By Emily Underwood On a moonless night, the light that reaches Earth is a trillion–fold less than on a sunny day. Yet most mammals still see well enough to get around just fine—even without the special light-boosting membranes in the eyes of cats and other nocturnal animals. A new study in mice hints at how this natural night vision works: Motion-sensing nerve cells in the retina temporarily change how they wire to each other in dark conditions. The findings might one day help visually impaired humans, researchers say. Scientists already knew a bit about how night vision works in rabbits, mice, humans, and other mammals. Mammalian retinas can respond to “ridiculously small” numbers of photons, says Joshua Singer, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland in College Park who was not involved in the new study. A single photon can activate a light-sensitive cell known as a rod cell in the retina, which sends a minute electrical signal to the brain through a ganglion cell. One kind of ganglion cell specializes in motion detection—a vital function if you’re a mouse being hunted by an owl, or a person darting to avoid oncoming traffic. Some of these direction-selective ganglion cells (DSGCs) get excited only when an object is moving upward. Others fire only when objects are moving down, or to the left or right. Together, the cells decide where an object is headed and relay that information to the brain, which decides how to act. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Vision; Evolution
Link ID: 25449 - Posted: 09.14.2018

By Knvul Sheikh Humans and other mammals react to stressful situations through a series of well-orchestrated evolutionary adaptations. When faced with a predator looking for its next meal, or with worry of losing a job, our bodies release a cascade of stress hormones. Our heart rate spikes, breath quickens, muscles tense up and beads of sweat appear. This so-called “fight-or-flight” response served our ancestors well, but its continual activation in our modern-day lives comes with a cost. Scientists are starting to realize stress often exacerbates several diseases, including depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, HIV/AIDS and asthma. One theory is hoping to explain the link between stress and such widespread havoc by laying the blame on an unexpected source—the microscopic powerhouses inside each cell. Each of our cells contains hundreds of small bean-shaped mitochondria — subcellular structures, or organelles, that provide the energy needed for normal functioning. Mitochondria have their own circular genome with 37 genes. We inherit this mitochondrial DNA only from our mothers, so the makeup of the DNA’s code stays relatively consistent from one generation to the next. But our fight-or-flight response places extreme demands on the mitochondria. All of a sudden, they need to produce much more energy to fuel a faster heartbeat, expanding lungs and tensing muscles, which leaves them vulnerable to damage. Unlike DNA in the cell’s nucleus, though, mitochondria have limited repair mechanisms. And recent animal studies have shown chronic stress not only leads to mitochondrial damage in brain regions such as the hippocampus, hypothalamus and cortex, it also results in mitochondria releasing their DNA into the cell cytoplasm, and eventually into the blood. © 2018 Scientific American,

