Sleep - Page 14 of 16

How The Brain Controls Sleep

Weird ‘zoning out’ sensation when sleepy explained.

Weird ‘zoning out’ sensation when sleepy explained.

Parts of the brain can fall asleep while the rest of the brain stays awake, new research finds.

It might explain the weird sensation of ‘zoning out’ people get when they are trying to avoid falling asleep.

The effect is triggered by a brain structure called the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN).

The TRN relays signals including a slow oscillating brain wave typical of sleep.

The TRN may be important in how we consolidate new memories.

Dr Laura Lewis, the study’s lead author, said:

“During sleep, maybe specific brain regions have slow waves at the same time because they need to exchange information with each other, whereas other ones don’t.”

Dr Lewis said their animal experience revealed that…

“…when you induce these slow waves across the cortex, animals start to behaviorally act like they’re drowsy.
They’ll stop moving around, their muscle tone will go down.”

The brain circuit could also be responsible for the weird sensation of ‘zoning out’ people get when they are trying to avoid falling asleep.

Dr Lewis said:

“I’m inclined to think that happens because the brain begins to transition into sleep, and some local brain regions become drowsy even if you force yourself to stay awake.”

Professor Emery Brown, a co-author, said:

“The TRN is rich in synapses — connections in the brain — that release the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA.
Therefore, the TRN is almost certainly a site of action of many anesthetic drugs, given that a large classes of them act at these synapses and produce slow waves as one of their characteristic features.”

The study was published in the journal eLife (Lewis et al., 2015).

Brain image from Shutterstock

The Natural Response That Psychopaths Tend To Lack

The connection between psychopathy and contagious yawning.

Psychopaths display less empathy, which is why they are less prone to this normal behaviour.

People with psychopathic tendencies are less prone to ‘contagious yawning’, a new study finds.

Yawning after seeing someone else yawn is linked to empathy and bonding.

But psychopaths are selfish, manipulative, fearless, domineering and, critically, lack empathy.

Mr Brian Rundle, the study’s first author, said:

“You may yawn, even if you don’t have to.
We all know it and always wonder why.
I thought, ‘If it’s true that yawning is related to empathy, I’ll bet that psychopaths yawn a lot less.’
So I put it to the test.”

The study found that people with psychopathic tendencies were less likely to yawn when they saw someone else yawning.

Mr Rundle said:

“The take-home lesson is not that if you yawn and someone else doesn’t, the other person is a psychopath.
A lot of people didn’t yawn, and we know that we’re not very likely to yawn in response to a stranger we don’t have empathetic connections with.
But what we found tells us there is a neurological connection — some overlap — between psychopathy and contagious yawning.
This is a good starting point to ask more questions.”

The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Rundle et al., 2015).

Yawn image from Shutterstock

People Sleep Better With Access To This Healing Resource

Lack of sleep linked to poor thinking skills, worse mental health and even obesity.

Lack of sleep linked to poor thinking skills, worse mental health and even obesity.

Many people sleep better when they have access to nature, a new study finds.

It could be an ocean view, a green space nearby or any natural surroundings.

People over-65 and men of all ages slept better when they had access to nature, the research found.

Professor Diana Grigsby-Toussaint, the study’s first author, said:

“It’s hard to overestimate the importance of high-quality sleep.
Studies show that inadequate sleep is associated with declines in mental and physical health, reduced cognitive function, and increased obesity.
This new study shows that exposure to a natural environment may help people get the sleep they need.”

Data from 255,171 people was included in the research.

It asked about the number of days of insufficient sleep and access to green space.

Across all the age-groups it was men that seemed to benefit more from natural spaces.

It may be that women use natural public spaces less because of safety concerns.

For over-65s, though, the sleep of both men and women benefited from access to nature.

Professor Grigsby-Toussaint said:

“If there is a way for persons over 65 to spend time in nature, it would improve the quality of their sleep–and their quality of life–if they did so.

…our results provide an incentive for nursing homes and communities with many retired residents to design buildings with more lighting, create nature trails and dedicated garden spaces, and provide safe outdoor areas that encourage outdoor activity for men and women.”

The research was published in the journal Preventive Medicine (Grigsby-Toussaint et al., 2015).

No sleep image from Shutterstock

How a Jet-Set Lifestyle Could Affect Mental Health

The effect of frequent, long-distance travel on mental health.

The effect of frequent, long-distance travel on mental health.

Frequent, long-distance travel has been linked to high levels of stress and loneliness by new research.

This dark side to travel is in stark contrast to the way it is frequently represented by the media.

Dr Scott Cohen, the study’s lead author, said:

“A man in a sharp suit, reclining in a leather chair, laptop open in front of him, a smiley stewardess serving a scotch and soda.
This is often the image of travel, particularly business travel portrayed in TV ads and glossy magazines.
But there is a dark side to this ‘glamorised’ hypermobile lifestyle that the media, and society ignores.”

The research concluded that jet-setters were more likely to suffer health problems like deep vein thrombosis and radiation exposure.

However, there is little discussion of this darker side.

