Perchance to Dream

Diesel fumes produce stress response in brain, study shows

James Randerson, science correspondent
The Guardian, Tuesday March 11 2008

Half an hour of sniffing diesel fumes in a busy city street is enough to induce a "stress response" in the brain, according to scientists who measured volunteers.

The response continued to increase even after they had stopped breathing the fumes.

The researchers speculate in a study published today that the changes in the brain may trigger other well-established body responses to diesel fumes, such as oxygen deprivation in the heart.

"The changes that we see can be interpreted as a stress response," said Thomas Sandström at the University of Umeå in Sweden.

"For the first time ever, air pollution effects in the brain have been visualised, which is an effect previously unheard of."

So that's why the air quality in New York City was so hard on me! And why I feel so much better since I moved to New Mexico....

Would be nice to know what effect the fumes had on breath values. I'll look for this study when it publishes, and give more details here.

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Mobile phone radiation wrecks your sleep

Phone makers own scientists discover that bedtime use can lead to headaches, confusion and depression

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
The Independent (UK)
Sunday, 20 January 2008

Radiation from mobile phones delays and reduces sleep, and causes headaches and confusion, according to a new study.

The research, sponsored by the mobile phone companies themselves, shows that using the handsets before bed causes people to take longer to reach the deeper stages of sleep and to spend less time in them, interfering with the body's ability to repair damage suffered during the day.

The findings are especially alarming for children and teenagers, most of whom – surveys suggest – use their phones late at night and who especially need sleep. Their failure to get enough can lead to mood and personality changes, ADHD-like symptoms, depression, lack of concentration and poor academic performance.

The study – carried out by scientists from the blue-chip Karolinska Institute and Uppsala University in Sweden and from Wayne State University in Michigan, USA – is thought to be the most comprehensive of its kind.

Perchance to Dream's comment: This is a major finding, and if it is confirmed by further research, it should really change our mobile-phoning habits. Deep, slow-wave sleep is an essential component of the sleep cycle, and is thought to account for the major part of sleep's purely restorative function. Anything that undermines slow-wave sleep is going to be a big no-no from a health point-of-view.

Wise precautions for now: Make those late-night calls on the land line or VOIP. Or better yet, observe an hour of meditative silence prior to sleep. Mmmm.

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Thanks to my friend and collaborator Patricio Simon for heads-upping this story!

Now hiring!

Today's edition of FastCompany.com features an article on "Ten Jobs You Didn't Know You Wanted," and one of the jobs is "Sleep Instructor." How cool is that? Seems there's this dude named Michael Krugman who developed something called the Sounder Sleep System™. Graduate from his Teacher Training Program, and the world is your oyster. Gosh, you could make up to $1250 per day putting corporate clients to sleep!

PS: My phone has been ringing all morning. Thanks, Fast Company. Read the story See the slideshow

Sleep-deprivation causes an emotional brain 'disconnect'

Without sleep, the emotional centers of the brain dramatically overreact to negative experiences, reveals a new brain imaging study in the October 23rd issue of Current Biology, a publication of Cell Press. The reason for that hyperactive emotional response in sleep-deprived people stems from a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe—a region that normally keeps emotions under control.

The new study from Harvard Medical School and the University of California, Berkeley is the first to explain, at the neural level, what seems to be a universal phenomenon: that sleep loss leads to emotionally irrational behavior, according to the researchers. The findings might also offer some insight into the clinical connection between sleep disruptions and psychiatric disorders.

“This adds to the critical list of sleep’s benefits,” said Matthew Walker, from the University of California, Berkeley. “Sleep appears to restore our emotional brain circuits, and in doing so prepares us for the next day’s challenges and social interactions. Most importantly, this study demonstrates the dangers of not sleeping enough. Sleep deprivation fractures the brain mechanisms that regulate key aspects of our mental health. The bottom line is that sleep is not a luxury that we can optionally choose to take whenever we like. It is a biological necessity, and without it, there is only so far the band will stretch before it snaps, with both cognitive and emotional consequences.”

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Midday Napping Slows Heart Disease

Here are the details on that Greek napping study I cited earlier:

from Heartwire — a professional news service of WebMD

February 14, 2007 — What could be some of the most welcome heart-healthy advice in a long time comes from Greek researchers who say daytime napping — taking a siesta — may add years to your life.