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25448 - Posted: 09.14.2018

By Abraham Loeb Scientific discoveries substantiate our awe when faced with the richness and universality of the laws of nature. But science falls short of explaining this natural order and why it exists in the first place. This is where philosophy comes to the rescue. Science seeks to understand how the universe works, just as we might try to figure out the mechanics of a sophisticated engine. Philosophy, by contrast, addresses questions that transcend the functionality of nature, as we might pursue the complementary task of figuring out why the engine is constructed in a particular way. As a scientist, I am surprised at the degree of organization the universe exhibits; the same laws that govern its earliest moments—something we know from observations of the most distant galaxies and most ancient radiation—also preside over what we find today in laboratories on Earth. This should not be taken for granted. We could have witnessed a fragmented reality, one in which different regions of spacetime obey different sets of laws or even behave chaotically with no rational explanation. By studying the physical constituents of an engine, one acquires a better understanding of how it works but not necessarily the purpose for its existence. Metaphysical thinking can supplement science in territories not accessible to empirical inquiry. Within these domains, philosophy can build on scientific knowledge rather than yield to it. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 25447 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By Sheila Kaplan and Jan Hoffman WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday declared that teenage use of electronic cigarettes has reached “an epidemic proportion,” and it put makers of the most popular devices on notice that they have just 60 days to prove they can keep their devices away from minors. The order was part of a sweeping government action that targeted both makers and sellers of e-cigarettes. If Juul Labs and four other major manufacturers fail to halt sales to minors, the agency said, it could remove their flavored products from the market. It also raised the possibility of civil or criminal charges if companies are allowing bulk sales through their websites. The agency said it was sending warning letters to 1,100 retailers — including 7-Eleven stores, Walgreens, Circle K convenience shops and Shell gas stations — and issued another 131 fines, ranging from $279 to $11,182, for selling e-cigarettes to minors. Federal law prohibits selling e-cigarettes to anyone under 18. In a briefing with reporters, the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, said that more than two million middle and high school students were regular users of e-cigarettes last year. The government’s tactics underscore a dilemma in the public health community: In addressing one public health problem — cigarette smoking, which kills 480,000 people in the United States each year — e-cigarettes are creating another — hooking teenagers who have never smoked on nicotine. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25446 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By: Albert La Spada, M.D., Ph.D. Altering the DNA sequence of a single gene can be enough to cause a fatal illness, and a medical specialty is devoted to the diagnosis and care of patients who have what doctors have labeled “genetic diseases.” While most of these conditions are very rare (except in certain small human populations that exist in reproductive isolation1), there are thousands of genetic diseases, and at least half of pediatric patients admitted to major children’s medical centers at any given time are afflicted with one of them.2 Single gene mutations can also cause breast, ovarian, and colon cancer in adult patients. Over the last century, our understanding of genetic disease has greatly advanced through the tireless work of clinicians and researchers, as the concept of one gene giving rise to one particular disorder evolved, and the modes of inheritance for different genetic diseases were defined. In the course of this work, certain such diseases (e.g. sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, neurofibromatosis) became well known, almost always because they were the most common and the most tragic. Included in this group is a disorder that has been the focus of intense research efforts to define its cause and now to develop an effective treatment: Huntington’s disease (HD). In this primarily neuropsychiatric disorder, most affected individuals first suffer from an inability to control their movements, and develop signs of disease in their 30s or 40s. Because these uncontrolled movements can appear rhythmic, the disease was also named Huntington’s chorea, from the Greek word for dance. The initial phase typically advances for a number of years before HD patients develop cognitive decline, which progresses until they can no longer perform the activities of daily living. At this point, patients are typically admitted to a skilled nursing facility, where they linger in decline for more years before passing away. © 2018 The Dana Foundation

Keyword: Huntingtons
Link ID: 25445 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By Michael Schulson Last spring, Paul Strode gave an unusual survey to his advanced biology students at Fairview High School in Boulder, Colorado. The first five questions were: 1. Define as best you can: What is a racial group? 2. Define as best you can: What is an ethnic group? 3. Define as best you can: What is meant by the term genetic ancestry? 4. True or False: There is too much overlap between racial groups to use a single biological trait (like skin color) to distinguish one racial group from another. 5. True or False: When several traits are combined they can be used to distinguish one racial group from another. “In terms of wading into the idea of gender identification, differences between racial groups and so forth, we regard those as potential firestorms, if we were to go there.” The next day, Strode showed his students — all seniors — their aggregated results. On some questions, the students were mostly in agreement. More than 80 percent of them, for example, correctly marked Question 4 as “True.” But other topics were muddier, and on several questions — including #5 — the students split nearly 50-50. “They’re guessing,” Strode says. (For the record, the answer he says he was looking for on #5 was “False.”) Strode’s exercise is an anomaly. Most American biology textbooks and curricula don’t discuss race at all — nor do they grapple with the biology of sexual orientation or gender, for that matter. To some, these omissions seem appropriate. Early 20th-century biology textbooks, after all, were replete with ignorant racial and gender stereotyping and classifications purporting to be scientific — and some even extolled the virtues of racial purity. It would be hard to find such discussions in today’s biology classrooms and supporting materials. Copyright 2018 Undark