Dr Cohen said:

“The level of physiological, physical and societal stress that frequent travels places upon individuals has potentially serious and long-term negative effects that range from the breaking down of family relationships, to changes in our genes due to lack of sleep.
It is not only traditional media that perpetuates this image.
Social media encourages competition between travellers to ‘check-in’ and share content from far-flung destinations.
The reality is that most people who are required to engage in frequent travel suffer high levels of stress, loneliness and long-term health problems.
There are also wider implications for the environment and sustainability.
In this context, hypermobility seems far from glamourous.”

Dr Cohen concluded:

“Society needs to recognise that the jet-set lifestyle is not all it’s made out to be.
By striving to travel far, wide and frequently we are damaging the environment, ourselves and potentially our closest loved ones.”

The study was published in the journal Environment and Planning A (Cohen & Gössling, 2015).

Jetset image from Shutterstock

Sleep Does More For Memory Than Just Preserve It, Study Finds

Sleep does more for memory than just protect it against forgetting.

Sleep does more for memory than just protect it against forgetting.

Sleep can double the chance of recalling a forgotten memory, a new study finds.

It may do this by enhancing memories and making them more vivid and accessible.

The boost is in addition to sleep’s well-known ability to protect against forgetting.

For the research people’s memory for made-up words was tested before and after sleep.

The effects of sleep were compared to when people were simply awake for a period.

The study found that sleep did more than just preserve memory.

Sleep actually helped people recall words that previously they could not remember.

Dr Nicolas Dumay, the study’s author, said:

“Sleep almost doubles our chances of remembering previously unrecalled material.
The post-sleep boost in memory accessibility may indicate that some memories are sharpened overnight.
This supports the notion that, while asleep, we actively rehearse information flagged as important.
More research is needed into the functional significance of this rehearsal and whether, for instance, it allows memories to be accessible in a wider range of contexts, hence making them more useful.”

The boost to memory could be down to activity in the hippocampus, Dr Dumay thinks.

It’s in this region of the brain that recently laid down memories may be ‘unzipped’ and ‘replayed’.

It could be this process that helps us remember things we couldn’t before.

The research was published in the journal Cortex (Dumay, 2015).

Sleep waves image from Shutterstock

The Good Habit Which Boosts Self-Control

This good habit can boost attention, decision-making and the ability to resist impulses.

This good habit can boost attention, decision-making and the ability to resist impulses.

Good sleep habits can boost attention, decision-making and the ability to resist impulses, a new review of the evidence finds.

Good sleep habits include going to bed at the same time every night, avoiding caffeine late in the day and allowing time to mentally wind-down before bedtime.

Professor June Pilcher, who led the study, said:

“Self-control is part of daily decision-making.
When presented with conflicting desires and opportunities, self-control allows one to maintain control.
Our study explored how sleep habits and self-control are interwoven and how sleep habits and self-control may work together to affect a person’s daily functioning.”

Professor Pilcher explained the review’s conclusions:

“Poor sleep habits, which include inconsistent sleep times and not enough hours of sleep, can also lead to health problems, including weight gain, hypertension and illness, according to prior research.
Studies have also found that sleep deprivation decreases self-control but increases hostility in people, which can create problems in the workplace and at home.”

Since sleep and self-control are so intimately connected, improving sleep can help in many ways, Professor Pilcher said:

“Many aspects of our daily lives can be affected by better-managed sleep and self-control capacity.
Improved health and worker performance are two potential benefits, but societal issues such as addictions, excessive gambling and over spending could also be more controllable when sleep deficiencies aren’t interfering with one’s decision making.”

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Pilcher et al., 2015).

Self-control image from Shutterstock

Here’s a Tip To Counter Sleep Deprivation Naturally (It’s Not Coffee!)

Sleep deprivation is typically linked to lower concentration and alertness the next day.

Sleep deprivation is typically linked to lower concentration and alertness the next day.

Eating less at night may help to reduce the mental problems caused by lack of sleep, a new study finds.

Professor David F. Dinges, of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, one of the study’s authors, explained:

“Adults consume approximately 500 additional calories during late-night hours when they are sleep restricted.
Our research found that refraining from late-night calories helps prevent some of the decline those individuals may otherwise experience in neurobehavioral performance during sleep restriction.”

The study restricted 44 people to only four hours sleep a night.

Some were allowed to eat all they wanted, though, while others were only allowed water from 10pm until 4am.

The results showed that those not allowed to eat had faster reaction times and better attention in tests administered at 2am.

Not only can eating less help preserve thinking skills, it also helps avoid weight gain.

In another study by the same researchers, the effects of sleep restriction on weight gain and obesity was tested.

They found that as people slept less, their resting metabolic rate decreased.

In other words: the more sleep deprived they were, the less calories they burned.

Dr Namni Goel, the study’s senior author, said:

“Short sleep duration is a significant risk factor for weight gain and obesity, particularly in African Americans and men.
This research suggests that reducing the number of calories consumed can help prevent that weight gain and some of the health issues associated with obesity in Caucasians and particularly in African Americans.”

