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GamesPosts Tagged: ‘sleep’
Blow Your Mind: The Extreme Sleep of Parasomnias
by Robert Lamb | August 11, 2011
Most of us take a good night’s sleep for granted, but there’s a whole world of bizarre sleep out there that only parasomniacs who scoff at your occasional complaints about “work dreams” and nightmares.
Yes, we’re talking about the world of sleep walking, sleep eating, sleep paralysis, sleep violence, sexsomnia and snoregasms.
Happy marriages hinge on well-rested wives?
by Cristen Conger | June 27, 2011
Science just pulled a fast one on me. Last week, I was raising the roof about how a study from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine found that sleep deprivation doesn’t have as potent an effect on women, compared to men. Now, a study from the University of Pittburgh School of Medicine seems to throw a monkey wrench in that notion.
Preliminary research from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine indicates that lost sleep affects women less potently than it affects men. When men and women only snooze for six hours or less throughout the workweek, cognitive performance takes a hit, which accumulates over time as well. Even sleeping in during the weekend isn’t enough to make up the difference — especially in men.
I remember on a podcast published years back I mentioned that I hit a wall just about every afternoon, growing almost irresistibly tired by around 3:00 p.m. I posited that it was a crash after the effects of caffeine I’d drank in coffee all day wore off. But I remember a SYSK listener sent an email suggesting that it wasn’t a caffeine crash but was the result of a lack of oxygen or an overabundance of carbon dioxide around the office. I never looked into the suggestion, but I was reminded of it when I came across an article on The Local — “Sweden’s News in English” — that a rise in narcolepsy cases is being linked to the swine flu vaccine.
We’ve all watched enough sci-fi and horror films to know how life underground goes. Your skin and hair turn pale, you go blind and before long you’re probably prowling around naked for the great taste of human flesh. Ah, but what is sleep like for these strange creatures of the underdark? As reported today in Current Biology, the Mexican Blind Cave Fish (Astyanax mexicanus) offers some excellent insight into the question.
If we as human beings were living “naturally”, without any artificial light sources, how would we sleep? What would our natural rhythm look like? What would our sleeping patterns be in the ideal sense? Well it turns out that when people are living without any sort of artificial light at all, they sleep twice every [...]
I’ve read the news that bedtime gaming causes problems with sleep in two different places today — Kotaku and Kotaku’s source, U.S. News and World Report. Both cited the National Sleep Foundation’s 2011 “Sleep in America” poll, the results of which were released today.
Funny thing is, both Kotaku and U.S. News talk about findings that aren’t actually related to pinpointing a correlation between gaming and lack of sleep.
One of the best things about Spain is the napping. Am I right?
Actually, I’ve never been to Spain. Nevertheless, I was a bit sad to find out that in 2006, the Spanish government outlawed the workday siesta (eating, then lying down to catch an hour of zzzs) for its federal employees, and that it expected the private sector to follow suit.
How Accelerated Aging Works – the amazing aging of President Obama
by Marshall Brain | December 10, 2010
Accelerated aging is often used as a device in fiction, as seen in this clip from Star Trek: But it can also happen in real life, as demonstrated here: President Obama after 2 years This same kind of thing happened with President Bush: President Bush after 7 years President Bush after 8 years So what [...]
Jet Lag Makes You Dumb and Dumber
by Amanda Arnold | November 22, 2010
If you feel stupider when you’re jet lagged, it’s because you are. A recent scientific study presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting showed that chronic jet lag decreases the amount of new neurons created in the brain by about half, making you less smart.
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