Miles O'Brien has a wonderful piece on NewsHour about the neuroscience of sleep and other forms of brain-rest, including meditation. I was present for some of the taping and research, and I love how the story turned out.

Sleep deprivation can cause serious health and cognitive problems in humans. In short, it can make us fat, sick and stupid. But why do humans need so much sleep? Science correspondent Miles O'Brien talks to scientists on the cutting edge of sleep research and asks if there's any way humans might evolve into getting by with less.

And below, some out-takes from Miles' time swimming with dolphins at SeaWorld. Dolphins sleep in a very interesting way, and you'll want to watch the piece to learn more. PBS Link, and YouTube Link.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-power-of-sleep-pbs-newsho.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/12/the-cool-science-behind-a-real.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/12/the-cool-science-behind-a-real.html#comments Mon, 12 Nov 2012 22:09:23 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=193725

This hummingbird is sleeping in a specialized research container connected to a machine that measures how much oxygen it is breathing. According to forrestertr7, who posted the video to YouTube, this experiment was part of research aimed at understanding the differences between the metabolism of hummingbirds and that of larger species. After its nap, the hummingbird was released back into the wild.

But what about the snoring? Does the hummingbird really need a tiny, little beak strip, or what? I asked science blogger Joe Hanson, who posted this video to Twitter earlier today, and he did some research. Turns out, it's not totally unreasonable to call that adorable little wheeze a "snore". But, at the same time, hummingbirds have very different biology than we do. A snore for them isn't the same as a snore for us.

Hummingbirds have incredibly high metabolic needs. To do all that buzzing around and to keep their tiny bodies warm, they eat the human equivalent of a refrigerator full of food every day, mostly in the form of high-energy nectar and fatty bugs. Because of their small size, they also lose a lot of body heat to the air. In order to preserve energy on cool nights, they have the ability to enter a daily, miniature hibernation called torpor.

...Just before morning, their natural circadian rhythms kick in and they start to thaw out, like heating a car engine on a cold day. What we see in the video is probably a bird coming out of torpor (which is what the scientists in the video were studying), starting to breathe in more oxygen to raise its body temperature, and making that adorable snoring noise.

Read the full story at Joe Hanson's blog, It's Okay To Be Smart

See also: The myth of the 8-hour sleep ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/09/26/second-sleep-a-period-of-wake.html/feed 96 http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/student-sleep-problems-arent.html http://boingboing.net/2012/08/28/student-sleep-problems-arent.html#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:26:04 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=178436

Coinciding with the beginning of the US school year, researchers at UCLA published a study last week showing a correlation between lack of sleep and poor academic performance. Some 500 high schoolers kept two-week diaries of their sleep habits, how well they understood and participated in classroom work, and their scores on assignments and tests. The ones who slept less did less well in school.

The headlines on this study—like the one at Smithsonian.com, where I first saw it—tout the results as evidence that you shouldn't stay up late cramming. But cramming usually is a special-occasion thing—something you do the night before a test—not a daily occurrence. This study is really about chronic sleep deprivation, habits and behaviors that happen over weeks and months. Along with several other studies that have come out in recent years, it helps build a persuasive case not against occasional cram sessions, but against academic routines that all-but require students to operate constantly on an abnormal sleep cycle.

For instance, military education—where students carry both heavy physical and mental loads—is highly regimented with a certain number of hours being alloted for sleep. In 2008, researchers from the Air Force Academy and the Naval Post Graduate School published results of a study that showed recruits who operated on a schedule that allowed for 6 hours of sleep did worse academically than peers who were given 8 hours. In fact, the recruits who got 8-hours of sleep scored an average of 11 percent higher on tests.

Another study, this one from 2011, found that sleep deprivation and sleep quality affected academic performance, independent of whether people were "good students" or "bad students" and independent of their personal lifestyle choices, like whether they partied a lot or not.

That doesn't mean partying isn't a factor at all. There have been a couple of studies that found correlations between alcohol consumption and not getting enough sleep. But the 2011 study suggests that lack of sleep isn't just a issue for wild and crazy drinkers and they aren't the only ones who suffer academically because of it.

Taken together, the evidence we have on the connection between sleep and academic performance suggests that the problem isn't merely an issue of student behavior, and the solution probably shouldn't be confined to lecturing kids on how they ought to be getting a full 8 hours of rest. It's also a systemic problem with the way we do education. Consider when high school starts, for instance. Studies in Minnesota (and elsewhere) have shown that simply shifting first period from 7:20 to 8:30 makes a difference not only in attendance, but also in how well students do once they get to school.

