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 […]
Snore no more! (7/27/11)
Are You Snoring? Guess Who’s Watching! Snoring is not normal. It’s associated with increased heart attack and stroke risk. Prolonged snoring eventually leads to sleep apnea, stopped breathing episodes that increasingly risk survival. And snoring is often loud. It wakes up other people – particularly spouses, where it sometimes becomes grounds for divorce. It […]
Do sleeping pills work by making us forget? (7/6/11)
How Do Sleeping Pills Work? Insomnia provokes many controversies. One of the more heated at the recent Sleep Research Meeting in Minneapolis was about why sleeping pills work – do they induce sleep? Or do they just make people forget they were awake during the night? Lots of people, including Mike Perlis, now at the […]
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 […]