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Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity
SL33Z3 writes "Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have found increased brain activity in areas of the brain that otherwise stay inactive. The longer the students went without sleep, the more activity was found. Research found students to have better recollection after long periods of sleep deprivation. Check out the release here. " Heck, combine this with the news about caffeine and I'm all set!
How about too much sleep? From personal experience, if I sleep more than 7 hours, I'll feel lazy the day after. I find a good night of sleep is around 6 hours, if that's what I get, I'll be in great shape for coding.
:)
Although I get an average of 5 hours.. but hey, combine that with coffee and you've got maximisation of time and efficiency
Where did you read that? It is totally incorrect - acethylcholine is a neurotransmiter, like serotonin and dopamine, for instance, and it is the one responsible for muscle contraction (and regulation of heart rate). It doesn't come in food, it is syntesized at the synaptic terminal from choline and acethyl coenzime A.
And about cells dying and others taking place - that's also not true. Neurons have several axons forming synapses, and if one dies, the axons go with it - if one were to take it's place, it would have lost all the connections of the previous one. And since learning, memory, our personality, etc, is all due to the way the various axons are arranged, after some time we'd have these parameters altered: different personality, loss of memory, etc, and that does NOT happen.
Sure, brain cells die, but with aging, and they are not replaced with new ones.
-- Electron
Yeah, but you think you're doing a great job too, when in fact you're probably not doing as well as you thought.
But yeah, that would scare the hell out of me. Four days on and three days off? Geez, how long can someone's body take punishment like that?
---
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Sleep deprivation also causes hallucinations.
Severe sleep deprivation resembles an acid trip.
More brain activity is not always a good thing, unless you like having your neurons cross-linked.
---
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60 hours of no sleep, 6 hours of sleep, and another 60 hours of no sleep...
I was trying to stay awake for the whole week, and failed. But I had a lot of fun, anyhow...
---
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The extra activity is hallucinations..
Ask any Crack/Meth/Coke-head.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
*Mild* sleep deprivation seems to enhance creativity -- but there's a falloff rate there...
;)
You know that if you stay up past the point that you "get sleepy" that eventually the sleepiness wears off, and you get what is commonly referred to as a "second wind". This process seems to continue (at least for me) in a cycle (get sleepy, get nth wind, get sleepy, get n+1th wind, etc...) where the lengths of time between periods of sleepiness (aka: the "winds") get shorter, and the periods of sleepiness get longer.
Now, I've noticed that at some point, (generally halfway through either the 2nd or 3rd wind) I seem to be a heck of a lot more creative. I also get a heck of a lot more work done.
But, it gets increasingly hard to concentrate on a single task - my mind tends to wander a lot as the condition wears on.
Coffee (and I'm assuming other stimulants as well) seems to have a lengthening effect on the "winds", but when it wears off, the "winds" shorten dramatically. (sort of like what we're all expecting to happen to Dick Clark - at some point he's going to age 60-100 years in a matter of minutes...I hope he's on camera...)
This is just personal observation, of course, and has absolutely no medical founding (IANAD)
(Sort of like the observastion that while I don't tend to eat red meat much, I crave it when I'm injured - almost like I'm looking for raw materials to rebuild the broken parts...)
And yes, I'm aware that this post tends to ramble a bit...I'm on my 4th wind and ready for bed
I'm currently taking a class called "the Neurobiology of Sleep and Dreaming" so I know a bit about the subject at hand.
First of all, there are parts of your brain that have increased activity during sleep, especially in the brainstem (note that most researchers sperate sleep into slow wave and REM, since REM is really strange, but this statement applies to all sleep).
Second of all, past sleep dep studies have shown that the main symptom of sleep dep is. . . feeling sleepy. Yes, cognitive functions are impared, but significantly less so than expected (it is suspected that most of those effects are due to attention problems rather than actual cortical processing issues).
Third, the need for sleep decreases as you age, although I can't point to any studies on sleep dep. in the elderly (it is known, however, that significant sleep dep. in the elderly mimics Alzheimer's in that it causes misdiagnoses).
Fourth, I suspect the 17 days rat sleep dep. death figure is due to use of the water tank method of sleep dep., where a rat is placed on a very small platform in a tank of water, such that it falls in the water if it falls asleep. This is highly stressful in addition to depriving sleep. An experiment where the bottom of a cage was rotated (the walls stayed still, so the rat was bumped by the walls which woke it up and it had to walk some before it stopped) when EEG signals indicated sleep for the experimental rat (a control rat was also in the cage but was allowed to sleep; I did not suffer ill effects) showed that it took 30 days for the rat to die. That's something of a nitpick, but implies that stress might also be deadly.
Finally, to counter the story of the DJ, let me tell you the story of the 17 year old kid who stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days) in an attempt to break the world record (dunno if he succeeded) in 1965. By the last day he was really sleepy but could still perform tasks (the kind that scientists give people, I don't know specifics). Afterwards he slept for 14 hours 40 minutes straight, then was fully recovered with no aftereffects. Also, Kales in 1970 performed an experiment where 4 subjects were kept awake for 205 hours. They suffered eyelid tremors and decreased performance (which was suspected to be due to lack of motivation) and had a big REM rebound (lots more of their sleep was in REM than normal) for 4 days, then also fully recovered.
A good book on the subject is "Sleep" by J. Allen Hobson (an expert on the subject who works at Harvard).
Brynn, who suspects that the DJ in question already had some stability issues
"Any sufficiently advanced form of Magic is indistinguishable from Technology." - Gnomish Technomancer
I think I'll stick to taking lots of Ginseng and Niacin, and coffee if I want increased brain activity.
So now I know why I always produce better code at 3 AM after drinking two liters of cherry coke...
-- K
So why not have glucose or other IV feeds directly into our brains?
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
XFS might be pretty cool. I could really use the GRIO (Guaranteed Rate I/O) whenever I trying to explain things to people. No more stuttering while I'm trying to remember what I wanted to say. ;-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Do you suppose we can get Stephen Tweedie to port ext3 to neurons once he's done?
--Joe "Journal Neuron Not Found" Z.--
Program Intellivision!
Without the aide of chemicals? Three working days...finally crashed out after coming home from work the third day.. It was odd, I'd start to grow very tired during the day, and then every few hours a wind would kick in.. I also had quite a bit of stress at the time, and was working with a new job, so that may have contributed to it..(and no, I dont recommend staying up several days in a row during your second week of work at the office..:]..)
Driph
"Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
--
driph
--
It's long been known, at least in the group of programmers that I associate with, that the best coding is done at the 2AM time. I've read tons of different studies throughout the years, one even in Popular Science, claiming that there is a reason for this. Basically, your instinctual skills kick in and you rely more on that than your "reasoned" judgement. Also, your brain activity is significantly higher (blood flow, brain waves, etc) at these times.
Why? Traditionally, it is attributed to our carnivorous nature (anyone who claims humans are vegetarians has clearly not researched this well enough, only even in the last few thousand years have humans become omnivorous). Humans still contain the basic animal instinct to hunt. Hunting was best done at night obviously for the surprise effect (which unfortunately works both ways!), and hence a few hundred thousand years of evolution later and we are better coders at night.
Of course, sleep deprivation is counterproductive, what I mentioned rather refers to working late. When I'm working on big projects I tend to get into the habit of working late and sleeping late. I can't count the number of times that working through being exhausted has resulted in bad code, regardless of time. If I'm tired at noon, I write crap at noon. I think the true mark of a coder is to dynamically alter your sleep cycles between "human" mode where you sleep at night and week up in the morning, and "machine" mode where you sleep in the morning and wake up in the afternoon.
I think the survey was taking a more narrow slice of this, not quite what the submitter had in mind. Still interesting and provacative though. Remember, if its ambiguity raises too many eyebrows, a clarification will probably follow.
Yeah I like it when you can talk with the dead people after not sleeping a week. That and tlaking to your feet, those cut ups...
:- well_screw(me)
Is this a good idea to tell people:
(define direct_relationship(sleep, brian_activity))
proc less_sleep
begin
inc brian_activity
end
oh god I need a little more sleep...
for(i=10;i100;i+=10)sleep(i);
when:: little_sleep(me)
segmentation fault... woof woof
Well, at least we know the MPAA isn't losing any sleep...