Read more on the Minnesota school time start studies

Psychology Today on delaying the start of the school day

Nocebos are what happens when a placebo (again, something that technically has no physical effect on the body) causes a negative side-effect, simply because the person believes that such side-effects are likely to happen to them.

There is a lot we don't understand about both of these effects. After all, running really detailed tests would inherently involve unethical behavior—intentionally not treating patients or intentionally trying to induce a negative reaction in them. But that doesn't mean you can ignore these phenomena.

A great example comes in a recent column by Alexis Madrigal on The Atlantic. You're probably familiar with the idea of sleep paralysis—the experience of waking up, being mentally awake, but still physically paralyzed. This happens to people all over the world. And, all over the world, it's long been explained in folklore as the work of demons and evil spirits. (The fact that sleep paralysis is often accompanied by feelings of terror, and the sensation of something sitting on your chest doesn't hurt in that regard.) Normally, sleep paralysis brings a few minutes of terror, but no lasting harm. In the mid-1980s, however, it suddenly became capable of killing. The catch, the men it killed were all recent Hmong immigrants, living in the United States. Researcher Shelley Adler thinks it was actually a nocebo effect that killed these men—they believed themselves into an early grave.

[In America] some Hmong felt that they had not properly honored the memories of their ancestors, which was a known risk factor among the Hmong for being visited by the tsog tsuam. Once the night-mare visitations began, a shaman was often needed to set things right. And in the scattered communities of Hmong across the country, they might not have access to the right person. Without access to traditional rituals, shamans, and geographies, the Hmong were unable to provide themselves psychic protection from the spirits of their sleep.

Drawing on all this evidence, Adler makes the provocative claim that the Laotian immigrants of the 1980s were in some sense killed by their powerful cultural belief in night spirits. It was not a simple process.

"It is my contention that in the context of severe and ongoing stress related to cultural disruption and national resettlement (exacerbated by intense feelings of powerlessness about existence in the United States), and from the perspective of a belief system in which evil spirits have the power to kill men who do not fulfill their religious obligations," Adler writes, "the solitary Hmong man confronted by the numinous terror of the night-mare (and aware of its murderous intent) can die of SUNDS."

Maybe you were just plain tired. But, chances are, there were other factors involved in that decision, as well. Where you hoping to get a certain number of hours of rest before you had to get up and go to work? Maybe it just felt like time to crawl into bed, because your friends and family were, too. If you stayed up later, would you feel like you were doing something wrong? Do your sleep patterns change when you've spent time in another country?

Sleep, and the physical cycles that drive it, aren't just about biology. The patterns and expectations surrounding sleep have varied greatly throughout human history and from place to place. Sleep is cultural. If you want to understand the science of sleep, you have to learn both biochemistry and anthropology.

That's the message at the heart of Jessa Gamble's The Siesta and the Midnight Sun. This is a book about how circadian rhythms work. But it's also a book about how the invention of the clock and the long arm of Western colonialism changed the way human beings relate to the world around them in a really fundamental way.

I'll be honest. That perspective took me off-guard. I dove into this book expecting to learn some cool biology. And I did. Gamble spends the first third of the book talking about how seasonal and daily rhythms manifest in animals and plants ... and how we see traces of those rhythms in humans. You'll discover that in some species, like sheep, hormone levels drop and the testes actually retreat into the male's body for much of the year, preventing breeding at times when food is scare. And you'll find that male humans still carry echoes of this: Their reproductive hormones peak at the beginning of summer and drop off at the end of summer, taking condom sales and STD diagnoses along with them.

I also expected to learn some practical advice about what we should do to sleep in a more healthy way. That's in the book, too. Gamble actually recommends a couple of cool smart phone applications. Jet Lag Fighter helps you prepare for a cross-country or trans-oceanic flight by slowly acclimatizing you to different sleep patterns over a number of days leading up to your trip. Sleep Cycle alarm clock asks you to sleep with your head on your phone. It then uses the phone's accelerometer to monitor your movement and determine where you are in your sleep cycles. That way, you can make sure that your alarm goes off when you're already at a light stage of sleep, which leaves you feeling more rested.

(There's also a really interesting section where Gamble discusses the perils of a fad "natural" health trend that recommended people change their sleep pattern to take multiple short naps throughout the day—and never really sleep for hours at all.)

But The Siesta and the Midnight Sun is really at its most intriguing (and Gamble's writing is at its best) when the book moves past the biological basics and into the deeper story of how and why humans choose to go against their circadian rhythms, and how those changes affect us.

