People complain to me ceaselessly – they can’t get back to sleep. Yet returning to sleep engages the same tools that help you fall asleep. If sleep is as necessary to life as food, why is returning to sleep so difficult? It seems many of us have forgotten how to rest. To fall asleep most […]
Do dolphins sing like whales as they sleep? (1/30/12)
Interspecies Recording? Many secrets arrive with the night. Recently researchers at Universite de Rennes 1 in France decided to hook up microphones to listen to dolphins. No one seemed to know what sounds they made – especially in sleep. The dolphins made a lot of noise. However, 1% of their vocalizations sounded nothing like their […]
Is Rest Critical to Creativity? (8/23/11)
Where Is Music in the Mind? You may never have heard of Charles Limb. He’s a otolaryngologist and musician with joint appointments at the Johns Hopkins Medical School and the Peabody Institute, one of the nation’s finer music consrvatories. He wants the cochlear implants he puts in people’s ears to hear music better, and figures […]
Singing in your sleep (7/25/11)
Composing New Songs Do you sing in your sleep? Or just write music as you slumber? Barry Manilow does. Often he hears songs for the first time in his dreams. Keeping a recorder next to his bed, some of his biggest hits, like “One Voice,” appeared to him fully fleshed out as soon as he […]
Rock yourself to sleep? (6/29/11)
You’ve Got Rhythm There are many effective strategies to help you sleep. That’s a simple conclusion from two preliminary studies in the last two weeks demonstrating that brain cooling caps and gently rocking beds can both improve “objective” sleep measures. Both involve changing internal body rhythms. The better news is that there are dozens of […]