To Sleep or to Not Sleep?!

I dont know why so many of these articles have to do with sleep patterns - I must be lacking in those REM cycles. Its not surprising though, two jobs and a full-time masters would keep anyone running in circles. Ah, but I do love that feeling, just when you are dozing off, when you no longer think...well here is something you can think of when you can't sleep!

Never let the sun go down on your anger! This biblical warning may actually have a scientific founding according to new research. Sleeping apparently seers bad feeling into the brain, while be awake can take the emotional edge off. The study appeared in a report in the Jan 18 Journal of Neuroscience. It was known that sleep locks in memories - studying the second before you go to sleep and when you wake up fortifies long-term memory. But scientists didn't know whether feelings accompanying painful memories are locked in too. This question is of particular importance to people who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.

“If we really want to know if this is relevant to trauma survivors, then we need to know if sleep not just changes the memory, but if it changes how you feel about it if you experience it again,” says study coauthor Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

In the study, Spencer and her colleagues showed participants pictures of neutral scenes, such as a street, or negative scenes, such as an upsetting car crash, to 106 young adults. Participants then rated the emotion inspired by the image on a one-to-nine scale ranging from sad to happy. After that, they were either sent to bed for a full night’s sleep or asked to stay awake for 12 hours. The researchers then retested the participants by showing some of the same pictures mixed in with new images. 

The results were as expected. The participant who had slept were better at remembering which images they had seen the day before. But it wasn't only the memory that remained: sleepers held on tighter to their feelings. Sadness scores given by people who stayed awake tended to weaker in the second session.

These results are to preliminary to base any reccomendations about how much or little sleep should be had after experiencing trauma. So more needs to be researched.

It should be noted that sleep deprivation is actually known to increase stress, so while the bad feeling may be seered into the brain, the temporary effects can be detrimental. “In most cases, it’s better to sleep than to not sleep,” Cognitive neuroscientist Jessica Payne of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana states.

But wait! There are conflicting study results: a study published in December that found that a night of sleep takes the emotional edge off unpleasant experiences — what some scientists call overnight therapy. That study, led by Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, used different methods and measurements, which may be responsible for the seemingly opposite findings, says neuroscientist Penny Lewis of the University of Manchester in England.

Ah this often happens when you did deeper - there are so few facts in Science! You haven't learnt anything new really, except that you musn't take things at their face value, I started this thinking there was a new discovery to be made - but the case is still open. Watch this space. If you are pained by this, the maybe you should stay awake all night so the pain doesn't imprint itself. Or not, cos it might be better if you slept... AHHHHH!

Sleeping Beauty Had it Wrong...

Apparently that beloved fairytale had it backwards. According to a new study, there is a reason why women wake before men, and tire more easily in the evenings. Here I thought it was just so they could fetch coffee and breakfast in the morning...

A previous article (http://suupedupscience.blogspot.com/2011/07/less-rhythm-less-sleep.html) talked about circadian rhythm (the body clock) and how neural rhythms determine so many body functions. A new study shows that men and women are biologically designed to go to bed at different times. Female circadian rhythm runs faster, and therefore they tire earler and wake up ealier than men. Male rhythm predisposes them to sleep and wake later, and are therefore more likely to be night owls.

The study was led by Jeanne F Duffy, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and is the first to find a difference in the body clocks of different sexes. She said 'We found that women are twice as likely to have a circadian rhythm shorter than the normal 24 hrs and mre likely to get sleepy in the evening.'

By contrast, men are more likely to have a rhythm that is longer than 24 hours.

The study involved 200 people and took a month. The subjects were not told the time and were kept in subdued light. The production of melatonin (a hormone that is involved in circadian rhythm) was measured and showed that the average male internal cycle lasts 24 hours and 11 minutes, 6 minutes longer than for woman.

This may not seem like a big difference, but becaus circadian rhythm affects your sensitivity to multiple external factors (like light), it can effectively mean a matter of hours. Duffy explains, 'Morning light exposure aligns us to the 24-hour clock, so if you in on Sunday, it's harder to wake up on Monday.' So if women expose themselves to light in the evenings, they can slow down their cycle, whereas men can do the opposite.

Now I know there is a reason why my mother always insisted on my going to bed at the same time every night. I wonder if there is a reason female cycles are faster. I think back to our hunter-gather days, men would so often be working harder chasing things to kill, so perhaps those who got too tired died out, and so the ones that could stay up later survived, whereas with women, it didn't matter because they were just looking after the cave hearth...

Credits:The Sunday Times 28.08.11,

www.npr.org/2011/05/03/135954176

www.macmillandictionary.com/dictionary/american/circadian

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