed Matters Arising commentary for Nature Neuroscience. Inserting needles into the brain damages the tissue, and injecting fluid, as the team behind the new work did, increases intracranial pressure, says Jonathan Kipnis, professor of pathology and immunology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Kipnis and his colleagues published a study in February in support of the glymphatic system hypothesis that suggests neural activity facilitates brain clearance. “You disturb the system when you inject into the brain,” Kipnis says, “and that’s why we were always injecting in the CSF.” © 2024 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29327 - Posted: 05.25.2024

By Carl Zimmer Earlier this month, millions of Americans looked up at the sky to witness a total eclipse. Now, another cyclical marvel has arrived, this time at our feet. Trillions of noisy, red-eyed insects called cicadas are emerging from the earth after more than a decade of feeding on tree roots. The United States is home to 15 cicada broods, and in most years at least one of them emerges. This spring, Brood XIX, known as the Great Southern Brood, and Brood XIII, or the Northern Illinois Brood, are emerging simultaneously. Cicada watchers have spotted the first insects coming out of the ground, reporting their sightings to apps such as iNaturalist and Cicada Safari. The Great Southern Brood, which emerges across the South and the Midwest every 13 years, has been seen at sites scattered from North Carolina to Georgia. The Northern Illinois Brood, which appears every 17 years in the Midwest, is expected to appear in the next month, as temperatures there warm. How cicadas manage to rise en masse after spending so long underground remains largely a mystery. “There’s surprisingly little information about cicadas that you’d like to know,” said Raymond Goldstein, a physicist at the University of Cambridge. Once a brood climbs out of the ground, the cicadas crawl up trees to mate, and the females lay eggs in tree branches. After hatching, the young insects drop to earth and burrow into the soil. Then, each cicada spends the next 13 or 17 years underground before emerging to mate and repeat the cycle. That means that trillions of insects have to track the passage of time in the soil. It’s possible that they detect annual changes in tree roots. But how can cicadas add up those changes to divine when 13 or 17 years have passed? Scientists cannot say. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 29272 - Posted: 04.26.2024

Kimberly Rosvall Liz Aguilar The total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, coincides with an exciting time for wild birds. Local birds are singing for mates and fighting for territories as they gear up for their once-a-year chance to breed. Tens of millions of migrating birds will be passing through the path of totality, and they mostly migrate at night. Because birds use light to match their behaviors to their environment, scientists like us have lots of questions about how they will respond to the eclipse. Will they pause their fighting and wooing and shift toward bedtime-like behaviors? How about a nocturnal animal like an owl or those nighttime migrants – will they start to rustle from their roosts before they realize it’s not night? As behavioral biologists at Indiana University, we research wild breeding birds, with a goal of understanding why animals behave the way that they do in response to environmental challenges and opportunities. For the 2024 eclipse, our team is launching a new project and developing an app. If everything goes as planned, we should end up with a large dataset after the eclipse, collected by community scientist volunteers across the country. On average, a total solar eclipse occurs in the same place only once every 375 years. Most wild animals, like most people, have never seen the sky quickly switch to night in the middle of the day. These rare events are a natural experiment that can help scientists like us understand how animals respond to an unusual sudden change in light. Most past research on animal behavior during total solar eclipses is anecdotal. Observers have reported that zoo animals acted distressed or went into their enclosures. Scientists have spotted spiders starting the nightly deconstruction of their webs in the middle of the day, and farmers have heard their roosters start to crow after totality, as if it’s once again dawn. Other reports suggest more subtle effects on animal behavior. © 2010–2024, The Conversation US, Inc.

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Vision
Link ID: 29246 - Posted: 04.06.2024

By Erin Blakemore More than three-quarters of sudden infant deaths involved multiple unsafe sleep practices, including co-sleeping, a recent analysis suggests. A study published in the journal Pediatrics looked at 7,595 sudden infant death cases in a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention registry between 2011 and 2020. The majority of deaths occurred in babies less than 3 months old. The statistics revealed that 59.5 percent of the infants who died suddenly were sharing a sleep surface at the time of death, and 75.9 percent were in an adult bed when they died. Though some demographic factors such as sex and length of gestation were not clinically significant, the researchers found that the babies sharing a sleep surface were more likely to be Black and publicly insured than those who didn’t share sleep surfaces. Soft bedding was common among all the infants who died, and 76 percent of the cases involved multiple unsafe practices. The analysis mirrors known risk factors for sudden infant death. Current recommendations direct parents and other caretakers to provide infants with firm, flat, level sleep surfaces that contain nothing but a fitted sheet. Though room sharing reduces the risk of sudden infant death, CDC officials discourage parents from sharing a sleep surface with their child. Exposure to cigarette smoke during pregnancy was more common among infants who shared surfaces when they died. Though most infants were supervised by an adult when they died, the supervisor was more likely to be impaired by drug and alcohol use among those who shared a sleeping surface.

