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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.
I don't understand this article. Couldn't sleep last night.
May provide for insights into research on multiple sclerosis, a disease in which the body attacks its own myelin sheaths around nerves.
In your dreams, uberbrainchild, in your dreams!
Try watching this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc
"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.
From delicious, tasty brains.
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.
And which hair metal band were you a part of?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Back in the 80's, I constantly heard "You'll sleep enough when you're dead." or "Sleep is for wimps."
It was a trap! They wanted you at your worst.
No sig today...
Because 16 hours is a long time to go without food, even if you are asleep the whole time. You need to strike an appropriate balance between rest and nutrition and activity. We have lost our natural rhythm.
Oh.
Zombies aren't shambling horrors mocking life with their undeath. They're just REALLY sleep-deprived.
Makes perfect sense. I turn into a zombie after 22 continuous hours without sleep, so that must be what's happening.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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?
Other things will go wrong instead; its not just cellular structure that is replenished during sleep but critical fluid chemical balances as well.
Luckily for you though, the United States military already has a drug to manually re-balance those other chemicals. It has been tested extensively for years and has been reported to keep your reaction times and accuracy levels to within well-rested parameters for up to 40 hours without any of the side effects of amphetamines traditionally used for such exercises.
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.
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.
Look into melatonin to increase your REM sleep.
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.