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 25444 - Posted: 09.13.2018

Diana Kwon Obesity is on the rise across the globe. The worldwide prevalence of the condition has nearly tripled over the last four decades, and approximately 13 percent of adults were obese in 2016. This staggering rise poses a public health concern: not only is obesity tied to bodily ailments such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, epidemiological investigations have revealed that it is also linked to cognitive decline—and higher chances of developing dementia and other brain-related disorders later in life. Researchers have recently started to shed light on how weight gain affects the brain, and over the last few years, microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, have emerged as the key culprit. Several rodent studies paint a picture of activated microglia gobbling up dendritic spines that form synapses in obese animals’ brains as the cause of cognitive decline. A study published today (September 10) in the Journal of Neuroscience provides strong new support for this theory. While prior studies have drawn robust associations between microglia and obesity-related cognitive decline, Elise Cope, a postdoc at Princeton University, says none had yet addressed whether those cells were actually causing the behavioral changes. “The novelty of our study was where we decided to see if blocking microglia using three different methods could actually prevent the dendritic spine loss and improve cognitive function,” Cope says. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist.

Keyword: Obesity; Glia
Link ID: 25443 - Posted: 09.13.2018

By Carl Zimmer How generous is an ape? It’s a hard question for scientists to tackle, but the answer could tell us a lot about ourselves. People in every culture can be generous, whether they’re loaning a cellphone to an office mate or sharing an antelope haunch with a hungry family. While it’s easy to dwell on our capacity for war and violence, scientists see our generosity as a remarkable feature of our species. “One of the things that stands out about humans is how helpful we are,” said Christopher Krupenye, a primate behavior researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. This generosity may have been crucial to the survival of our early ancestors who lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers. “When our own attempts to find food are unsuccessful, we rely on others to share food with us — otherwise we starve,” said Jan Engelmann, a researcher at Göttingen University. To understand the origin of this impulse — known as prosociality — a number of researchers have turned to our closest living relatives. For example, a new study involving bonobo apes suggests that the roots of human generosity run deep, but only came into full flower over the course of the evolution of our species. Roughly seven million years ago, our lineage split from the ancestors of chimpanzees and their cousin species, bonobos. Chimpanzees and bonobos share a common ancestor that lived about two million years ago. These two closely related species of apes look almost identical to the untrained eye. But they have evolved some intriguing differences in their behavior, including which objects — food or tools — prompt them to behave with generosity. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 25442 - Posted: 09.12.2018

Jon Hamilton Kids with ADHD are easily distracted. Barn owls are not. So a team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore is studying these highly focused predatory birds in an effort to understand the brain circuits that control attention. The team's long-term goal is to figure out what goes wrong in the brains of people with attention problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. "We think we have the beginnings of an answer," says Shreesh Mysore, an assistant professor who oversees the owl lab at Hopkins. The answer, he says, appears to involve an ancient brain area with special cells that tell us what to ignore. Mysore explains his hypothesis from one of the owl rooms in his basement lab. He has a distraught bird perched on his forearm. And as he talks, he tries to soothe the animal. The owl screeches, flaps and digs its talons into the elbow-length leather glove that Mysore wears for protection. He covers the bird's eyes with his free hand and hugs the animal to his chest. The owl, no longer able to focus on the movements of his human visitors, goes quiet. When it comes to paying attention, barn owls have a lot in common with people, Mysore says. "Essentially, a brain decides at any instant: What is the most important piece of information for behavior or survival?" he says. "And that is the piece of information that gets attended to, that drives behavior." © 2018 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Attention
Link ID: 25441 - Posted: 09.12.2018

By Elena Pasquinelli Ten years ago technology writer Nicholas Carr published an article in the Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” He strongly suspected the answer was “yes.” Himself less and less able to focus, remember things or absorb more than a few pages of text, he accused the Internet of radically changing people’s brains. And that is just one of the grievances leveled against the Internet and at the various devices we use to access it–including cell phones, tablets, game consoles and laptops. Often the complaints target video games that involve fighting or war, arguing that they cause players to become violent. But digital devices also have fervent defenders—in particular the promoters of brain-training games, who claim that their offerings can help improve attention, memory and reflexes. Who, if anyone, is right? The answer is less straightforward than you might think. Take Carr’s accusation. As evidence, he quoted findings of neuroscientists who showed that the brain is more plastic than previously understood. In other words, it has the ability to reprogram itself over time, which could account for the Internet’s effect on it. Yet in a 2010 opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, psychologists Christopher Chabris, then at Union College, and Daniel J. Simons of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rebutted Carr’s view: “There is simply no experimental evidence to show that living with new technologies fundamentally changes brain organization in a way that affects one’s ability to focus,” they wrote. And the debate goes on. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Attention
Link ID: 25440 - Posted: 09.12.2018

