For almost two decades, Philip Skeates woke up dog tired, even though he had just spent a good 12 hours in bed. (…) To the amazement of experts, he was diagnosed with one of the worst cases of sleep apnoea - a condition that causes the airways to close - that had ever been seen in Britain.

It meant that Skeates stopped breathing every 40 seconds or so during the night. He would briefly wake up, without properly regaining consciousness, and then fall back to sleep. And the process would begin over again.

Doctors estimated Skeates was only actually sleeping for a few seconds at a time, and for less than 15 minutes in total every night.

{ The Guardian | Continue reading }

In what sounds like a dream for millions of tired coffee drinkers, Darpa-funded scientists might have found a drug that will eliminate sleepiness.

A nasal spray containing a naturally occurring brain hormone called orexin A reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests. The discovery’s first application will probably be in treatment of the severe sleep disorder narcolepsy. (…)

Orexin A is a promising candidate to become a “sleep replacement” drug. For decades, stimulants have been used to combat sleepiness, but they can be addictive and often have side effects, including raising blood pressure or causing mood swings. (…)

“New research indicates that not getting enough sleep is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders,” said Dr. Michael Twery, director of the National Center on Sleep Disorders Research. “We have to realize that we are already living in a society where we are already self-medicating with caffeine,” he said.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Square America }

Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.

In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 a.m., from 7:30 a.m. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. Districts in Virginia and Connecticut have achieved similar success. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minn., which instituted high school start times of 8:40 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. respectively in 1997, students’ grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreased.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Do bears actually sleep straight through winter, and if so, how do they keep from dehydrating?

Although they can rouse themselves quickly if disturbed, bears really do sleep for three to seven months during winter–not because of the cold, but because of the scarcity of food. (…)

The bears’ body temperature drops only about ten degrees Fahrenheit. Still, they undergo some pretty dramatic physiological changes. Oxygen use drops 50 percent, and heart rate decreases from 40 to 50 beats a minute during summer sleep to 8 to 10 beats during hibernation. Eating, drinking, urination, and defecation cease. (One notable aspect of bear hibernation is formation of an anal plug, but I’d just as soon not get into that.)

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

photo { Jean Harlow with Polar Bear photographed by George Hurrell }

As a grad student in psychology in the early 1990s, Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo often had bad dreams. What struck him the most was how lifelike they were. (…) You move around, talk, run, interact with others, experience emotions, and feel the passage of time, just as in everyday life.

When Revonsuo began studying dreams, he asked his students to start keeping logs of their own nocturnal escapades. He noticed something striking. The dreams were filled with dangerous events, negative emotions, monsters, chases, escapes, fights, and near-death experiences. The dream world was a hellscape of danger, teeming with threatening events far more sinister than in waking life.

These weren’t the misfirings of diseased brains. Threat dreams were the norm, accounting for a staggering two-thirds of all dreams. Revonsuo discovered that we grossly underestimate the number of nightmares we have. As it turns out, we have 300 to 1,000 threat dreams per year—one to four per night. Just under half are aggressive encounters: physical aggression such as fistfights, and nonphysical aggression such as verbal arguments. The rest are about car crashes, falling and drowning, missing a meeting or a test, being lost or trapped, and being naked in public. The whole dream world seemed to have a negative bias: more negative emotions than positive ones, more nightmares than fantasy.

In the ancestral environment, Revonsuo reasoned, our dreams served to protect us, teaching us how to respond when a wild animal was chasing us or when we got lost in the forest. That was why the dream world was so filled with peril: to simulate the potential threats and prepare us to react quickly. But how could dreams help us select the optimal response, given that dream recall is so fragile? After all, we remember only a few of our dreams, and even those fade fast in the tumult of the day.

Revonsuo believes that by providing rehearsal, dreaming helps us recognize dangers more quickly and respond more efficiently. We don’t need to be aware of this rehearsal, just as you don’t have to recall exactly where you practiced your tennis serve in order to reap the rewards.

The idea that dreams are a dojo for perfecting waking activities fits well with what is already known about practice. Mental rehearsal through visualization improves skills, enhances learning, and changes the brain, polishing performance in almost any domain, from sports to piano playing.

The single most pervasive theme in dreaming is that of being chased or attacked. Just as athletes in training repeat parts of their performance, we may, in our nightmares, be attacked and chased over and over again, not to solve a particular problem but to actually practice efficient escape behavior. (…)

The dreaming brain, explains Revonsuo, scans emotional memories. When it detects a memory trace with a strong negative emotion, it constructs a nightmare around that theme. The more traumatic the event, the more intense the nightmare. The brain’s system for detecting threats is sensitive and flexible: Anything the brain tags with a strong negative charge gets thrown into the threat bin and dredged up at night.

