Cleansing the Brain What is sleep for? A few answers: 1. Learning 2. Memory Consolidation 3. Rebuilding Tissues and – 4. A brand new use – Cleansing the Brain (washing out toxins) What Happens When You Don’t Sleep Well? Much higher rates of 1. Heart disease 2. Heart Attack 3. Stroke 4. Depression 5. Infections […]
Lust In the Dust (10/21/13)
Must Sex Lead to Death? Never heard of the dasykaluta? The phascogale? Don’t be surprised. Small marsupials rarely get favorable media attention. Look at how we treat mice. But these otherwise insubstantial, arthropod ingesting (that includes roaches) rodents deserve our interest and perhaps our piteous respect. For they show the lengths evolution can go to […]
Multiple You (10/7/13)
One Person – Several Genomes You probably think you possess a single genome – one set of genes. Mom meets Dad, sperm penetrates egg, nine months later you appear. And your life is marked by a single set of genetic instructions that let you enjoy cartoons and ten food commercials every day, master calculus and […]
Psychotherapy While You Sleep (9/30/13)
Thinking While You Sleep Can’t we get people to learn stuff while they sleep? It’s been a dream (pardon the pun) of physicians, psychologists, industrialists and teachers for many many years. Why should eight hours – one third of life – be spent in such a “wasteful” manner? Now, media hype-hopes are rekindled anew with […]
Wild Type Humans Like Moving (9/5/13)
Walk on the Wild Side You have been part of a great biological experiment. You did not sign up for it. Yet it has changed the way you walk, the way you sleep, how you talk and socialize. Pretty much everything you do, in fact. In laboratories scientists make a major distinction between species born […]