Both studies will be presented at SLEEP 2015, the 29th annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies LLC.

• Related: 10 Sleep Deprivation Effects.

Image credit: Vic Xia

How To Improve Memory Five-Fold in 45 Minutes

How to improve memory with very little effort.

How to improve memory with very little effort.

A power nap of under an hour can improve memory performance by five times, a new study finds.

New information normally disappears from memory quite rapidly as people naturally forget.

But, after a 45-60 minute nap, participants in the study had forgotten little.

In comparison those who had remained awake had forgotten a lot.

The study had people learning unconnected pairs of words, and afterwards some slept while others watched a DVD.

Professor Axel Mecklinger, who led the study, explained the results:

‘The control group, whose members watched DVDs while the other group slept, performed significantly worse than the nap group when it came to remembering the word pairs.
The memory performance of the participants who had a power nap was just as good as it was before sleeping, that is, immediately after completing the learning phase.
Even a short sleep lasting 45 to 60 minutes produces a five-fold improvement in information retrieval from memory.”

Improve memory with power nap

The scientists also looked at how sleep might improve memory in an area of the brain called the hippocampus.

This is where new information is transferred into long-term memory.

Sara Studte, one of the study’s authors, explained:

‘We examined a particular type of brain activity, known as “sleep spindles,” that plays an important role in memory consolidation during sleep.
A sleep spindle is a short burst of rapid oscillations in the electroencephalogram (EEG).

We suspect that certain types of memory content, particularly information that was previously tagged, is preferentially consolidated during this type of brain activity.”

Professor Mecklinger concluded:

“A short nap at the office or in school is enough to significantly improve learning success.
Wherever people are in a learning environment, we should think seriously about the positive effects of sleep.”

The study was published in the journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Studte et al., 2015).

Confused man image from Shutterstock

How To Improve Attention and Ability to Focus

A new study reveals how to improve attention and the ability to focus.

A new study reveals how to improve attention and the ability to focus.

Learning to periodically self-check can improve attention and help people focus better on tasks, a new study finds.

Researchers have found that neurofeedback can be a useful tool in the quest to improve attention.

Dr Nicholas Turk-Browne, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Even though we all make a lot of attentional errors and we have difficulty focusing, there’s some potential for those abilities to improve.”

In the study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the authors used brain imaging to predict when people were starting to lose their focus on a boring task they were given (deBettencourt et al., 2015).

The task involved looking at faces, rather than a background scene with which it was blended.

Dr Turk-Browne explained:

“If you’re supposed to be focusing on the face and get distracted, we detect that in your brain before it causes an error on the task.
We alert the participant that they’re in the wrong state by making the task harder so they really have to buckle down.
If we see they’re starting to focus on the right kind of things again, we make the task easier.
By giving them access to their own brain states, we’re giving them information they wouldn’t otherwise have until they made a mistake.”

The researchers found that after just one training session to improve attention, those who had received the feedback performed better than a control group.

How to improve attention

The study’s authors write that attentional lapses occur because:

“…humans do not adequately monitor how well they are attending from moment to moment.
Lapses emerge gradually and may be detected too late, after the chain of events that produces behavioral errors has been initiated.
Accordingly, one way to train sustained attention might be to provide a more sensitive feedback signal, such that participants can learn to sense upcoming lapses earlier and prevent them from manifesting in behavior.”

Dr Turk-Browne explained his motivation for studying how to improve attention:

“The basic science is really why we did the study, and we learned a lot about behavior and the brain.
I think some of the most interesting applications may actually be in the everyday mundane experiences we all have of not being able to stay focused on what we’re trying to do.”

Attention image from Shutterstock

The Age At Which Sleep Matters Most For a Good Memory

The age at which sleep has the greatest influence on cognitive function.

The time of life when sleep has the greatest influence on cognitive function.

Good sleep in young and middle-aged people helps boost memory up to 28 years later, a new review of the evidence finds.

However, people in their 70s, 80s and 90s do not typically sleep so well and the link to a good memory is less strong.

Dr Michael K. Scullin, who co-authored the review of around 2,000 separate studies, said:

“If sleep benefits memory and thinking in young adults but is changed in quantity and quality with age, then the question is whether improving sleep might delay — or reverse — age-related changes in memory and thinking.
It’s the difference between investing up front rather than trying to compensate later.
We came across studies that showed that sleeping well in middle age predicted better mental functioning 28 years later.”

Deep sleep in particular has a whole host of mental benefits, found the 50-year review of research which is published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (Scullin & Bliwise, 2015).

Just one of those is that during this time memory is sorted and consolidated for better recall later on.

Even sleep during the day, in the form of an afternoon nap, can be beneficial for memory, as long as sleep at night is still sufficient.

Later in life, though, people tend to sleep worse, with less deep sleep and more wakefulness during the night.

Dr Scullin says:

“…even if the link between sleep and memory lessens with age, sleeping well is still linked to better mental health, improved cardiovascular health and fewer, less severe disorders and diseases of many kinds.”

Image credit: Sleep image from Shutterstock