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29230 - Posted: 04.02.2024

By Charles Digges My default mode for writing term papers during my student days was the all-night slog, and I recall the giddy, slap-happy feeling that would steal over me as the sun rose. There was a quality of alert focus that came with it, as well as a gregariousness that would fuel bonding sessions with my other all-night companions. After we’d turned in the products of our midnight oil to our professors, we would all head out for pancakes. Then I’d go home and sleep the magic off. For years, I’d wondered if there was any basis for this temporary euphoria that I—though certainly not all my classmates—experienced after those sleepless nights. That I should feel so expansive and goofy after skipping sleep while many of them turned into drowsy grouches seemed to defy logic. Going without sleep isn’t supposed to be a good thing, especially for folks who experience depression, as I have. But it turns out this paradox has been the subject of inquiry for at least two centuries. In 1818, University of Leipzig psychiatrist Johann Christian August Heinroth was reportedly the first to suggest that partial or total sleep deprivation could be temporarily effective against “melancholia,” as depression was called in those days. He found this to be true only in a certain subset of patients—around 60 percent. More than a hundred years later, in the 1970s, evidence emerged that a “resynchronization” of disturbed circadian rhythms could be responsible for the improved moods of depressed patients after a night without sleep. And more recently, researchers have found that a neurotransmitter involved in reward known as dopamine may play a role in this effect, as may neuroplasticity—the nervous system’s ability to rearrange itself in response to stimuli. But the precise neural mechanisms responsible have remained unclear. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Keyword: Sleep; Depression
Link ID: 29220 - Posted: 03.28.2024

Ian Sample Science editor Two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, according to researchers, who said consistent, restful slumber was a key factor in helping to stave off feeling one’s true age. Psychologists in Sweden found that, on average, volunteers felt more than four years older when they were restricted to only four hours of sleep for two consecutive nights, with some claiming the sleepiness made them feel decades older. The opposite was seen when people were allowed to stay in bed for nine hours, though the effect was more modest, with participants in the study claiming to feel on average three months younger than their real age after ample rest. “Sleep has a major impact on how old you feel and it’s not only your long-term sleep patterns,” said Dr Leonie Balter, a psychoneuroimmunologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and first author on the study. “Even when you only sleep less for two nights that has a real impact on how you feel.” Beyond simply feeling more decrepit, the perception of being many years older may affect people’s health, Balter said, by encouraging unhealthy eating, reducing physical exercise, and making people less willing to socialise and engage in new experiences. The researchers ran two studies. In the first, 429 people aged 18 to 70 answered questions about how old they felt and on how many nights, if any, they had slept badly in the past month. Their sleepiness was also rated according to a standard scale used in psychology research. For each day of poor sleep the volunteers felt on average three months older, the scientists found, while those who reported no bad nights in the preceding month felt on average nearly six years younger than their true age. It was unclear, however, whether bad sleep made people feel older or vice versa. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29219 - Posted: 03.28.2024