This involves a lot of cultural relativism—sleep has always meant something different to people in the Arctic compared to people in the tropics. It involves some critique of how cultures dominate and change each other—before the 9-5 work day, Arctic cultures were able to adapt their lives to the demands of extreme seasons and the midnight sun in a much more comfortable way. And it also involves issues of class. It is impossible right now to read about what happens to a human body subjected to shift work, particularly swing shift work, without thinking of it in the context of the 99%. As a well-off, self-employed person, I have the privilege of adjusting my sleep schedules to match what makes me feel healthy. Meanwhile, someone who needs to work the late shift accepts an increased risk of cancer and what amounts to constant, life-long jet lag in exchange for a paycheck.

Ultimately, The Siesta and the Midnight Sun is a lot like the biological processes it documents and deconstructs—utterly fascinating, but not always comfortable. And that's a good thing.

Image: "Flaming June" by Lord Frederic Leighton (1895). via Wikimedia Commons

Since everyone is reporting on their long-term self-experimentation this week*, I thought I'd share my own major breakthrough. I strongly believe that waking yourself up with alarms is extremely bad for your health, creativity and productiveness.

I'm coming up on the 8th anniversary of my decision to eschew alarm clocks. It started when I noticed that I often awoke before my alarm went off anyway. After reading an article about ten years ago in Nature on timing the end of nocturnal sleep (PMID: 9892349), I gave alarms up in 2003 and have not looked back. I decided to try working without a net, and after some trial and error, I found what works for me. I have never overslept (a problematic word, IMHO) or missed anything important. Details after the break.

Here are the basics:

1. I have no clock in my bedroom.
2. I do not keep a watch or phone in my bedroom.
3. I do not have a TV or computer in my bedroom.
4. I use a very heavy window curtain so I can't tell what time it is.

Here is what I have found:

1. It forces me to get the kind of good night's sleep championed by Mark, Xeni, and Arianna Huffington.
2. I go to bed sooner, especially if I have something important the next morning.
3. I remember my dreams more often.
4. I feel much sharper in the mornings than I used to.
5. I do not need caffeine to wake up (though I do drink energy drinks throughout the day)
6. My skin looks better, especially around and under my eyes.

A few caveats that might affect your own results:

1. The biggest leap of faith was not setting an alarm before a morning flight. To this day, I still often stay up until my flight, then sleep on the plane.
2. I have never had any problems with insomnia, and I sleep pretty heavily.
3. I do use my phone's audible reminder feature throughout the day when I have a call or other obligation.
4. I do occasionally get a feline wakeup call, similar to the one shown here. These are on no discernible schedule.

Good Morning Sunrise Wake-up Light Alarm Clock with Nature Sounds

I still occasionally put on this Liquid Mind: Sleep album I mentioned last year, which is very relaxing to me. Brian Eno's ambient stuff would probably do the trick, too. If you have a week where you can go to bed early, I recommend giving it a shot. The main thing is not to worry about waking up. That will let you complete your sleep cycle and leave you feeling a lot less stressed. It's like being on vacation all the time - no alarms!

* BTW, I never use bar soap, but unlike Sean and Mark, I smell like a nerdy hippie chick. A little gamey, but not revolting.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/01/07/waking-up-without-an.html/feed 131 http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/study-lack-of-mornin.html http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/study-lack-of-mornin.html#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:41:24 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder Zoe Caira wears a personal light-measuring device, called a Daysimeter, to monitor her rest and activity patterns and the amount of circadian light -- short-wavelength (blue) light -- reaching her eyes. Credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently conducted a field study to learn the effects of morning light on teenagers' sleep cycles. They concluded that a lack of exposure to early morning light can result in a 30-minute delay in the onset of sleep.

"If you remove blue light in the morning, it delays the onset of melatonin, the hormone that indicates to the body when it's nighttime," explains Dr. Figueiro. "Our study shows melatonin onset was delayed by about 6 minutes each day the teens were restricted from blue light. Sleep onset typically occurs about 2 hours after melatonin onset."

The study findings should have significant implications for school design. "Delivering daylight in schools may be a simple, non-pharmacological treatment for students to help them increase sleep duration," concludes Dr. Figueiro.

The new research has applications for more than 3 million shift workers and Alzheimer's patients who suffer from lack of a regular sleep pattern.

Studies have shown that this lack of synchronization between a shift worker's rest and activity and light/dark patterns leads to a much higher risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, seasonal depression and cancer over decades.