Finding God in a Dog
Its not easy getting a fully packaged/ready to go neurotransmitter into the brain just by swallowing a pill. The blood-brain barrier keeps most stuff like that out. You can't give them a dopamine pill easily. You can try L-dopa, building blocks though.
"Subjects had fewer correct answers and omitted more responses when sleepy than when rested."
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
that if you stay up long enough, your brain will just explode from all that activity? (it would if this were a Hollywood movie, I bet.)
What a mess.
(on the serious side, do we really know what sleep is for, anyhow? Perhaps this is similar to a hard drive thrashing when the filesystem has gotten too fragmented. More overhead required to the do same thing...)
"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."
Well, maybe LSD doesn't have many side effects, and maybe it does, but it has at least a few, including flashbacks.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
And about cells dying and others taking place - that's also not true. Neurons have several axons forming synapses, and if one dies, the axons go with it - if one were to take it's place, it would have lost all the connections of the previous one. And since learning, memory, our personality, etc, is all due to the way the various axons are arranged, after some time we'd have these parameters altered: different personality, loss of memory, etc, and that does NOT happen.
Actually brain cells do regenerate. There was a lot of talk about this in journals this autumn. Do a search on neurogenesis to find out more. Brain cells have been found to regenerate in the hippocampus (an area associated with some aspects of memory) in human brains. Previously neurogenesis has also been found to occur each season in some song birds, once the need to learn a new song arises.
Energy. That's why we sleep.
I doubt that. A lot of things happen in the brain during sleep. Sure, the activity is slightly lower, but if the sole purpose of sleeping was to recharge, then why does not all activity stop?
If the brain does use up more energy than it receives during wake hours, I find it more likely that this is just the brain utilizing the wake hours more since it "knows" (in an evolutionary sense of course) that it can regain the lost energy during sleep.
IMHO, a more realistic theory about sleep is the one that states that sleep, especcially dream periods are used to sort the experiences of the say and store them. The weirdness of dreams would be caused by events being replayed faster than real-time by the subconscious, at a speed that consciousness cannot keep up with.
The internet does the same thing. When it hits an area of inherent unreliabilty it routes around it. This is much the same thing that the article was describing and in a general sense results in a lowering of the aggregate computing potential.
:-( This would probably explain why the stupidest among us tend to attract the most mates...
It is also apparent from this that the brain values verbal skills over mathematical skills. It makes sense since the brain is simply not evolved enough to have multiple mathematical processing areas. Thak and Groo probably needed communication skills more than they needed the ability to balance their stone checkbook.
The parietal area takes over the verbal skills when the pre-frontal area can't handle them anymore. My guess would be that the pre-frontal area of the brain is so new that it is not fault tolerant yet. It's neat to see this appear in other areas like stroke victims and people with forms of impact brain damage. I'm not a believer in the 10% theory. I feel like we use most of our brains although we have the potential to evolve them to include more and more memories and abilities much like FPGA. When another part of the brain evolves to take over something a damaged part can no longer handle, the overall system loses some proccessing power.
In reality all you really need is the ability to move, communicate on a basic level, go to the bathroom, eat and have sex. The brain seems to protect these functions. Everything else is surplus and gives up its processing power if necessary. Lets face it folks we were born to attract mates and breed
Also, if you do not get enough sleep your "cron" process do not run and your system is left in a messy state, eventually becoming unusable...
--
Quantum Linux Laboratories - Accelerating Business with Linux
* Education
* Integration
* Support
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
I wonder if any mentioned one of the standard textbook psychology experiments of deprevation of R.E.M. (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep. Basically they allowed the subjects to sleep but as soon as they entered REM sleep (usually after 90min or so, from memory) the subject was woken up. The experiment had to be abandoned because the subjects began to show symptoms of psychosis after 7 days (again from memory). The experiment has since not been repeated in any form or variation I know of. If you interested in finding out more pick up a modern 1st year psychology text. :)
:P
Startrek (The Next Generation) used the experiment as part of one of the expisode plots. Something causes the crew to no longer get their REM sleep and they go psychotic, I think Data saved the day
WeirdArms (BA/BE, Psychology/Comp Eng) well at least at the end of this year when I graduate
It should be noted that where brain activity is concerned more is not necessarily better. If you are performing a brain death protocol more is absolutely better, however more brain activity (in terms of frequency in the time domain and amplitude in voltage) can actually be indicative of abnormal processes. (Epilepsy for one) Also other studies (using PET scans looking at glucose metabolism in the brain) indicate that people who are smarter (per IQ scores and comparing "normal" with Down's syndrome subjects) have lower rates of metabolism and thus "activity" than those with lower IQ scores. I also believe I recall a study examining metabolic rates of sleep deprived subjects versus subjects that have normal sleep times and metabolism was up in the sleep deprived subjects supporting this finding of increased brain activity in the sleep deprived. More is not always better folks. The brain works not like a combustion engine, but more like a massively parallel computer that requires intricate timing to allow for some time dependant tasks to occur. There is a balance with some circuts that behave in an excitatory fashion and some that behave in an inhibitory fashion. So it is not all about increasing clock cycles. When some circuits fire without appropriate controls you can get aberrant behavior ultimately leading to pathology (epilepsy, and perhaps some forms of mental illness)
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
God! You're forgetting about the excluded middle! This logic does NOT follow!! Next time try to think efore you make a post eveyone will laugh at. -llm
-Leo
Yes, you apparently read the article unlike the poster submitter and editors. No, too harsh there, let's take a more happy view - they were all sleep-deprived and their parietals didn't pull them back up to normal - that sucks.
This result corresponds with my own college experiences. I always found that staying up all night writing a term paper due the next day was more productive than staying up all night trying to finish calculus homework. Programming lies somewhere in between; much is linguistic (verbal) and much is analytic. Hacking away late at night on new code can be awesome. But trying to find bugs in a complicated procedure at 4am is not fun. Maybe this research explains it, since debugging is more analytical and writing new code involves more language skills.
-Nathan Whitehead
I had a roommate in college who suffered from (I believe) bipolar disorder or something similar. If he stopped taking his medication (which happened a little too frequently), he would be unable to sleep for long periods of time. He went through one really bad spell where I came back from the newspaper office and found him sitting on the edge of his bed in his underwear asking me why he was in Hell. Best way I could think to describe what he was going through was "waking dreams". His brain was processing all this submerged stuff that's usually dealt with when we dream. He ended up in the hospital for a few days so he could get his body back in balance. Not fun for him, or for me.
Don't try try to stay awake that long at home.
--Ben
Do you have this report online at all? I'd like to pursue this further.
Maybe some relevant URLs?
-- "Religion is for those who fear hell, spirituality is for those who have been there."
This leads me to believe that the post is right and wrong. I can attest to your situation. Still the article from what I have read claims increased brain activity. Couldn't this attribute halucination? It doesn't neccisarily mean that you will be able to perform everyday tasks as well without sleep. I don't know very much about the brain but wouldn't increased brain use sort of be like overloading a computer? does it perform better overloaded? I don't think so. That is why we sleep; to release some of the load on our brains.
Summary or details.
And how do you know we don't have altered personality as we age? Perhaps you haven't known people, and yourself, for decades. Remember, there probably is no single neuron controlling anything, and we're referring to replacing some with similar neurons.
Go right ahead and have proper professionals deliver more glucose to your brain. Evolution hasn't managed to deliver enough energy...although the Coca-Cola company has been trying to...
Jordan
We've got memory leaks, and as we stay awake too long without a reboot, our swap space gets more active. Simple. :o)
Dolphins will put half of their brain to sleep at a time. This allows them to maintain a state of semi-awareness, while resting. I wish we were built that way.
We are, but it only appears during the college years, mysteriously entering remission until, if by pure luck or natural selection, you acquire a position in middle management.
The extra activity is the bits of your brain ganging together, saying "GET SOME F*ING SLEEP". So no surprises really.
Microsoft Windows is quite similar. As the uptime goes along, junk processes are accumulated which use up CPU time...
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
My knowledge of this subject is limited (to what I've learned in AP psychology in high school) but I'll take a stab at this question.
The brain does need sleep. Furthermore, it needs dreams. Dreams happen in REM sleep and everyone dreams every night, if they sleep normally. Even if you don't remember it, you do.