Laura Sanders I’m relatively new to Oregon, but one of the ways I know I’m starting to settle in is my ability to recognize marijuana shops. Some are easy. But others, with names like The Agrestic and Mr. Nice Guy, are a little trickier to identify for someone who hasn’t spent much time in a state that has legalized marijuana. A growing number of states have legalized both medical and recreational marijuana. At the same time, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are using the drug in increasing numbers. A 2017 JAMA study described both survey results and urine tests of nearly 280,000 pregnant women in Northern California, where medical marijuana was legalized in 1996. The study showed that in 2009, about 4 percent of the women tested used marijuana. In 2016, about 7 percent of women did. Those California numbers may be even higher now, since recreational marijuana became legal there this year. Some of those numbers may be due in part to women using marijuana to treat their morning sickness, a more recent study by some of the same researchers suggests. Their report, published August 20 in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that pregnant women with severe nausea and vomiting were 3.8 times more likely to use marijuana than pregnant women without morning sickness. So some pregnant women are definitely using the drug, and exposing their fetuses to it, too. Ingredients in marijuana are known to make their way to fetuses by crossing the placenta during pregnancy (and by entering breast milk after the baby is born). But what actually happens when those marijuana compounds arrive? © Society for Science and the Public

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25439 - Posted: 09.12.2018

By Nicholas Bakalar New research has found that obstructive sleep apnea — a disorder in which breathing stops and starts during sleep — is associated with an increased risk for gout, a common cause of painful arthritis. Scientists studied 15,879 patients with apnea and 63,296 matched controls without, following them for an average of almost six years. Over that time, 4.9 percent of people with apnea developed gout, compared with 2.6 percent of those without the disorder. Both disorders are associated with obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and other conditions, but after controlling for these and other factors the independent association of apnea with gout was still evident. The study is in Arthritis & Rheumatology. The mechanism is unclear, but reduced oxygen supply during sleep encourages the production of uric acid, and the accumulation of uric acid crystals in the joints is what causes the inflammation and pain of gout. Apnea can be treated with continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, in which the patient wears a mask at night to allow easier breathing. There are drugs and diet restrictions used to treat gout. The lead author, Milica Blagojevic-Bucknall, a lecturer at Keele University in England, said that this observational study does not prove cause and effect. Still, she added, “It’s possible that people who use CPAP could reduce the risk or severity of gout.” © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25438 - Posted: 09.12.2018

By James Gorman Chalk up another achievement for parrots, with an odd twist that raises questions about whether the experimenters or the birds know best. Anastasia Krasheninnikova and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany tested four species of parrots in an experiment that required trading tokens for food and recently reported their findings in the journal Scientific Reports. Would the birds resist an immediate reward to trade for something better? Many species have shown the ability to hold off on an immediate treat — like a dry corn kernel — for something tastier later on, like a bit of walnut. Chimpanzees, monkeys and cockatoos, among other species, can defer gratification. But using tokens for trading had not been tried before in birds, Dr. Krasheninnikova said. Here’s how it worked. First the birds, great green macaws, blue-throated macaws, blue-headed macaws and African grey parrots, learned that they could barter tokens for foods of different value — to the birds, that is. A metal hoop could be traded for a piece of dry corn, the lowest value food, a metal bracket for a medium value sunflower seed and a plastic ring for the highest value food, a piece of shelled walnut. The birds were then offered various choices, like a piece of corn or the ring. They all reliably chose to forego the corn and take the ring. Then they were able to trade the ring for a piece of walnut. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 25437 - Posted: 09.11.2018

By Frankie Schembri The Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation has awarded its three annual prizes, regarded as the United States’s most prestigious biomedical research awards, to four researchers in fields including genetics and anesthetic drug development. The Laskers often precede a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Since the awards were founded in 1945, 87 Lasker laureates have later gotten the call from Stockholm. The basic research prize is shared by Michael Grunstein of the University of California, Los Angeles, and C. David Allis of The Rockefeller University in New York City, who investigated the histone, once considered to be inert packing material for DNA. It is now recognized as an essential component in gene regulation. Joan Argetsinger Steitz of Yale University won the special prize for her discoveries in RNA biology, as well as her work in mentoring and advocating for women in science. John “Iain” Glen, a Scottish veterinary-anesthesiologist now retired from AstraZeneca, the biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., won the clinical award for development of propofol. One of the most widely used drugs for inducing anesthesia, propofol is administered some 60 million times per year in the United States. The laureates will receive their prizes and honorariums of $250,000 for each category at a ceremony in New York City on 21 September. © 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25436 - Posted: 09.11.2018

Bret Stetka Dr. Leslie Norins is willing to hand over $1 million of his own money to anyone who can clarify something: Is Alzheimer's disease, the most common form of dementia worldwide, caused by a germ? By "germ" he means microbes like bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites. In other words, Norins, a physician turned publisher, wants to know if Alzheimer's is infectious. It's an idea that just a few years ago would've seemed to many an easy way to drain your research budget on bunk science. Money has poured into Alzheimer's research for years, but until very recently not much of it went toward investigating infection in causing dementia. But this "germ theory" of Alzheimer's, as Norins calls it, has been fermenting in the literature for decades. Even early 20th century Czech physician Oskar Fischer — who, along with his German contemporary Dr. Alois Alzheimer, was integral in first describing the condition — noted a possible connection between the newly identified dementia and tuberculosis. If the germ theory gets traction, even in some Alzheimer's patients, it could trigger a seismic shift in how doctors understand and treat the disease. For instance, would we see a day when dementia is prevented with a vaccine, or treated with antibiotics and antiviral medications? Norins thinks it's worth looking into. © 2018 npr

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 25435 - Posted: 09.11.2018

By Rachel Bluth The number of children diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyper­activity disorder (ADHD) has reached more than 10 percent, a significant increase during the past 20 years, according to a new study. The rise was most pronounced in minority groups, suggesting that better access to health insurance and mental-health treatment through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) may have played some role in the increase. The rate of diagnosis doubled in girls, although it was still much lower than in boys. But the researchers say they found no evidence confirming frequent complaints that the condition is overdiagnosed or misdiagnosed. The United States has significantly more instances of ADHD than other developed countries, which researchers said has led some to think Americans are overdiagnosing children. Wei Bao, the lead author of the study, said in an interview that a review of studies around the world doesn’t support that. “I don’t think overdiagnosis is the main issue,” he said. Nonetheless, those doubts persist. Stephen Hinshaw, who co-authored a 2014 book called “The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medication, Money, and Today’s Push for Performance,” compared ADHD to depression. He said in an interview that neither condition has unequivocal biological markers, which makes it hard to determine whether a person has the condition. Symptoms of ADHD can include inattention, fidgety behavior and impulsivity. © 1996-2018 The Washington Post

Keyword: ADHD; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 25434 - Posted: 09.11.2018

By Jan Hoffman BOSTON — To the medical students, the patient was a conundrum. According to his chart, he had residual pain from a leg injury sustained while working on a train track. Now he wanted an opioid stronger than the Percocet he’d been prescribed. So why did his urine test positive for two other drugs — cocaine and hydromorphone, a powerful opioid that doctors had not ordered? It was up to Clark Yin, 29, to figure out what was really going on with Chris McQ, 58 — as seven other third-year medical students and two instructors watched. “How are you going to have a conversation around the patient’s positive tox screen results?” asked Dr. Lidya H. Wlasiuk, who teaches addiction awareness and interventions here at Boston University School of Medicine. Mr. Yin threw up his hands. “I have no idea,” he admitted. Chris McQ is a fictional case study created by Dr. Wlasiuk, brought to life for this class by Ric Mauré, a keyboard player who also works as a standardized patient — trained to represent a real patient, to help medical students practice diagnostic and communication skills. The assignment today: grappling with the delicate art and science of managing a chronic pain patient who might be tipping into a substance use disorder. How can a doctor win over a patient who fears being judged? How to determine whether the patient’s demand for opioids is a response to dependence or pain? Addressing these quandaries might seem fundamental in medical training — such patients appear in just about every field, from internal medicine to orthopedics to cardiology. The need for front-line intervention is dire: primary care providers like Dr. Wlasiuk, who practices family medicine in a Boston community clinic, routinely encounter these patients but often lack the expertise to prevent, diagnose and treat addiction. © 2018 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 25433 - Posted: 09.11.2018

