Tag: sleep
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Together, Unconscious: We All Sleep
One constant that connects us all in some way is that–at the end of our day–we lie down and slowly slip into a state of reduced or absent consciousness and become at the mercy of our fellow man. Every day we fall asleep: we have done so for millions of years and will continue to…
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Illness Susceptibility and Sleep Quality
I’ve been ill for a few weeks and I was fairly sure (in my amateur opinion) that it was related to a significant lack of sleep over the last couple of months. Upon returning to full health I decided to do some quick research on my favourite topic: sleep. In one recent study looking at…
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Gradual Sleep Deprivation, Obesity and Cognitive Impairment
By getting less than our required amount of sleep over an extended period of time (two weeks, for example) we are increasing our risk of obesity and impairing our cognitive abilities without even being aware of it. That’s the conclusion from a short article summarising the surprising effects of gradual sleep deprivation: Researchers […] restricted…
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Routine, Sleep and Premature Death
Sleeping for less that six hours a night is correlated strongly with an increased risk of premature death over a 25-year period (a 12% increase in the likelihood of your premature death, to be exact). That’s the conclusion from an extensive report (studying 1.5 million people) convincingly showing the link between quality sleep and one’s…
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Sleep for Creativity
Dreams are not “meaningless narratives” but are “layered with significance and substance”, laments insomniac Jonah Lehrer as he considers the importance of dreaming for creativity: A group of students was given a tedious task that involved transforming a long list of number strings into a new set of number strings. This required the subjects to…
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Sleep and Weight Loss
While asleep our metabolic rate increases such that we lose more than three times the amount of weight than if we are awake (awake but lying dormant, of course): 1.9g/min compared to 0.6g/min. This increase in ‘caloric expenditure’ is not yet fully understood, but there are a number of reasons why we may lose more…
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The Cognitive Importance of Good Sleep
After a week of surviving on minimal sleep you may assume that a lazy weekend will allow you to recover in time for the coming days. Not so: research has shown that not even a full week of quality sleep can reverse the cognitive and physiological ‘damage’ just five days of poor sleep can inflict on…
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Surviving Jet Lag
With my 25-hour flight from Sydney back to London fast approaching, my mind is wandering to the topic of jet lag–or desynchronosis, to use the medical term. The most often suggested remedies for jet lag (where recovery times are generally said to be 1 day per eastward time zone or 1 day per 1.5 westward time…
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How (and Why) to Nap
How to Nap is an informative graphic from The Boston Globe detailing how we should nap effectively during the day. Power naps enhance memory consolidation is an accessible article on why we should nap, drawing on research from Harvard Medical School’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory. via Neurophilosophy