(Another fact - sleepwalking does not happen in REM sleep and so sleepwalkers are not dreaming. Rather it happens in the deepest sleep stage. REM sleep happens in lighter sleep when the brain waves more closely resemble the alpha waves of awake but relaxed people. Sleepwalking involves deep sleep and delta waves.)
People who take sleeping pills will fail to have REM sleep, so this can be harmful. When taken off sleeping medication, people who fall asleep will spend much more time in REM sleep. Also, people who are sleep deprived will enter REM sleep very quickly. It is apparent that the brain needs REM sleep.
People tend to remember the preceding day's events better when they have more sleep, suggesting that REM sleep is involved in encoding short-term memories into long-term memory. Staying up all night to cram for a test might help but the information is not as likely to be remembered over a long period of time (what is forgotten will likely be forgotten very quickly - over time the amount of forgotten material levels off to a steady value - this is Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve).
The brain is probably not "exercising itself" through dreams. Rather, it is busily sorting through the day's events and storing the important material in long-term memory. Dreams appear to be the way that our mind superimposes a structure on this activity. This is the reason we see sudden changes in setting or events in a dream - our neurons are firing, and the brain tries to fit this somewhat random activity into a rational pattern through dreams.
Freud's ideas on latent and manifest content of dreams seem much less credible than the biological picture.
The events in dreams often echo the preceding day's events or things that have been on our minds. This lends support to the idea that the brain is encoding short-term memories into long-term storage.
Sleep deprivation may not hamper activity on some tasks - for instance, one research subject, a teenager who had been kept awake for several days, was able to beat the researcher in a game - pinball, if I remember correctly - even after several days without sleep.
From personal experience, it seems that sleep deprivation hurts mathematical ability but enhances creativity.
I don't have time to write more now, but hopefully this sheds a little light on the subject.
Matt Reece
[Disclaimer: I admit that I have not yet read the article, I'm merely responding to the actual posting and not the article, as of yet, so I may be wrong. :-)]
:-) I recall them saying something about becoming borderline retarded as a result of insufficient sleep... not good, probably. :-)
:-) You really can't make-up lost sleep either. People die from sleep deprivation... death generally has detrimental effects on your social life, so it's just a lose-lose situation, might as well sleep. :-)
Okay, well, a quick glance at the the blurb, and some of the discussion posts, it seems the jist (or interpreted just, as it may be) of the article is that sleep deprivation increases brain activity in certain areas, improving memory. Well, I don't know about the validity about that, but I read a while back about a study they did in England which found that lack of sleep lowers your IQ. I believe they said a week of inadequate sleep will lower your IQ by a point. I for one don't wanna just go around getting dumber by the day, I'm sure I haven't got too many spare IQ points laying around.
Also, as I'm sure this has been mentioned a million times already. Sleep deprivation has seriously negative side effects on the body. The body uses sleep time to recuperate. Even geeks do enough physical activity to require some sort of rest.
--Ricky
-------------------------------------------
I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.
-- Dr. Seuss
Extra activation != increased brainpower I have seen reports of the study and they explain the phenomenon a little better to non-health pros.
The increased brain activity is in a special area that is rarely used. It is, in fact, making up for the parts of the brain that start to SHUT DOWN during sleep deprivation.
This means there is an increase in one section, but not necessarily an overall increase.
When a person sleeps, the brain is resting and "repairing" (brain cells don't reproduce, but they don't necessarily have to die so quickly). If you deprive the brain of the repair period, it starts to degrade. After a few days of deprevation, one gets hallucinations because the brain is losing full functionality. After more than that, a person's whole personality can be changed for good and permanent brain damage can occur. The guy who went 200 hours without sleep came out a completely different person. His wife divorced him and he doesn't remember his kid's name, he was fired from his job and other "bad things."
The point is: The extra activity is your brain trying to keep up functionality while other parts are turning themselves off (or not being productive).
Secondly, every other study shows that productivity of the person degrades over time during depravation. The graph looks like a damped out sinusoid where ability goes way down during normal sleep hours, comes back up during normal waking hours (but not up to full power), back down again during the normal sleep hours, and back up again (even lower this time).
Any doctor will tell you that sleep deprevation is bad and that if you have to for work or school, don't do it for more than a day or two and to at least take small naps in there. Any marginal gain by the time increase will be offset by loss of abilities.
IANAL, but I play one on
I actually did do a /b to turn off the bold on the quote but it didn't get registered. I also put a (p) with the correct syntax, of course, and it didn't register, either. I guess I should have previewed more than once. I probably forgot the closing > and it messed up everything. Oh, well.
IANAL, but I play one on
Or not just read the article, but actually look into the topic and know what you are about to post about.
Which is a very good idea and I hope that more people can learn to do this.
How, precisely, do you infect a living being with cancer?
If your brain doesn't need rest, then why don't you lie down in a fully-conscious state and just rest your body?
I think probably there are parts of your brain that need less rest than others, so they spend the downtime running simulations (ie. dreams) to train themselves.
--
Patrick Doyle
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The study DID NOT find that sleep deprivation increases the memory capability. Indeed, it found that despite the increased brain activity, the brain cannot overcome the sleep deprivation and performs poorly.
(8-DCS)
Totally offtopic, but isnt it weird sometimes when similar topic posts are all made in a row? For instance, in this story, it's the basic first post crap, with some other stuff thrown in, and then boom, 3 straight posts commenting on the exact same thing (misleading headline). It happens in a lot of other articles too, where something might be factually wrong with the article, but no one makes any comments until about post 50, and then you get about 3 straight posts on it. It's sorta freaky.
You know what's even scarier? PHB's who equate less sleep = more brain activiity => more productivity.
.sig Instructions .sig here
I'm sure a few memos will be sent out in some companies suggesting the idea of getting a solid 4 hours of sleep ever 3 days.
:)
_____________________
step one: place
Dolphins will put half of their brain to sleep at a time. This allows them to maintain a state of semi-awareness, while resting. I wish we were built that way.
The article states that sleep deprivation causes increased brains activity -- this is not necessarily a good thing.
I recall a study comparing students that did well in math and students that did poorly. The students that did well had minor brain activity. The kids that did poorly had a LOT of brain activity.
The results of this study concluded that this might have to do with "brain efficiency" and that the increased brain activity in the kids doing poorly was causing them more problems.
I don't have URL for this study. It was about two years ago.
I do my best coding after 2PM ;-)
:-)
I just sat down to write some more in motorola 68000 series assembler (for class, not fun) and I couldn't understand what the hell I wrote last night, until I realized I'm a god damn genius, and everything I wrote while well-rested this afternoon messed up the perfect code I wrote last night. Must have been that higher brain functionality
Peace
Spyky
In the past few weeks, I have actually noticed that.. Bah, who needs sceince to tell us about reality. While at work and semi-sleep deprived (not as bad as college students, but like 2 hours sleep and a long day), I can do the same work or more WHILE holding converstation with people around me, which normally can not be done on a good nights sleep. My job also calls for working either mornings or nights, and if I am working nights (till like midnight), I just with it more, while the people we serve are pissed off and taking it all out on you.... Would be nice to be in a bad mood at the same time as our customers, then we take agression out on them too.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Remember your Psych 101 classes? More activity is indicative of poorer performance -- novices in a field always have much more brain activity than experts. This study tells me that the brain is having a harder and harder time as sleep deprevation increases! That's not good....
I forgot to add: The spamming idiots are sometimes posting 40 idiotic posts that need to be moderated down which does probably screw the setup we had before this became the norm.
haha, that's funny. You know how big the market is for pseudo science herbal medicines and such? The same goes for GNC, especially for fitness related drugs. People take these drugs then change their behavior, then take the drugs for the change in fitness level when it was really the change in behavior. There are, of course, many drugs that do have an effect -- but I'm just proving the point that there are many who do not or do little in the equation.
Huh? The caffiene story says it causes the dendrites to grow and grow more spines but we do not yet know what this does or doesn't do for long term memory. The sleep deprivation story says that sleep dev turns off parts of your brain and other parts get hyper to try to compensate. But in particular it says it lowers math ability. Last time I checked coding and math ability are pretty strongly correlated. So I would be very surprised if sleep dev improved hacking.