Sometimes this system works well: Dreaming about a boy running in front of our car better prepares us should that danger crop up in real life. But sometimes the modern world throws the threat-detection mechanism out of whack: Watching horror movies can trigger nightmares about vampires, ghosts, aliens, or zombies. Such “nonsense nightmares” don’t rehearse any useful threats; they’re like an allergic reaction, says Revonsuo. Just as our immune system can mistake pollen for a pathogen and mount a defensive campaign, the threat-detection system misperceives horror movies and deploys its defenses by generating a nightmare.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

artwork { Golan Levin, Opto-isolator, 2007 | paint, mechatronic circuits, acrylic, custom software, computer, ABS enclosure }

Over the last ten years, scientists have come to appreciate the complex relationships between sleep and memory. Not only does sleep prepare the brain for encoding new memories, sleep also provides an opportunity for the brain to consolidate and integrate recently learned information. Thus, sleep can make memories more stable, so that they are more resistant to interference and decay. For example, a night of sleep can make you better able to identify objects in your visual field where you studied them the night before, and it can make you faster and more accurate at typing a sequence of numbers that you practiced the night before. But studies have also shown that sleep also can identify, extract, and store key features of memories, leaving a memory that is more useful the next day. Thus a night of sleep can increase the likelihood that you will discover a hidden shortcut for a mathematical procedure that you laboriously practiced the night before.

This wide range of benefits of post-training sleep suggests that such memory processing is a major function of sleep. But the findings I’ve described so far all concern the benefits of sleep on the formation and recollection of memories already formed. Another question is: How does sleep help you learn better the next day? Or, to put it another way, how does a lack of sleep affect your ability to form new memories? (…)

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers at Harvard Medical School monitored the brain activity in colleage-age subjects who had either slept normally the night before or slept not at all. They scanned these subjects’ brains while the subjects went through 150 pictures of people, objects, landscapes, and more complex scenes, and classified each as an indoor or outdoor picture.

Two days later, when both groups were well rested, they gave the subjects a surprise memory test. They showed them the same 150 pictures, mixed together with 75 new ones, and asked them to identify the pictures they remembered having seen before. Both groups did pretty well, but the sleep-deprived group forgot almost twice as many of the original pictures, 26 percent compared to only 14 percent for the well-rested group.

{ Robert Stickgold | Scientific American | Continue reading }

image { omodern }

related { Woman with perfect memory baffles scientists }

Sleepy drivers who don’t want to stop their journey have two choices: pull over and take a short nap or load up with caffeine to stay awake.

So what’s the better option? French researchers decided to find out, testing the driving performance of two dozen sleep-deprived motorists. Participants first drove a two-mile course on the highway between 6 pm and 7:30 pm, to measure their driving skill on a normal amount of sleep. On other days, they were asked to take the driving test again between 2 am and 3:30 am. They were given either a placebo (decaffeinated coffee), regular coffee or allowed to take a 30-minute nap, according to the study, published this month in the medical journal Sleep.

A driving instructor in the car counted the number of inappropriate line crossings during each driving test. Line crossings were measured because drifting over the center line or off the road causes 65 percent of sleep-related accidents.

The decaf drinkers racked up a total of 159 line crossings while drowsy, compared to just 2 line crossings during the daytime driving test. Nappers did better, crossing lines only 84 times. But surprisingly, the coffee drinkers did the best in the sleepy driving test, crossing lines a total of 27 times.

But what was surprising is that the effect of coffee and napping varied by age. For middle-aged drivers, aged 40 to 50, coffee was a far better choice. Among younger drivers, a nap was almost as effective as caffeine.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

I can take a nap almost anywhere. At night, I’m asleep in about five minutes.

I wasn’t always that way. Falling asleep is a skill. I’ll tell you my method.

I always start by creating a simple story in my head where something good, and highly unlikely, happens to me. The trick is to focus on something that is more fascinating than your real life. Maybe you are winning a prestigious award, inventing something that changes the world, or being the first person on the scene of an accident involving the Cirque de Soleil and a tanker of chemicals that turn out to be a powerful aphrodisiac.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

{ Nikola Tamindzic }

I grind my teeth at night. Have for years. It’s my secret shame. But now I have the comfort of knowing that at least 8 to 10 percent of the adult population shares my malady.