Diana Kwon In the early 2000s, Stefano Schiaffino, a muscle physiologist at the University of Padova in Italy, was faced with puzzling results: two seemingly identical experiments involving hind leg muscles in rats had yielded different findings. Schiaffino and his team were investigating nuclear factor of activated T cells (NFAT), a transcription factor that responds to the level of muscle activity. Despite using similar procedures, the researchers found that in the tissues from one set of animals, NFAT had moved from the cytoplasm into the nucleus in a large proportion of cells, while in tissues from another experiment, this change had not occurred. The explanation for this difference turned out to be simple: timing. The researcher responsible for one trial had sacrificed the nocturnal animals in the evening, while another had conducted the same procedure for the second trial in the morning. This meant that the first group of animals was more active at the time of measurement than the second. When the scientists repeated the second experiment late in the day, when the animals were more likely to be awake, they observed high levels of NFAT in the nuclei of the muscle cells, essentially replicating the first experiment. “At that time, I’d been working for many years on muscle, but had never thought about the circadian rhythms,” recalls Schiaffino, whose research now focuses on this aspect of muscle biology. © 1986 - 2018 The Scientist

Keyword: Biological Rhythms; Obesity
Link ID: 25432 - Posted: 09.11.2018

Laura Sanders Obesity can affect brainpower, and a study in mice may help explain how. In the brains of obese mice, rogue immune cells chomp nerve cell connections that are important for learning and memory, scientists report September 10 in the Journal of Neuroscience. Drugs that stop this synapse destruction may ultimately prove useful for protecting the brain against the immune cell assault. Like people, mice that eat lots of fat quickly pack on pounds. After 12 weeks of a high-fat diet, mice weighed almost 40 percent more than mice fed standard chow. These obese mice showed signs of diminished brainpower, neuroscientist Elizabeth Gould of Princeton University and colleagues found. Obese mice were worse at escaping mazes and remembering an object’s location than mice of a normal weight. On nerve cells, microscopic knobs called dendritic spines receive signals. Compared with normal-sized mice, obese mice had fewer dendritic spines in several parts of the mice’s hippocampi, brain structures important for learning and memory. The dendritic spine destruction comes from immune cells called microglia, the results suggest. In obese mice, higher numbers of active microglia lurked among these sparser nerve cell connections compared with mice of normal weights. When the researchers interfered with microglia in obese mice, dendritic spines were protected and the mice’s performance on thinking tests improved. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2018.

Keyword: Obesity; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 25431 - Posted: 09.11.2018

By Susana Martinez-Conde Last month, for the first time in over a year, I had lucid dreams for two nights in a row. A lucid dream, or realizing that you’re dreaming while still inside of the dream, is not an unusual experience: most people will have at least one lucid dream in their lives. An occasional lucid dreamer myself, I’ve never developed the degree of control that some master lucid dreamers have, who can bend, Matrix-like, the fabric of their dreams to their will, night after night. Instead, my own version of lucid dreaming tends to consist on being in the midst of some horrifying nightmare, then having the thought that “this is just too awful to be real, so I must be dreaming,” and eventually grasping that that’s indeed the case. When that happens, I typically use my newfound awareness to wake myself up at once and be done with the whole thing. But in these two recent instances, I had an altogether different experience. Critically, I figured out that I was dreaming while having a neutral sort of dream, so I wasn’t compelled to seek an immediate exit. So my understanding of my unusual situation was a lot more matter-of-fact than in the majority of my prior lucid dreaming episodes. On each consecutive occasion, I immediately decided on flying. I had had dreams of flight before, but never intentionally. Now I could soar with purpose. I ascended at vertiginous speeds over the Manhattan skyline, and as soon as the clouds enveloped me I dove down, superhero-style, unafraid of gravity. Rising up again, I darted around buildings and billboards with ballistic accuracy. I briefly joined a flock of birds, then left them behind. © 2018 Scientific American

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 25430 - Posted: 09.10.2018