I read the article, and I don't see how you can draw those conclusions. I interpreted this to mean that the brain was trying its best to adapt to critical conditions. When sleep deprived, various parts of the brain begin to shut down ( as a self defense mechanism, or simply because they cieze to function ). But in order to maximize the human capacity to think and survive, other more dormant portions of the brain are activated to take over certain operations. The specific operation sited in this article was linguistics.
:)
I don't really see why linguistics would be important for survival. They said math skills went down the toilet ( because it is such a complex and consuming activity that there weren't any reserve portions of the brain to divy activity out to ).
They specificly raise the health risks of sleep deprevation, and how much poorer those test subjects performed. What it does show, however, is the incredible adaptibility of the human mind. Much like Terminator 2, re-routing neural connections on the fly to redundant reserve systems.
What this also suggests to me is that we are capable of using other portions of our brain when we try hard enough.. Perhaps we can meditate and awaken those dormant sections. Who knows, maybe during finals, we can get a suddent burst of intelligence even.
-Michael
The spell checker was the single worst contributor to the modern written word.
-Michael
yeah, I saw that too! :-)
It was on The X-Files....It's a cool program, but I don't think everything is true
I would imagine its not too dissimilar from a computer hard drive.
:)
:(
:)
A) You have have it spinning constantly, giving you an improved speed on the return of information. Downside: Shortens life span of said drive, burns more energy and can begin to make scary grinding noises.
B) You can keep you hard drive in the occasional "sleep mode" by spinning it down when not needed or at least after a determined time where it isn't being accessed. This can save on energy, drive life span, and less grindy noises down the road. Downside: Data access takes a bit once you have to wake it up. You also finding it inadvertantly dozing on you once in a while. (Mine does while playing Diablo...arg!
Basically, everyone has a happy middle ground somewhere in there between A & B.
Ok...so I could be off. My brain's spinning down now anyway. Its a Friday!
-Vel
So, Katz was behind your personal DoS (Denial of Sleep) attack!
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
See this.
Echidnas (Australian spiny ant eaters) have no REM sleep.
This is a well-known phenomenon among military special ops types.
It is common among Ranger school students.
-Peter
Actually He's not so much makig fun of fear of clowns as he's quoting an episode of the simpsons in which homer instils this fear in a young bart.
hell of a funny episode.
Exactly. Nowhere does this article mention that long term memory is improved. In fact, it says the opposite, and I quote: "Subjects had fewer correct answers and omitted more responses when sleepy than when rested" So in now way does the study support this statement: WRONG "Research found students to have better recollection after long periods of sleep deprivation" WRONG All they said is that when subjects are sleepy, they noted a slightly greater activity in the porietal lobe, which is associated with long term memory, that's all. Here: TOP: Activity of a rested brain doing subtraction BOTTOM: Activity of a sleep-deprived brain doing subtraction Which would you rather be?
So in now way does the study support this statement:
All they said is that when subjects are sleepy, they noted a slightly greater activity in the porietal lobe, which is associated with long term memory, that's all.
Here: look at this image.
http://health.ucsd.edu/news/images/gillanNeuroRepo rt.jpg
TOP: Activity of a rested brain doing subtraction BOTTOM: Activity of a sleep-deprived brain doing subtraction
Which would you rather be?
Looks like the /. coders are going to have to "deprive their sleep" in order to restore normal operations!!!
If you read the study you see they are not saying that sleep deprivation increases your abilites, just that the brain tries to compensate by becoming active in regions that it normally is not. Whether or not this compensation is an improvement is up for debate, and I for one doubt that it is.
/. complaining about other news sites doing this, try to keep yourselves to the same standard.
With that in mind perhaps the title 'Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity' is a bit misleading, especially when coupled the comments below the title?
Come on, I have seen
Sigs are awesome huh?
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how much bandwidth has been wasted by this sig?
You mean to tell me there was some purpose behind sleeping 2 hrs a night while I was in college?
I thought it done because the people in college were mean son'bitches!
I mean between those freaking engineering projects, all the drinking I did, and fooling around at all hours there wasn't much time for sleep. I can sleep easy know that I know it made me exercise my brain muscle.
Be insightful. If you can't be insightful, be informative.
If you can't be informative, use my name
yeah, but i recall reading that 15 minute power naps are actually quite good for you, where you don't feel tired as long as you sleep for about 15 minutes every 4 hours. is that not true? i've tried it and never have had any problems, although concede that once after 4 days of being awake, i started hallucinating and feeling *really* dizzy...
--
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you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
... take Hell week, for example. Maybe someone could've measured more brain activity, but I doubt it was useful activity. There's a reason sleep deprivation is often used in POW / capture situations. It can break the spirit of many people, or at least push them over the edge in an otherwise stressful situation.
Just my $.02.
SEAL
A few caveats about interpreting this study:
1) Extra activation != increased brainpower
A variety of conditions, such as seizures, frontal lobe damage, and schizophrenia can all produce increased neurological activity. Now, I'm not saying that what we see here is of this pathological variety. The release states that sleep-deprived subjects who showed more abnormal activation did better than those with less -- but not better than those who showed none at all as a result of having adequate sleep. As Gillin suggests, it seems to be some sort of compensatory mechanism, rather than an overall advantage.
2) Extra activation is not necessarily healthy
More neurological activity is not necessarily sustainable or healthy. In extreme cases, brain cells can even be killed by overexcitation, although personally I'm only aware of drug models for this phenomenon.
3) Take Gillin's general comments on sleep deprivation with a grain of salt
The author of the study editorializes a bit towards the end of the release. There's no doubt that sleep deprivation impairs concentration and mental ability, or that many people do suffer from the condition. But her suggestion that sleep deprivation is endemic and terribly costly to society is not yet an established fact. Here are a few articles that challenge her stance, without disagreeing on the basic nature of sleep deprivation.
- Michael Cohn
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Perhaps this activity in the prefrontal region is the brain sort of sleeping while it's awake. When the body is asleep, the brain fires what seems to amount to a bunch of random synapses, which, if I remember correctly occur mostly in the prefrontal region, where lots of higher order thinking goes on, like doing math problems and such. This activity could perhaps be the brain trying to do this in an effort to glean what it can out of whatever it is that is beneficial from this occurrence.
Last year and some of this year I was sleep-deprived enough to start halfway falling asleep in odd places, like class, the car, a barber shop, and others. I remember being able to understand what was going on around me, but I was also having some sort of dream at the same time. Maybe that was some of the heightened brain activity at work.
not enough people meta-moderate
This is true, and I think has got something to do with the way meta-moderation is not adequately distinguished from standard moderation in the UI. If you click on a pop-up next to a comment you *then* have to decide whether it's better to moderate or meta-moderate, and it's generally easier to just moderate and be done with it.
I think I'd like to see a system of meta-moderation which is completely distinct from standard moderation, maybe limited to 100 or so people (with great karma) at any one time. These people would get meta-moderation points which could not be used on standard moderation.
As M2 affects karma, this would have the effect of allowing high-karma users to concentrate on meta-moderation more than standard moderation. Which I think overall is a positive outcome for /. What do you think?
I'm a bsd obsessed geek. wise up stoopid.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
While I can't comment on the effects of the drugs Ken mentioned, I most certainly can vouch for the hallucinations. When I was working on the technical parts for the ramp-up of a (now-defunct) retail sales location, I went for about 4 periods of 72 hours straight with no sleep at all. In between I got about 1.5 hours of sleep- on the floor under my desk, it was brief and most uncomfortable.. When I finally got to go home I had a two hour drive ahead of me. On the road I was so tired I had to chainsmoke with the window open and the A/C on in the dead-of-Winter, to keep lucid enough to tell when the cars ahead of me had stopped. Fortunately for me that was easier because of the traffic volume- but that was about the time those hallucinations kicked in. I began seeing the cars lose dimensions. If you've ever seen that rendered "The Simpsons" special where Homer comes into 3-d space then think of what the reverse would look like. Cars and trucks began to look like poster-ads from the side of city buses. Very disturbing was the fact that I could tell my brain was overloading from the humming noise that I started to get in my head. .. Very disturbing and serious enough for me to promise myself NEVER to go more than 48 hours without sleep again.. not to mention that sleeping on the floor under my desk without at least a pillow really sucks..
