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The genetics of sleep
Maria Konnikova has a post at The New Yorker about the genetics of sleep: “What the researchers found was that the reaction to sleep deprivation was largely heritable: eighty per cent of the variation...
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“Sleep disturbances may be an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s”
A post from the blog Neurophilosophy: “The research shows that people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and several other neurodegenerative conditions often experience sleep disturbances many decades...
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Pediatricians call for later high school start times
The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued a report on adolescent sleep: “insufficient sleep in adolescents as an important public health issue that significantly affects the health and safety, as...
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Sharp brain-wave ripples and memory
An interesting piece in Quanta Magazine on sharp-wave ripples, a pattern of brain wave activity that occurs during sleep. “Over the past few decades, researchers have worked to uncover the details of...
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Daily routines of creative people
Here is a graphic representation of the daily routines of famous creative people. It is interesting to note the individual differences, for example – the odd sleeping pattern of Franz Kafka. One needs...
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Napping improves some forms of memory
A paper in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory reports that napping can improve some kinds of memory. Here is the abstract: “Many studies have shown that sleep improves memory performance,...
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Orange glasses for sleep
A couple of years ago I read on Seth Robert’s blog about the possibility that orange glasses might improve sleep. This week an article on the subject appeared in The New York Times. “Studies have shown...
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Sleep reverses memory deficits in fruit flies
A paper in Current Biology titled “Sleep Restores Behavioral Plasticity to Drosophila Mutants”: “Given the role that sleep plays in modulating plasticity, we hypothesized that increasing sleep would...
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“Waking Hospital Patients to Check Vital Signs May Do More Harm Than Good”
“If left alone and allowed to sleep, these patients likely will heal faster and have a better attitude during their hospital stay,” Read about it here.
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The 90 minute rule for a good night sleep
You can find a sleep time calculator here. For the science behind the 90 minute recommendation see this paper.
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Sleep deprivation associated with changes in brain micro-structure
A paper from PLOS , “Widespread Changes in White Matter Microstructure after a Day of Waking and Sleep Deprivation.” From the PLOS Blog: “Neuroscientists from Norway set out to answer this question in...
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Some skepticism on sleep claims
From the good folks at Ask For Evidence. ‘The NHS Choices website claimed that “People who sleep less than seven hours a day are 30% more likely to be obese than those who get nine hours or more of...
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More evidence that sleep improves memory
From the journal Psychological Science: “Both repeated practice and sleep improve long-term retention of information. The assumed common mechanism underlying these effects is memory reactivation,...
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An interesting paper about school schedules and student performance, published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, “How the Time of Day Affects Productivity: Evidence from School Schedules.”...
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Sleep deprived judges hand out longer sentences
This study just appeared in the journal Psychological Science: The degree of punishment assigned to criminals is of pivotal importance for the maintenance of social order and cooperation. Nonetheless,...
View ArticleAutonomic nervous system activity and memory consolidation during sleep
According to a paper published in PNAS, “ autonomic nervous system (ANS) plays a role in associative memory consolidation during sleep.” Here is the abstract: Throughout history, psychologists and...
View Article“Aging impairs slow wave-spindle coupling, leading to overnight forgetting”
This story was covered on NPR, but they did not provide a link to the original paper. Unfortunately only the summary is available on line: The coupled interaction between slow-wave oscillations and...
View ArticleAre all evening-types doomed?
An interesting interview with Royette Tavernier of Wesleyan University, about her work on sleep and chronotype: Empirical evidence indicates that US children and adults alike are getting less sleep...
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