Slashdot Mirror
Sleep Found To Replenish a Type of Brain Cell
New submitter wrackspurt writes "Sleep deprivation has long been thought to be prevalent in the industrialized world. A new study (abstract) explains one very good reason why at least seven hours of sleep a night is necessary. Quoting the BBC: 'Sleep ramps up the production of cells that go on to make an insulating material known as myelin which protects our brain's circuitry. ... The increase was most marked during the type of sleep that is associated with dreaming - REM or rapid eye movement sleep — and was driven by genes. In contrast, the genes involved in cell death and stress responses were turned on when the mice were forced to stay awake.'"
If I don't get an ample amount of sleep at night, I am absolutely useless for any sort of skilled work.
Sig: I stole this sig.
So where can i get some myelin? hehe
Anveto
I don't understand this article. Couldn't sleep last night.
Back in the 80's, I constantly heard "You'll sleep enough when you're dead." or "Sleep is for wimps."
And sleeping was for "lazy" people.
I'm glad that we are becoming enlightened about the importance of sleep and that if anything, sleep makes one operate at their best.
May provide for insights into research on multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the body attacks its own myelin sheaths around nerves.
"A lot of people believe in working long days and doing double,triple, or even quadruple shifts. I’m not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night’s sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I’m a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that’s just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly valid excuse, and I’m standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your productive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake, you are alert and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four or whatever."
from "Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary" by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond
Is it possible that controlled sleep deprivation could result in the culling of strictly unnecessary brain cells, so that the overall result is a more power-efficient brain? The first time I pulled an all-nighter to work on mentally taxing problems, I had to sleep 19 hours to recover. After doing that kind of work regularly, only a few hours or recovery became necessary.
Well, it's one thing to say lack of sleep makes you sleepy and ineffective.
To me it sounds like something else entirely to say the myelin isn't getting replenished -- especially since myelin breakdown has been linked with Alzheimer's and dementia.
So (based on my complete lack of attending med school) ... doesn't this potentially make more longer term problems in the brain?
My read on this is this has much broader implications than how you're going to be ineffective the next day. As in, in the long run, your brain may simply be degrading more than it can keep up with than if you'd had enough sleep over that time.
Next time the wife complains when I go take a nap, I'll remind her that I'm re-building my myelin and I need to do that so I don't get any dumber. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I'd been living with sleep apnea for years, but didn't realize it. I just thought that getting up to pee 3 or 4 times in a night was normal for a 42 year old... Turns out it's not. It was my body's way of trying to figure out why it was awake and concluding it must be because my bladder was full. I did a sleep study and found that I would stop breathing 260 times in the first 3 hours of sleep after which time I started waking up and that was the end of the study... I was fitted with a sleep apnea dental appliance (the TAP3 device) and the first night I slept through the entire night for the first time in years... My wife kept waking up to make sure I was still breathing because I wasn't snoring or making any noise at all. After some adjustment, I can say I sleep like a baby now... I spent a lot of money on matresses and pillows before, thinking it was the bed's fault...
The way the dental appliance works is by extending your lower jaw (as though you have a terrible underbite) which opens up your airway.
Very occasionally, I will forget it when I go somewhere for an overnight, and I sleep like shit those nights... I wake up multiple times, have a sore throat in the morning (from snoring loudly), have no energy, and no motivation.
I've had it for 2.5 years now and can't imagine life without it. I also can't imagine life with a CPAP machine though I hear they work great for some people.
I could feel it killing me, when I was forced to wake up too early as a child. I could feel it stretching my consciousness thin... the most appropriate description for the feeling is the one used by Bilbo Baggins; "... like butter scraped over too much bread."
I predict that next they will discover that while 7 may be an absolute minimum for basic health, some people will need more depending on their brain capacity and "usage patterns." I predict they will eventually discover that having at least 8 hours every night during childhood will prevent the onset of Alzheimer's disease in old age. I further predict that never going under-slept (sleeping in up to even 10+ hours if necessary to stop feeling groggy or "stretched") will eventually prove to extend longevity by 20-50% and cure a whole host of neuroses and other emotional and psychological disorders.
Too many brain cells, and the brain doesn't know how to use them yet?
I wonder if this might have something to do with the rise in rates of ALS and Parkinson's. Both related to degradation of the myelin sheath.
We have enough studies telling you not to do this particular thing where you feel like complete and utter crap if you do.
Unless you're Michelangelo. Or DaVinci, or Edison...or Napoleon. All people who clearly weren't operating at their best.
(Or Madonna, Jay Leno, Margaret Thatcher...all complete losers by any measure)
No sig today...
Myelin degradation is part of a whole spectrum of neurological diseases. Which makes me wonder about the importance of the TFA's findings - at a very broad level one would expect that chronically sleep deprived people would have a higher incidence of neurodegenerative diseases - something I don't think happens (although that's a WAG of my sleep deprived brain).