It’s called sleep bruxism, and it refers to the grinding or clenching of teeth. There’s a waking version, too — an unconscious clenching of the teeth, most often owing to stress — but the origins are different and the effects are seldom anywhere near as bad as during sleep, when certain of the body’s protective mechanisms are turned off. Left untreated, it can cause damage to the teeth and surrounding tissue, headaches and jaw pain.

Bruxism may be at least as old as the Bible, which describes hell as a state where there is “gnashing of teeth.” (…)

“It’s much like having a large football player standing on the tooth,” says Dr. Noshir Mehta, chairman of general dentistry at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and director of its Craniofacial Pain Center.

During sleep bruxism, he explained, the upper and lower teeth may come into direct contact as much as 40 minutes per hour, and — for example, on the first molar — with a force of about 250 pounds. Hence the football player. Compare that with normal circumstances, when a person’s teeth make contact for about 20 minutes a day, while chewing, and with only 20 to 40 pounds of pressure. (…)

“The exact causes are unknown,” said Dr. Gilles Lavigne. (…) Stress was thought to be the cause, but this failed to explain why not everyone with sleep bruxism was stressed and not everyone with stress ground their teeth.

{ Paul VanDeCarr/NY Times | Continue reading }

Dutch architect has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force and comes with a price tag of $1.54 million.Magnets built into the floor and into the bed itself repel each other, pushing the bed up into the air. Thin steel cables tether the bed in place.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

The Four Seasons offered a “teen concierge” over the summer (”to provide teen-savvy advice on what’s hot in our city”). The Ritz-Carlton in Battery Park once had a water sommelier who offered advice on more than 30 waters, none of them tap. At the Benjamin, Ms. Orlanska, 37, the hotel’s senior concierge, said she advises dozens of guests a day on their sleep. (…)

The Benjamin Hotel in Midtown Manhattan helped invent the position of sleep concierge nearly seven years ago when its concierge staff noticed that more and more of their guest questions involved sleep. It is one of only a few hotels to offer the service, with the Fairmont in Washington and the SoHo Metropolitan Hotel in Toronto offering similar services.

Steps away from the No. 6 subway train and Lexington Avenue in full havoc, the Benjamin has deployed an array of anti-insomnia weapons.

They include guest rooms that begin on the fifth floor, high above street noise, with soundproof windows; luxury sheets; aromatherapy; massages; satin sleep masks; tips for “executive” naps; a menu of 11 special pillows, including the “Snore-No-More”; and special sleep-inducing foods, like banana bread with peanut butter.

The hotel, at 50th Street and Lexington, has a guarantee, said the sleep concierge, Anya Orlanska, who speaks with a slight Polish accent.

“You must sleep well or you will get money back,” she said.

Jennifer King, a technology consultant originally from Chicago, stayed at the Benjamin Hotel last month. She did so because Ms. Orlanska had done a deft job of finding a good hairdresser for Ms. King’s mother when Ms. Orlanska was the concierge at the New York Palace Hotel.

Ms. King noticed the pillow menu and other offerings, but, she said, “I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal.”

A sufferer of back pain, Ms. King said she had never been able to sleep for more than three hours a night without getting up.

But with a firm mattress and a special pillow — the “Swedish Memory,” with self-molding foam developed by NASA — she was able to sleep for eight hours, she said. “And this was during the United Nations General Assembly and police escorts and traffic and people all around,” Ms. King said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

Lucky for the Benjamin that Ms. King’s visit was so restful. Her seven-night stay cost more than $4,000.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { David LaChapelle }

A surge in naked sleepwalking among guests has led one of Britain’s largest budget hotel groups to re-train staff to handle late-night nudity.

Travelodge, which runs more than 300 business hotels in Britain, says sleepwalking rose seven-fold in the past year, and 95 percent of the somnambulants are scantily clad men.

“We have seen an increased number of cases over the years so it is important that our staff know how to help sleepwalking when it arises,” Leigh McCarron, the chain’s sleep director, said in a statement.

One tip in the company’s newly released “sleepwalkers guide” tells staff to keep towels handy at the front desk in case a customer’s dignity needs preserving.

The company said naked wanderers often ask receptionists such questions as “Where’s the bathroom?,” “Do you have a newspaper?” or “Can I check out, I’m late for work?”
Studies have found that sleepwalking can be brought on by stress, alcohol, eating cheese or consuming too much caffeine. It generally takes effect an hour or two after going to bed, when people are first slipping into a deep sleep.

Asked Thursday why she thought 95 percent of its sleepwalkers were naked men, a Travelodge spokeswoman said: “We have more men staying with us than women, so that could be a factor.”

{ Reuters }