Yes, you're perfectly correct. But we already know Slashdot story submitters and editors don't read the articles they post. They should fix the article, before legions of slashdotters kill themselves.
This is completely OT, but I'm putting it here because I have the chance to post early, and I'm unabashedly hoping to get moderated up so people can see it, and let me know if they agree or not. Is it just me, or is there less moderation these days? I usually read at 3+, and even on mediocre-response articles, there is a handful of articles at this level For the last few days, it seems that there has been significantly less. A few explanations come to mind: o I'm crazy, it's the same as usual. Responses to this article will determine that. o More people are moderating down, rather than up. I don't know, I don't read at -1, but I doubt it. o For some reason, users are moderating less. This seems unlikely to me. o The quotas for how many moderation points are given it has been dropped. It's that last one that is bothersome -- because, again, there are a few explanations that I can think of: o One of the slashdot crew is fiddling with quotas to try and fine-tune the moderation system. o A bug in the code, perhaps. Or the really bothersome one: The ability to moderate is being limited. Why is this bothersome? Well, I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but moderation is what keeps any force from being able to heavy-handedly change slashdot. Like other people have pointed out, 90% of the content here is in the comments, if not more. The users control the comments, the users control the site, which means VA, Andover, and whoever, have only a limited ability to influence things, because they have watchdogs that can get moderated up if something seems fishy. If there are fewer moderation points being given out, then this seems awfully suspicious. Just some thoughts. Anyone noticed the same thing? My apologies to the slashdot crew for yet more criticism and paranoia, but..I can't help it. :-)
-Rob Ewaschuk
Sorry about the formatting in the last post...
:-)
This is completely OT, but I'm putting it here because I have the chance to post early, and I'm unabashedly hoping to get moderated up so people can see it, and let me know if they agree or not.
Is it just me, or is there less moderation these days? I usually read at 3+, and even on mediocre-response articles, there is a handful of articles at this level For the last few days, it seems that there has been significantly less.
A few explanations come to mind:
o I'm crazy, it's the same as usual. Responses to this article will determine that.
o More people are moderating down, rather than up. I don't know, I don't read at -1, but I doubt it.
o For some reason, users are moderating less. This seems unlikely to me.
o The quotas for how many moderation points are given it has been dropped.
It's that last one that is bothersome -- because, again, there are a few explanations that I can think of:
o One of the slashdot crew is fiddling with quotas to try and fine-tune the moderation system.
o A bug in the code, perhaps.
Or the really bothersome one:
The ability to moderate is being limited. Why is this bothersome? Well, I'm not normally a conspiracy nut, but moderation is what keeps any force from being able to heavy-handedly change slashdot. Like other people have pointed out, 90% of the content here is in the comments, if not more. The users control the comments, the users control the site, which means VA, Andover, and whoever, have only a limited ability to influence things, because they have watchdogs that can get moderated up if something seems fishy. If there are fewer moderation points being given out, then this seems awfully suspicious.
Just some thoughts. Anyone noticed the same thing?
My apologies to the slashdot crew for yet more criticism and paranoia, but..I can't help it.
-Rob Ewaschuk
It is also interesting that that the 35 hours the subjects were kept awake is the typical length of a shift for a medical resident. Sleep deprevation has long been a part of medical training, although the reasons why are unclear. New York recently passed a law prohibiting it, though I have heard mixed reviews regarding its enforcement.
Do not forget that it is not possible to prove causality from one antecdotal data point.
Someone who could stay awake for 200 hours was probably not typical to begin with.
I've found that when I'm working on schoolwork, whether it be projects, essays, or studying for a test....I don't study well early on in the evening, but when I hit around 2, 3AM, I get a burst of energy, and I'm suddenly able to study a lot more and cram a lot more into my brain.. :)- -
Also, I've found that when I'm up to say, 5 AM and get up again at 7 AM, I'm a lot more active in my classes, and I basically run on adreniline all day...wheras when I go to bed at 2 and get up at 7, I tend to fall asleep in class. =P
At any rate...just my 2..
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(((one more time to kill the pain)))
Defragging!
To top it off, pid 1 likes to make fun of the kernel. It gets an especially big laugh when the kernel asks for more disk cache. "I could use a little cash myself!" Ha ha, okay that wasn't very funny.
I'm suprised that I haven't had to boot off the install disk and do an FTP install in a whole entire 14 years! They must have some nice new features in the latest version! Well at least I can do some upgrades while up, but kernel compiles just load me down after some time. So that's what I do when I sleep; I get the latest kernel and recompile. Then, a few hours before I get up, there goes shutdown -fr. If I am awakened and the fsck on my either my /usr or /home partitions isn't done yet, I am not in a very good mood. I usually either just skip the mounting (especially if it's the /home partition; I can do without that at 5:30 in the morning) or force a mount of an unclean filesystem. Right there: the origin of almost all bad days. Where do the rest come from? Easy: a bug in the latest kernel. Of course I'm the first to notice, and sometimes I'll get a prepatch and take advantage of a particularly boring class to recompile. Of course I have to doze off for a little while to reboot, but I almost always forget to rerun kenlo (the Kenneth Loader). Good excuse for another reboot, er, snooze!
Kenneth
A few things worth keeping in mind.
First, numerous functional brain imaging studies have shown patterns of decreased activation with practice, especially in the PFC. It's sometimes informally described as a sign of effortful performance. So more activation is not always good.
Second, there are lots of reasons to be cautious interpreting these kinds of results. Assuming the authors did the stats reasonably well (about a 10% chance in this relatively new field), understanding the roles of interacting brain regions is not straightforward. The press release doesn't mention that the earlier article in Neuroreport reported apparently opposite results (reduced activation with sleep deprivation). I think that article is available free online at:
http://www.neuroreport.com
As an architecture major, I can attest to this fact. You get your "second wind", then the third, then the forth..it's pretty unreal sometimes. You look back on what you've done and can't believe it. Kinda cool.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
Sharks don't sleep. They need to keep moving 24/7 to push water across their gills to keep breathing. As far as higher organisms I don't know. Does anyone know if dolphins sleep?
no sig.
He died exactly 2 weeks ago. Spooky! Search for "Peter Tripp" in here. It includes a link to his recent obituary. He had an ongoing career after the 200 hour experiment, so he probably wasn't a vegetable as one poster suggests. Here's another nice article which refers to a couple of long sleep deprivation experiments including Peter Tripp's. Apparently there were no long term side effects, but the short term effects were quite severe. One night's sleep is all it takes to recover. From my own experience, I've found that sleeping too much definitely causes loss of mental ability. I don't get much coding done until late at night after being awake most of the day, when I'm already feeling tired. It's annoying as I want to rest but that's when I get stuff done. On the other hand, communication with co-workers is often more effective earlier in the day. I've found my dark areas under the eyes tend to disappear when I get up early, not late. That really surprised me. I take that as one indicator of physical health, so now I'm not afraid to get up and feel tired when it seems like a good idea: tired does not necessarily mean I need rest. But I'm lazy so I tend to lie in anyway. :-) After a very long session of staying awake, one night is not quite enough to back to "normal". About 4 nights does the trick. But, "normal" is not my most alert, effective or communicative. enjoy,
-- Jamie
You must've been tired.
Snr. Monsado, It's posts like yours that keep me coming back to /. You have made your point with total lucidity and economy. Hat's off!
I'd definately have to agree with this. I was just reading the AOL Open Access Drop thing and it seems that some AC has decided to post a response to every post. Perhaps moderators should be able to inform the slashdot crew, or someone who could remove these trolls. I think that would definately help that problem. I don't necessarily think this should always apply to all trolls, just the ones that in no way, shape, or form relate to anything.
Wigs
--Stupidity got us into this mess - why can't it get us out?
I have the exact same experience. When I have programmed all day and at the end of the day I am trying to solve some higher level algorithmic problem, I just can't, even though I churn out simple code very fast. The next morning when I start work the answer to the problem is just there staring at me and I wonder how I couldn't come up with it last evening. That is why, I always try to get enough sleep -- the next morning is just fun when I finally know how to prove it or do it or whatever the problem is.
