Too Hot to Handle Some like it hot. Nearly sixty years ago, film director Billy Wilder presciently premised that two men fleeing the hotly pursuing Chicago mob could succeed by dressing as women, and then unexpectedly find true love. But what happens to hot men and women when the mercury keeps rising? The strange transports of […]
Driving Asleep
Ever driven while asleep? No? Are you sure? In America people fall asleep at the wheel all the time. Many sleep experiences are microsleeps, brief “lapses of attention” where much of your brain is asleep – but not necessarily all of it. Microsleeps are generally just seconds long. On the highway, a three second highway microsleep means […]
Sleep in Space
Humans adapt. We live in trackless deserts, on the tops of mountains, in pestilential jungles, in prisons and hospitals. To survive we sleep, for we need sleep like food. We adapt to sleeping in space. At the recent sleep meetings I had the chance to talk with Dr. Erin Flynn-Evans, who runs the Fatigue Countermeasures Laboratory […]
Changes, Little Bit by Little Bit
“I can’t change,” people tell me. “I want to. I can’t.” Yet the research landscape is changing. And now it’s arguing that small shifts, little changes bit by bit, are more than effective. When interspersed among times of rest, when cells and tissues remake and regenerate themselves, they can make more effective contributions to your […]
Do We Dream All the Time?
What are dreams for? Are they garbage processing by the brain, as Francis Crick declared? The royal road to the unconscious, as some Freudians believe? Or are they something more interesting, an intermediary between conscious and unconscious biological intelligence? Recent research out of one of the more innovative sleep labs in the world, guided by […]