Appearing in the February 12 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, the study included 23,681 participants from the cohort of the Greek European Prospective Investigation (EPIC) into Cancer and Nutrition.

Men who occasionally napped had a 12% (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.48 - 1.60) lower coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality; those who napped almost daily did even better, with a 37% (95% CI, 0.42 - 0.93) mortality decrease.

"If this is confirmed, we may have new weapon against CHD," Antonia Trickopoulou, MD, of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, said in an interview with heartwire.

Read the full story here

NYT: Curing Insomnia Without Pills

From: Curing Insomnia Without Pills
by Tara Parker-Pope
The New York Times
November 5, 2007

The behavioral strategies for better sleep are deceptively simple, and that’s one reason why many people don’t believe they can make a difference. One of the most effective methods is stimulus control. This means not watching television, eating or reading in bed. Don’t go to bed until you are sleepy. Get up at the same time every day, and don’t nap during the day. If you are unable to sleep, get out of bed after 15 minutes and do something relaxing, but avoid stimulating activity and thoughts.

So-called sleep hygiene is also part of sleep therapy. This includes regular exercise, adding light-proof blinds to your bedroom to keep it dark and making sure the bed and room temperatures are comfortable. Eat regular meals, don’t go to bed hungry and limit beverages, particularly alcohol and caffeinated drinks, around bedtime.

Finally, don’t try too hard to fall asleep, and turn the clock around so you can’t see it. Watching time pass is one of the worst things to do when you’re trying to fall asleep.

If these steps don’t work, talk to your doctor about a referral to a sleep therapist, who can also teach you additional relaxation techniques to help bring on sleep.

Or try the Sounder Sleep System™, a highly refined system of movement and breathing techniques to relax your body, calm your mind, and lull you to sleep. You can purchase recorded lessons on-line, or find an Authorized Teacher of the system in many parts of the US, Europe, and the Middle East.

Image: Le Rêve par Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: "Dans son sommeil l'Amour, la Gloire et la Richesse lui apparurent."

Sleeping to survive winter

Speaking of longer sleep duration (see previous post), how about this historical evidence of hibernation-like human behavior during winter?

From: "The Big Sleep"
By GRAHAM ROBB
The New York Times
November 25, 2007

Economists and bureaucrats who ventured out into the countryside after the Revolution were horrified to find that the work force disappeared between fall and spring. The fields were deserted from Flanders to Provence. Villages and even small towns were silent, with barely a column of smoke to reveal a human presence. As soon as the weather turned cold, people all over France shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end.

The same mass dormancy was practiced in other chilly parts. In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”

It is unlikely this was hibernation in the zoological sense. While extreme cold might have set off a biological response normally seen only in squirrels, bears and marmots, human hibernation probably reflects a sensible, communal decision to stay in bed for as long as possible.

But the French seem to have been particularly sleepy. They “hibernated” even in temperate zones. In Burgundy, after the wine harvest, the workers burned the vine stocks, repaired their tools and left the land to the wolves. A civil servant who investigated the region’s economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”

See also Human Hibernation? and Meditation as a Voluntary Hypometabolic State of Biological Estivation.

Image: Self-Portrait by Joseph Ducreux, ca. 1783 (Click to enlarge)

Short, long sleep duration associated with increased mortality

From: American Academy of Sleep Medicine

WESTCHESTER, Ill. – A study published in the December 1 issue of the journal SLEEP is the first to show that both a decrease and an increase in sleep duration are associated with an elevated risk of mortality by cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular means, respectively.

The study, authored by Jane E. Ferrie, PhD, of the University College London Medical School in London, U.K., focused on 10,308 participants between 35 and 55 years of age. Baseline screening (Phase 1), conducted between 1985 and 1988, involved a clinical examination and a self-administered questionnaire. Data collection at Phase 3 (1992-1993) also included a clinical examination (8,104 participants) and questionnaire (8,642 participants).