I think these studies should be put in context sometimes. While it might be true that sleep deprivation causes increases in brain activity similar studies have also shown that the subject will have degraded comprehension of stimuli, poor coordination, and increased irritability. I guess I'm just kind of wondering what in the hell the schools and government are paying for this kind of crap study for in the first place. I think it's been known for some time the effects of sleeplessness (similarly fasting). Many religions and cultures have used sleep deprivation and sometimes fasting in order to reach "higher states of consciousness". Too me the deprivation just forces the body/mind to push dreams into the conscious mind in order to seek some respite from the overload of stimuli (hence the hallucinations). I think all of us who spent anytime programming, role-playing, playing Quake, working our asses off could attest to the effects of sleep deprivation. I also think a better study would be to focus on maybe why brain activity goes up, how it can be used to some advantage, can it be controlled at all, or how do these effects play into our religions and beliefs. I guess another thought is compare the results of the studies to the data on mentally disabled individuals and see if there is any correlation. I know that after about 48-72 hours of missed sleep I start seeing and hearing sh** like a crazy person. Paranoia much. just my two cents thrown from way up from my soapbox
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
But everyone knows that teens typically don't get up until 6pm.
A few years ago someone wondered: "Why are there no higher animals which do not sleep?" It clearly would be of great evolutionary advantage to not have to sleep. So there must be some very basic reason.
Answer: Brains use more energy than blood can deliver. The purpose of sleep is to recharge energy.
IIRC, people who are deprived of REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, but not of other kinds of sleep, eventually start going weird; in otherwords, dreaming (which happens mainly in REM) is somehow essential to the proper functioning of the human mind.
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day, but set him on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I spent 124 hours without sleep in the Ninth grade, three years ago, I was writing a play for class and had to keep editing to accomplish the will of the teacher "Add two more roles, more students want to work on this, etc." And for some reason the WP I was using would not save files, 19 pages gets long to type every night. Some very interesting things happened though:
1) My mental functions where downgraded seriously, took hours just to type, I can normally for about 50 words a min. It was down around 10, not good.
2) My memory was seriously downgraded, I put coffee through the Coffee Maker twice, thought I had not made it. That's in 30 minutes not a long time, the coffee was horrible, I had used Water Joe for the additional caffeine and it had quite a punch.
3) My imagination was significantly improved. It was as if I could see the play being preformed and was just writing the transcripts. I know it may have been hallucinations but it was so vivid and I can still remember it today.
That's just me though.
Nate Custer
P.S. please forgive the rant but I have not slept since Thursday at 6 am, so I don't have the clarity to write an incredibly focused post.
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
I agree my best code comes out when I am sleep deprived. However the design for, something complex algorithmic solutions does not seem to work as well. I usually end up sketching out an arch, then spending some time hear till my eyes are about ready to drop, then I go have a cup of two of coffee, then spit my code out. My dad hates it, I have to warn him before it happens. Yes, I still live at home, I am 17. I have to crash afterwards though. That is not fun, long and interesting dreams (When they get to the length of a Ayn Rand novel I know I have gone to far.)
Nate Custer
"The poet presents his thoughts festively, on the carriage of rhythm; usually because they could not walk" Nietzsche
I fell asleep. Writing. Notes. I was woken up --by my trainer no less-- and found out that I had written down my dream/halucination/what have you. Not much, a dozen words or so and then a squiggly line trailing off...
I actually have an entire notebook full of this stuff, from a history of Western Civilization class I was forced to take (my college requires it) last year. I think it's probably one of the greatest collections of notes I own. The class was at 9:30am, so it essentially consisted of a lot of those weird random squiggly lines along with words that made absolutely no sense. Also, every once in awhile I would print "NEED SLEEP" in large, block letters.
Not enough people meta moderate so this is why such a system can seem broken.
Can you explain how to meta-moderate exactly? I've read about this in numerous different posts lately, but I've never been sure exactly what it is. (No reference in slashdot faq, etc). Is this something that anyone can do, or are certain people assigned meta-moderation points in much the same way that the regular moderation points are given out?
Actually, coding improves dramatically after 1am,
because the gubmint mind control radio waves
are turned down at that time. They used to have
them going all the time, but they found that
it stopped people gettting proper restful sleep.
Then the factory bosses complained that the workers were getting restless due to hallucinations from sleep depravation, so the capitalist regime re-optimized the mind control schedule.
[Now how many ECHELON points is THAT?]
But only because I was really commited to actually getting to the end of the latest Katz article
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I went to Fiarfax County Public Schools, I write very goodly english.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
the article is /.ed so im going off of the story here.
it mentions increased brain activity. great. but what about their bodies ? im sure the brain runs fast as lightning, but what good is it if your body only runs at the speed of windows ?
The article may have some truth to it after all I went five days without sleep and found that I was philosphizing more. That I wonder'd why do I exist? Why do WE exist and in that time I wrote a paper on my "Theory on unequivicable singulartiy" and it was rather well written (done on the 5th day) and I also wrote a comment here that scored well on the 4th day. I think that sleep deprevation, though dangerous, does stimulate expanded brain function and opens gateways to different forms of creativity that the well rested mind may not clasp onto. Some food for thought...try writing as thesis after not sleeping for a week...might be interesting results.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
I really think the whole "recent study proves...." thing has gotten WAY outta hand. What's next? Drving while drunk is acutally safer?
I mean I bet if someone cross referenced results from past studies it would be possilbe to arrive at any desired proof. ie:
Sleep Depravation makes you smarter.
Eating Spinach makes you smarter
Therfore Sleep Depravation make you eat Spinach.
I am sorry.
Ah ha prof,
And for all you non-believers out there, if you think about it, it does make sense. Because without going to sleep your brain is not manifesting other things (dreams) that have pretty much nothing to do with your everyday life. Of course there are the people out there you could argue that dreams fortell the future solve your problems and help you with everyday life. But the fact of the matter is (no offence intended) that dreams are just manifestations that your brain makes up from past expirinces, how you think, and how you live your life. Which in turn takes your mind from thinking about realistic things to imagenary mixed with real, forming the dream world if you will.
This does not mean you should go about drinking caffine allnight and depriving yourself of sleep cause it drain you body of much needed rest and energy that you need to think and physically move. Also depriving yourself of REM (not the band) makes you gradually go insane, or for most of us more insane.
So a balance of the two would suffice. Keeping brain activity up along with phsical and mental rest.
"Take that Martha Stewart!"
-Trout
You guys are right. In the past I have normally sided with the poster's interpretations, however I'm beginning to realize that was merely so because of my bias. Considering how many thousands of people visit slashdot, I think it is time for Slashdot to become more objective.
My interpretation of that line is that, overall, students had WORSE memory performance when sleep-deprived, but those students who had greater activity in the parietal region performed better than those with lower activity -- but still worse than they would have had with a good night's sleep. Am I correct in my reading?
Yes, this is also borne out by the original article in Nature, which in its abstract says:
"Although sleep deprivation significantly impaired free recall compared with the rested state, better free recall in sleep-deprived subjects was associated with greater parietal lobe activation."
And in the article itself, they say:
"Subjects performed significantly less well on free recall when they were sleep-deprived"
I don't know whether the full article is accessible with a guest login at Nature's site, as I have a subscription.
There's also a story on Yahoo from AP which also points out that sleepy subjects did worse than well-rested ones.
---
Felix qui potest rerum cognoscere causas
Yeah, my brain is more active, but the quality of it sucks.
kwsNI
slashdot does have looser journalistic standards than many other sites, but that is part of what makes slashdot slashdot. people just need to understand that journalists are not perfect, you can not take everything they say as The Truth. anyone dumb enough to blindly accept what they are told unfortuntly probably deserves what they get. people need to take some responsibility to think for themselves, to educate themselves and to not blindly accept other peoples interpretations of reality. simple as that.
This also makes sense from the "parents understand their childrens language"-perspective because by the time that the child is old enough to form words, then the parent gets more sleep and the memory starts kicking back in.
Never attribute to conspiracy what could adequately be attributed to stupidity - but the NSA must have planted the dDoS attacks...