By Maria Popova I once dreamed a kiss that hadn’t yet happened. I dreamed the angle at which our heads tilted, the fit of my fingers behind her ear, the exact pressure exerted on the lips by this transfer of trust and tenderness. Freud, who catalyzed the study of dreams with his foundational 1899 treatise, would have discounted this as a mere chimera of the wishful unconscious. But what we have since discovered about the mind — particularly about the dream-rich sleep state of rapid-eye movement, or REM, unknown in Freud’s day — suggests another possibility for the adaptive function of these parallel lives in the night. One cold morning not long after the kiss dream, I watched a young night heron sleep on a naked branch over the pond in Brooklyn Bridge Park, head folded into chest, and found myself wondering whether birds dream. The recognition that nonhuman animals dream dates at least as far back as the days of Aristotle, who watched a sleeping dog bark and deemed it unambiguous evidence of mental life. But by the time Descartes catalyzed the Enlightenment in the 17th century, he had reduced other animals to mere automatons, tainting centuries of science with the assumption that anything unlike us is inherently inferior. In the 19th century, when the German naturalist Ludwig Edinger performed the first anatomical studies of the bird brain and discovered the absence of a neocortex — the more evolutionarily nascent outer layer of the brain, responsible for complex cognition and creative problem-solving — he dismissed birds as little more than Cartesian puppets of reflex. This view was reinforced in the 20th century by the deviation, led by B.F. Skinner and his pigeons, into behaviorism — a school of thought that considered behavior a Rube Goldberg machine of stimulus and response governed by reflex, disregarding interior mental states and emotional response. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 29216 - Posted: 03.26.2024

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

Keyword: Sleep; Consciousness
Link ID: 29176 - Posted: 03.05.2024

By Jackie Rocheleau Every day about 60,000 people have surgery under general anesthesia in the United States. Often casually compared to falling into a deep sleep, going under is in fact wildly different from your everyday nocturnal slumber. Not only does a person lose the ability to feel pain, form memories, or move—they can’t simply be nudged back into conscious awareness. But occasionally, people do wake unexpectedly—in about 1 out of every 1,000 to 2,000 surgeries, patients emerge from the fog of anesthesia into the harsh light of the operating room while still under the knife. One question that has dogged researchers over the past several decades is whether women are more likely to find themselves in these unfortunate circumstances. A number of recent studies, including a 2023 meta-analysis, suggest that the answer is yes. But the findings are controversial: Other studies have found no differences in waking frequency between the sexes and most of the studies were not designed specifically to identify sex differences. It’s also difficult to know whether other factors might have influenced the results: rates of metabolization of drugs by male and female bodies, as well as variation in kinds of surgeries and anesthetic regimens among study participants. No causal link had been established. Now, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences helps untangle some of the mystery. In a series of experiments in mice and in humans, the researchers found that females do wake more easily from anesthesia and that testosterone plays an important role in how quickly and deeply we go under, and how easily we wake up. “There seems to be something hardwired into the female brain that biases it more toward a state of wakefulness,” says University of Pennsylvania anesthesiologist Max Kelz, co-author of the study. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc., All rights reserved.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Sleep
Link ID: 29156 - Posted: 02.22.2024

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

Keyword: Sleep; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 29128 - Posted: 02.03.2024

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

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 29120 - Posted: 01.31.2024

By Christian Guay & Emery Brown What does it mean to be conscious? People have been thinking and writing about this question for millennia. Yet many things about the conscious mind remain a mystery, including how to measure and assess it. What is a unit of consciousness? Are there different levels of consciousness? What happens to consciousness during sleep, coma and general anesthesia? As anesthesiologists, we think about these questions often. We make a promise to patients every day that they will be disconnected from the outside world and their inner thoughts during surgery, retain no memories of the experience and feel no pain. In this way, general anesthesia has enabled tremendous medical advances, from microscopic vascular repairs to solid organ transplants. In addition to their tremendous impact on clinical care, anesthetics have emerged as powerful scientific tools to probe questions about consciousness. They allow us to induce profound and reversible changes in conscious states—and study brain responses during these transitions. But one of the challenges that anesthesiologists face is measuring the transition from one state to another. That’s because many of the approaches that exist interrupt or disrupt what we are trying to study. Essentially, assessing the system affects the system. In studies of human consciousness, determining whether someone is conscious can arouse the person being studied—confounding that very assessment. To address this challenge, we adapted a simple approach we call the breathe-squeeze method. It offers us a way to study changes in conscious state without interrupting those shifts. To understand this approach, it helps to consider some insights from studies of consciousness that have used anesthetics. For decades researchers have used electroencephalography (EEG) to observe electrical activity in the brains of people receiving various anesthetics. They can then analyze that activity with EEG readings to characterize patterns that are specific to various anesthetics, so-called anesthetic signatures. © 2024 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Keyword: Consciousness; Sleep
Link ID: 29116 - Posted: 01.27.2024

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

Keyword: Sleep; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29113 - Posted: 01.27.2024