“In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping seven or eight hours per night is optimal for health,” said Dr. Ferrie. “The indication that mortality rates are lower in participants who slept five to six hours or less at Phase 1 but who reported extended hours of sleep at Phase 3 implies that increasing sleep duration in short sleepers is likely to have health benefits. In contrast to this, the finding that an increased duration of sleep among those sleeping seven to eight hours is associated with higher levels of mortality implies that sleep restriction should at least be considered.”

These are very interesting and significant findings. If you're a short sleeper, you may be able to decrease your risk of mortality by sleeping more—up to eight hours a night. If you're already sleeping seven or eight hours a night, sleeping longer might increase your risk of mortality.

However, I get a bit uneasy whenever I hear people advocating sleep restriction. Let's keep in mind that these are statistical generalizations. And you're not a statistic, you're a person. So, if you feel you need a bit more than eight hours sleep to feel rested, alert, and energetic, I would encourage you to satisfy that need. (I personally find that about 8 hours and fifteen minutes is the ideal sleep duration for me, and I am certainly not going to cut back on that because of this finding!) And if from time to time you feel the need to sleep even longer for one or several nights, that's okay, too. Limited periods of sleep extension—up to 10.2 hours per night—have been shown to yield above-normal improvements in alertness, reaction time, and mood. They may have real therapeutic value.

Image: "The Dream" by Henri Matisse

TIME Waffles on Naps

From Time Magazine, "The Year in Medicine From A to Z"
Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2007

"Snoozing cats may lose an awful lot of their day to sack time, but they may be on to something. A Greek study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year showed that people who nap at least three times a week for at least 30 minutes are 37% less likely to die from heart disease. Another study, published in the online edition of the Journal of Applied Physiology, provided a possible reason: blood pressure eases in the time just before sleep. The coronary value of a siesta, however, is still questionable. Researchers have yet to explore whether blood pressure rises upon waking from a nap. Snoozing certainly isn't a guarantee against getting heart disease, but the studies do provide an excuse for half an hour of downtime."

Why couldn't they just say it: Naps are good for you. Are they afraid their own staff might start snoozing on the job? Probably so.

And yes, your blood pressure does gradually return to waking levels after a nap, but so what? Those 30 minutes spent in sleep bring us to a hypometabolic state that lowers not only blood pressure, but muscle tone, oxygen consumption, and cerebral processing rate, and provides a lasting reduction our levels of the stress hormone cortisol. That brief respite from the stress of life is highly restorative. And it's a proven aid to learning and memory. So by all means, nap!

Image: Hypnos and Thanatos, "Sleep and His Half-Brother Death" by John William Waterhouse.

Light pollution: "Bedrooms never got fully dark at night"

From "The Dark Side"

by David Owen

The New Yorker, 20 August 2007

"In 1610, Galileo Galilei published a small book describing astronomical observations that he had made of the skies above Padua. His homemade telescope had less magnifying and resolving power than most beginners' telescopes sold today, yet with them he made astonishing discoveries: that the moon has mountains and other topographical features; that Jupiter is orbited by satellites, which he called planets; and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars....Today, by contrast, most Americans are unable to see the Milky Way in the sky above the place where they live, and those who can see it are sometimes baffled by its name."

"The stars have not become dimmer; rather, the Earth has become vastly brighter, so that celestial objects are harder to see. Air pollution has made the atmosphere less transparent and more reflective, and high levels of terrestrial illumination have washed out the stars overhead--a phenomenon called "sky glow."

***

"My friend Ken Daniel is a lighting designer....His wife, Gina, told me that the street lights and other lights in their neighborhood [in Glendale, CA] were so bright that their bedrooms never got fully dark at night, even though they had curtains. When the Northridge earthquake struck, in 1994, the first thing she noticed, after the shaking had awakened her, was that she couldn't see. "The earthquake had knocked out power all over the city, and everything was black," she said. "When we got the kids and ran outside, we found all our neighbors standing in the street, looking up at the sky and saying, 'Wow'."

***

"Growing numbers of us pass most of our waking hours "in a box, looking at a box," as Dave Crawford [astronomer and president of the International Dark-Sky Association] put it: we spend our days inside offices, looking at computer screens, and our evenings inside houses, looking at television screens. Fewer and fewer of us spend much time outside at all, except in automobiles--and when we do venture outdoors after dark we are usually stepping into yet another box, the glowing canopy that our lights have projected into the sky."