Is It Romance, Or Do the Right Bacteria Make the Mood? Brain, your gut is calling. It’s got a lot to say – about, stress, anxiety, and your mood. That’s the potential upshot of a recent study published in PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/08/26/1102999108.abstract?sid=1091d71a-9201-45df-90ec-6134dfd8231d) by Javier Bravo and company from the University College, Cork, and nicely described in […]
Twilight consciousness – can you text while asleep (and what does that say about you?) (8/10/11)
Burning to Communicate Can you text while asleep? Many claim to do just that. They wake up in the morning and find they’ve sent a text to someone and have no recollection they did it (http://www.ketv.com/r/28610984/detail.html.) Sometimes the text is nonsense, sometimes its message is rational but banal. What’s Going On? People are now […]
Sleep is all about learning (especially when it’s about sex) (8/5/11)
Is This Why We Sleep? Why do we sleep? Evolution works is a fussy, erratic, back and forth way, taking information systems from one type of project and then applying it to another – and another. As animals moved from sea to land, fins become hands; when they returned to the sea, the hands began […]
Please don’t wake up – interrupted sleep harms memory (8/01/11)
Arousals You Can Live Without Some technologies are astonishing. Imagine this – you want to wake up an animal so quickly and efficiently that you do not change overall sleep – just cause brief arousals that don’t shift the amount of REM, deep sleep, or how long you get to rest. And you do it […]
Let the kids sleep (6/3/11)
Rest Changes Through the Life Cycle Rest is required for growth and maturation, but the requirements change over the life cycle. We need separate kinds of rest for special purposes at every stage of life – infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Recent work points out some of what’s required for growing kids: Infancy […]