The study here is based on measuring cerebral blood flow. When they analyze the image and come up with the pretty brain pictures, what you are actually seeing is a map of the areas of the brain that are significantly more active than the other regions, compared to a baseline condition. This means that if there is generally more blood flowing around in all parts of the brain, you will be less likely to measure significant activation in a specific area. This could happen in the sleep deprived for the following reasons:
The blood flow that is being measured is moderated by the exchange of sodium and potassium across the neuron membranes. So, chemicals that effect this process can also effect the blood flow. Certain brain chemicals go nutty when you are sleep deprived (thus the comments on hallucination on other posts). In fact, some would say these chemicals are the things that make you tired. The moral is, these chemical may be having a direct effect on the blood flow in all parts of the brain, making it more difficult to find significant differences in the regions of interest. So, their main conclusion, that areas are less active in the sleep-deprived, is probably an artifact of the plumbing of the brain, rather than an interesting finding about actual brain functioning.
The interpretation that many people are giving the paper is also incorrect. The actual finding is that sleep deprivation is bad, but those people who did better when sleep deprived had more parietal lobe activity. Even if this is true, nobody really knows what it means.
The interpretation that the researchers give this is on shaky ground--It is a potential explanation, but there are enough problems with the methodology that I think the only thing that is certain about this research is that "Sleep Deprived People Do Worse".
Moral: Don't rely on headlines for your science. And take it all with a healthy dose of skepticism.
I guess going without sleep affects your brain like Netscape affects your CPU. After a while, you start seeing lots of activity, but it isn't doing anything very useful.
I noticed the same thing when I was in high school, or rather the equivalent of it. I have this theory.. In natural environment, what will cause a person to sleep too little? Probably the prospect of danger, knowing there are predators nearby for example. So, lack of sleep puts you in a kind of alert mode. You get a little edgy, pay attention to strange sounds, try to figure out how escape unnoticed, etc. This can turn into paranoia in the long run, but I think this is all just to make sure you will survive in the wild.
Fight Spammers!
Who says I drink too much coffee?
Fight Spammers!
Fight Spammers!
Finally, proof that mine is the One True Faith.
-sig-
How long have the /. Moderators been awake? . . .
Answer: Brains use more energy than blood can deliver. The purpose of sleep is to recharge energy.
Then why is that one see quite often, when people grown old they don't need so much sleep?
I always assumed sleep was a sort of garbage collection, where they brain sorted some things out in preparation for the future - as your grew older your neural net expanded, ie you had more experience and what needed to be processed could be done in short time.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Great... another reason for profs to push college students even harder...
Okay, but seriously though..
"the temporal lobe, a brain region involved in language processing, was activated during verbal learning in rested subjects but not in sleep deprived subjects. Additionally, a region of the brain called the parietal lobes, not activated in rested subjects during the verbal exercise, was more active when the subjects were deprived of sleep"
We're less inclined to take stuff in but more inclined to work with it then? I know that's oversimplifying, but the point is Sleep Is Good
I don't know about you, but lack of sleep and no play makes Spiff go insane, or at least appear that way to others. I may be able to summon all my resources to focus on one task and burn myself out on it, but I'm about as meaningful as a babbling idjit to those around me.
If nothing else I'd love to see more in this area of research. 13 subjects? That's a pretty small sample guys.
I think the increased brain activity is just undirected and unstructured. As the article said, the parietal lobe became more active, while the temporal lobe became less active. The temporal lobe is associated with language processing, and if I remember my high school psych class, people with highly developed language skills were more likely to think structurally.
Dreams are considered to be random thoughts and memories working themselves out and linking themselves to other thoughts in your brain. Now, if you consider dreams at least similar to hallucinations, these hallucinations can be thought of more like waking dreams then they are brand-new images.
Sometimes this unfocused power surge can be beneficial. For instance, Leonardo DaVinci was said to sleep in a cycle of four hour stretches of being awake followed by a 20 minute nap. This works out to be less than two hours of sleep in a 24 hour period. And he, of course, was the ultimate Renaissance Man. Maybe it wasn't that he was good at everything, his brain couldn't stay focused on one task at a time.
Down with shampoo. Demand real poo.
There was a DJ for 106.7 KBPI in Denver that now owns the Guiness record for longest continous radio broadcast. He was on air for something like a month and a half. The way they tested to see if he was still sane was to have him sing Kid Rock songs. Once he finished his record, he was off air for about two weeks, slept it off and came back. As far as I know, he suffered no long-term effects, mental or physical (assuming you don't think of two weeks as long term). Of course, he was never quite sane to begin with, to attempt such a record.
Down with shampoo. Demand real poo.
Well doesn't it just make sense though? 95% of the code in linux is written at 4am on a weekend, after drinking a 12 pack of Mountain Dews and 30 minutes before the coder just passes out. NT of course was written by guys who go to Starbucks, go to bed at 10 o'clock and code at noon time. OK, well maybe there are other reasons to that argument but I'm sure this is what lies behind them all. :)
1. Take rat.
2. Open with knife or otherwise suitable object.
3. Insert small cancer-tissue.
4. Close rat.
5. Cancer breeds inside of rat.
Isn't it marvelous what they figure out for science?
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
It's like all those things you'll hear on the radio about scientists putting ten million into a project to come out with the fact that "rats that get infected with cancer die sooner than rats that we dont infect"...
Tomorrow will be cancelled due to lack of interest
1)To draw a loose analogy. . . You know how your average Windows-running box goes a little loopy if left running continuously for a couple days? Glitches, system noise, the system freezes, etc. It strikes me that this behavior is something like sleep deprivation in humans. "Increased brain activity" may result, sure, but I would maintain that primarily system noise that sleep normally clears up.
2)Of course, it's possible that not sleeping lets you dig past your normal rational filters and plugs you into your subconscious in some way-- I know many of you out there have had marathon sleepless coding/writing/music sessions that produced unearthly good results.
3)I once stayed up for eleven days in college, napping every morning around sunrise. After the third day, I was a tool. After eleven days I was sick and incoherent. I ended up beating on a copier with its own paper tray because I couldn't figure out how to get it back in.
You can't tell me that sleep-deprivation is always a positive thing.
It's also well known that sleep deprivation decreases life expectancy. Remember the DJ in 1959 who spent 200 hours on the air without any sleep. Then they found he was permanently brain damaged. He had increased brain activity all right but he was a vegetable. Ever since then when a radio station wanted to pull a stunt like that they had the DJ taking intermittant naps.
I have many episode of sleep deprivations before, and I took acid many times in my younger days too.
What I can is that those two things are NOT the same.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Ha, it only goes to show that brains and muscles have a lot in comon.
:)
Muscles fire (contract) individual fibers to provide the needed amount of force. A fiber either fires, or it does not. After a fiber fires, it needs to rest and heal.
Sore muscles result from many fibers needing rest and healing. Muscle fatigue comes from many fibers having fired, and few being left available to keep the work going.
The speed with which muscle fibers recover is proportional to their level of conditioning. So an athletic person is ready to go again sooner that a sofa-spud.
What does this have to do with brains?
A conditioned brain is able to recover from effort more quickly, while a stagnant one needs a long weekend.
A brain that has used up it's 'normal' operating capacity (analog to 'conditioned' fibers) will start to recruit typically unused areas to keep the work going. Sleep deprivation is a way of keeping the normally used areas from getting adequare recoup time, thereby forcing the 'lazy' areas to take up some slack.
Sleep deprivation cycles, along with an inter-disciplinary training regiment (variance in modes of thought, analytical, creative, perceptive, linguistic, mathematical...) is for the brain exactly like cross-training is for the body.
And it sounds suspiciously like going to college.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I've always wondered exactly what purpose it is that sleep serves. It is obviously not just for resting our organs and muscles - I see no reason for the impossibility of creatures whose bodies need no sleep.
It is obviously a necessity for the brain. Perhaps for consciousness to occur, there have to be periods of unconsciousness for some kind of routine "maintenance" that the brain's neural network performs on itself, somehow tied in with dreams.
I have absolutely no background on this - the above is just my random musings as I started learning about neural nets and AI. I was hoping to start a discussion or catch the eye of someone who has studied this extensively. What is the current state of human knowledge about sleep? Is it still mostly a mystery?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
A few years ago someone wondered: "Why are there no higher animals which do not sleep?" It clearly would be of great evolutionary advantage to not have to sleep. So there must be some very basic reason.
Answer: Brains use more energy than blood can deliver. The purpose of sleep is to recharge energy.
Mixed with neurons are glial cells, which store glucose during sleep. They then supply glucose to neighboring neurons while the brain is awake, supplementing glucose from the bloodstream.
When the energy is exhausted, neurons stop working properly. That's why there are hallucinations (particularly in pattern-matching neurons such as peripheral vision). It's probably also why the brain secretes chemicals which increase blood flow -- it's trying to get more glucose to keep functioning during whatever crisis is keeping it awake.
So, why might areas which are normally quiet showing more active in this study? Maybe because the blood flow has been increased in the exhausted areas, and also the neighboring cells which were least-used are now trying to activate because their exhausted neighbors can't work?
This paper does not seem to be on the net, so see Google search of related comments.
it only takes about three days to start hallucinating. Things get real strange, it definitely warps things immensely. Great for brainwashing.
+&x
Of course you're right... I mean come on, anybody who has been sleep-deprived for a substantial period of time can testify that there is no worse feeling.
True story: I've been through officer training for a certain Army (er... figure it out). As trainees we were sleep-deprived for 4 weeks: an average 5 hrs of sleep a day, with an occasional Sunday 6 or 7 --this while exercising 4-5 hours a day, doing chores, being on duty, etc. etc, for the remainder of the day... During Week 3 I was sitting in a nice, cozy, warm room taking notes for some class. At that point, I was halucinating at night or early in the morning pretty regulary (in fact this was a common experience among my class-mates). But that day, while I was taking notes, I fell asleep. Writing. Notes. I was woken up --by my trainer no less-- and found out that I had written down my dream/halucination/what have you. Not much, a dozen words or so and then a squiggly line trailing off...
I should have kept that notebook. But I have never been more scared for my own well being before or since.
Yeah, you go and try out the poster's theory...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
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Also, how did the study compensate for time of day? Many teens do not function well until late evening, and some researchers would be mislead to believe that it was sleep-deprivation causing the increased performance, not simple circadian rhythms.
In addition, I would expect people at all ages to have a small performance boost around morning -- when they would normally be getting up. This would be the body "thinking", "Crud, I guess I'm not getting any sleep tonight, might as well try to last until tomorrow evening".
--
The shareholder is always right.
I've noticed that I can churn out code efficiently while tired, but I have more trouble searching for bugs and trying to solve complex algorithmic problems. Is the same true for you?
I think our brains are designed to do repetitive tasks efficiently while tired, but are better at complex problem-solving while awake and relaxed.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Contrary to popular belief, your brain is constantly regenerating brain cells. Brain cells do not live forever, they die and are reborn like every other cell in the body.
There is a catch, however, and its the reason scientists once thot no brain cells could ever be regenerated... they need acetylcholene. Acetylcholene isn't usually found anywhere in your body except one place - the protective "lining" of brain cells. So when it goes to regenerate one, it rips an old one apart and builds the new cell inside, so it seems like no progress is being made. There is one food that contains acetylcholine, though. Fish! It really IS brain food! (I'm not joking, BTW) You can buy choline tablets too at health food stores. Lots of people call it a "smart drug" but it doesn't increase intelligence, it simply stops the brain from autocannibalizing cells when regenerating. Nootropics (smart drugs) is an interesting field. Most are just like caffeine spinoffs (keep you more alert) and a lot are just lies in a bottle, but there seems to be a lot of study done on acetylcholene.
Esperandi
A team of researchers from the UCSD School of Medicine and the Zelot Affairs Healthcare System, San Diego used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to monitor activity in the brains of Slashdot-deprived subjects performing simple verbal learning tasks.
They were somewhat surprised to learn that regions of the brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC) displayed more activity in direct correlation with the subject's sense of Slashdotness; the Slashdotier the subject, the more active the PFC.
Furthermore, the temporal lobe, a brain region involved in language processing, was activated during flaming previous posts in troll subjects but not in Slashdot deprived subjects. Additionally, a region of the brain called the parietal lobes, not activated in troll subjects during the posting exercise, was more active when the subjects were deprived of Slashdot. The parietal region normally performs somewhat different functions in the learning process than the temporal region. Although subjects' memory performance was less efficient with Slashdot deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory.
"Only in recent years have we begun to realize the prevalence and severity of Slashdot deprivation in our population, with a significant number of people doing first posts work, suffering from karma lag and so forth," said J. Natalie Portman, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the UCSD and the San Diego VAMC, and an author of the Flamebait paper. "Yet, we don't know very much about how Slashdot deprivation impairs sexual performance, and how precisely the brain reacts to lack of Slashdot. These findings are just a beginning, and as we learn more, perhaps will be able to devise interventions to alleviate the behavioral impairments associated with lack of Slashdot."
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Me I take the safe route, I view non-sleep time as that annoying period between naps, and limit all non-sleep time as much as possible.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
And if that's not really revelant, the folks from NYC would gain insight into how to finally kick the rat problem.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is a very real disorder.
PH34R!
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Please allow me to make a few comments about the slashdot moderation system:
I think it works pretty well for what it's supposed to do. The problem is a) the nature of the site being general tech news; and b) the quantity of users. We can either a) give all users random moderation points; or b) give a limited group of users moderation points based on criterion such as being moderated up themselves; or c) a mix of both. I think this is best theoretically if tweaked properly.
However, some problems exist such as a) the default linear setup combined with the fact that this is just a news site means lots of good comments at the end of the forum get lost; b) not enough people meta-moderate; c) people mark down comments that they do not necessarily agree with but may be valid points of view, or comments that are slightly off topic but are good extensions of the current conversation; d) people given moderation points often just want to get rid of them. This is a news site after all, and responsibility to the integrity of moderation isn't exactly a priority. Many people just scroll down a bit and moderate comments that vaguely look good. Why? Again, probably because this is just a news discussion site and expending the effort to read all the comments in a story would take many, many hours.
So, I agree with you that it might be good to increase the moderation points available. However, this must be done in a manner that will give points to those who deserve them and not to those who will moderate posts down just because they do not agree with a point or those who will just moderate because at first glance the post looks good.
In short, not enough people meta-moderate so at a macro level, increasing the amount of moderation points to everyone would be bad. It would be a bit better only increasing the amount to those who are consistently moderated up but that does not guarantee that those who moderated them up properly looked at their posts. So we either give a select group a lot of points and allow them to moderate - or we give the group at large a lot of points and hope that they use them wisely. Not enough people meta moderate so this is why such a system can seem broken. The bottom line? It's a discussion news site. Expending the effort is just too much in this situation.
Even then, meta moderation does not give you the thread. This creates a problem because the moderation might be relevant to the post and thread that it replies to. The solution? Tell everyone to quote every time what they are responding to. This is done most of the time, so this is not too much of a major problem.
There is also another improvement that I want. Randomly displayed threads. There are some very good comments that get lost in the noise because we only have an option for newest and oldest in threads or by themselves. This isn't a problem for the 100 comment stories but becomes a large problem for 250+ comment stories. The first problem with randomly displayed nested and threaded comments that comes to mind is that the flow of the discussion often comes linearly, even if not the same thread. However, I think it would be welcome to most slashdot readers. Anyway, to tie this into the moderation problems, it would probably have to be the default setting for proper moderation to occur. Either that or a the owners of the site generating a lot of noise about it.
Wading through so much information and finding signal in noise isn't much fun. I usually just ignore moderation and scroll a lot.
Boy, I'd hate to be one of *their* test subjects. When these guys actually did get to sleep, the VA probably accidentally amputated their legs and then lost the medical records.
The things I've seen at the VA Medical Center East Orange NJ, it wouldn't suprise me!
Although subjects' memory performance was less efficient with sleep deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory.
My interpretation of that line is that, overall, students had WORSE memory performance when sleep-deprived, but those students who had greater activity in the parietal region performed better than those with lower activity -- but still worse than they would have had with a good night's sleep. Am I correct in my reading?
Sleep deprivation can also kill you. I did a 12 page report on sleep and its effects on the human body, and have about 5 pages of stuff on sleep deprivation. A guy in the 1950's, I believe, did a radio show for 200 hours straight, and suffered SEVERE mental damage from it. Also, rats who have been deprived of any rest at all have died after 17 days. People with fatal familial insomnia, which causes the victim to be deprived of sleep for months upon months, will eventually kill after 9 to 12 months. If you want more information on sleep, deprivation, and disorders, e-mail me at mcnamarc@kirtland.cc.mi.us and I'll send you the report. I'll feel special, too. : )