Of course, TFA studied utilized some very broad brush assays and basically theorize that when the brain is awake, it tends to repress SOME aspects of myelin precursor production. It does NOT say that pulling all nighters will give you multiple sclerosis.
Interesting, but come back in five years and read the Nature or Science mini review on the subject before snacking on Oligodendrite Precursor laden twinkies.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What if you don't sleep and just take drugs to boost myelin?
Although it may be too late, it's pretty clear that you need lots more sleep.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We have enough studies telling you not to do this particular thing where you feel like complete and utter crap if you do.
Well, cool. You must feel pretty proud about learning absolutely nothing from this study except how your preconceived notions (aka "common sense") were correct to brag about it here and bash the authors for their useless work, but personally, I was fascinated by the info about sleep mediating gene activation and its effects on myelin growth.
Providing a mechanism to explain why you feel like utter crap is important -- especially for people who just like to soldier through chronic sleep deprivation and say they can handle it. Turns out, no, you can't -- you're literally killing your brain slowly, and that candle you're burning will run out much quicker. I've been trying to get myself into bed earlier each night, and I've heard studies that tell me that I'm shortening my life by not getting enough sleep, but now I know how and why and that I may be doing long-term brain damage by not fixing that problem, and that provides extra impetus to stop coasting and solve it right now.
This article, in the long run, may save my life (or at least greatly extend it) by giving the final kick in the pants to do something solid about it. (Especially since I'm half-dead today from lack of sleep.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
...that all of this is old news?
Dr. W.C. Dementbooks are a good place to start if your interested in an overview of the importance of sleep. Sleep hygiene is probably the idea currently being pushed to the forefront. The idea that a good night's sleep is as much a part of overall health as other good hygiene practices.
We have enough studies telling you not to do this particular thing where you feel like complete and utter crap if you do.
Unless you're Michelangelo. Or DaVinci, or Edison...or Napoleon. All people who clearly weren't operating at their best.
(Or Madonna, Jay Leno, Margaret Thatcher...all complete losers by any measure)
I'm not familiar with the medical history of most of those but you do know what happened to Margaret Thatcher, right?
She's currently suffering severe oxygen deprivation.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You forgot "a corporation guided by people chronically on 3 hours' sleep."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I predict the human race will die out within a generation if people follow your suggestions. I also guess you have never had kids.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Note: being a parent doesn't make you automatically right, or even more informed about basic health in any way whatsoever. Convenience to you doesn't automatically make it healthy for the kids either.
Yeah, for instance, the unfortunate souls who have sleep apnea but don't respond positively to the CPAP machine or other devices. It would be nice to have another option for treating those folks (including my dad).
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Look into melatonin to increase your REM sleep.
love is just extroverted narcissism
P.S. you're a sadist. seek help.
If you're not interested in the basic research, at least be interested that this is the groundwork for potentially eventually curing humans of sleep entirely.
Breaking Even
I'm not talking about kids' health. I'm talking about *having* kids. It is impossible to be a parent and consistently get a good night's sleep, thus it is impossible to have our neuroses cured and extend life by 20% without giving up kids. I know one of your lines mentioned childhood but the others do not, and if you meant to imply this is only for kids, that wasn't clear. And if you were talking exclusively about kids, most of them need far more than 10 hours in their early years, so it's confusing either way.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
I just run:
sleep(28800);
at round about midnight.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
You're right. Sorry, I did misunderstand the implied context behind your statements, but you missed an important key behind mine too: Going without sleep a few nights now and then won't kill you or significantly injure your brain if you make it up within a day or so, even sleeping in the daylight if necessary. What I'm saying in fact is that being a good little cog in the capitalist machine, early to bed and early to rise and all that, and basically living your entire life on an average of 6 to 6.5 hours of sleep per night is probably many orders of magnitude worse for you than just going without sleep occasionally, or eating junk food, or failure to exercise daily, etc, or shirking any of the other many rules for basic health and well-being we regularly shirk but no longer question the wisdom of.
I'm not arguing against your point at all. I've noticed a direct correlation between the amount of sleep I get and general health. Back-to-back nights of less than 5 hours regularly makes me susceptible to colds, while at another point in my life when I was on a fantastic sleep schedule I went a year and a half without a hint of a sniffle or any other illness, despite living on a crowded college campus and going through the general stresses of higher education. There's also studies correlating poor sleep with weight gain. And that's physical health, not touching on mental health at all.
The statistics on kids, by the way, is that parents are short an average of two hours per night for the first two years. It's not one bad night and then you make it up, it's a long grind. Have two kids and you're talking possibly half a decade of poor sleep, which is not insignificant. Still, if we live through it now, we'd surely live through it even in a world where we got better sleep the rest of the time.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay