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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.'"
I don't understand this article. Couldn't sleep last night.
In your dreams, uberbrainchild, in your dreams!
"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
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.
Let's just say that you don't notice the problem as much as you used to.
1 Hour, Things after a few hours start to move funny
2 Hours, I go for an hour or so, then I doze in and out for the rest of the day
3 Hours, I go a few hours, and blink out for a few minutes every half an hour
4 Hours, I can get threw the day, but I can't do much
5 Hours, I am am at reduced functionally
6 Hours, I can function during the day, but I am tired.
7 Hours, I am fine, however I am kinda grumpy
8 Hours, No problems
9 Hours, A lot of sleep and a LOT of energy
10 Hours, Too much sleep and I am kinda groggy
11 Hours of sleep I get Grumpy again
12 Hour a sleep I wander around like a zombie I spend the day like I just woke up.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
4 Hours, I can get threw the day, but I can't do much
5 Hours, I am am at reduced functionally
Only got 5 hours last night, eh?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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").
I used to think I needed more sleep than average. But once I put a little thought into my sleep patterns and methods, I learned a real lesson about it. My wife and I spent a little money on a really good mattress (OK, it wasn't so little) and really good pillows (You ought to try MyPillow). Then, on a lark I tried using an Android app on my Nexus 7 called "Sleep as Android", which tracked my movement as I slept and tried to wake me when my sleep was the shallowest. Then, it graphs out your sleep patters (when you're sleeping deeply and not moving and when you're restless or snoring or tossing and turning). Finally, when you wake up you rate how you feel on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. After the few months, I was surprised to find that when I sleep between 7:15hrs and 7:30hrs I felt best and had the best, most productive days. Occasionally, I would try to sleep 8 or more hours and I'd never feel as well or work as well.
So now, I sleep almost exactly 7:15hr to 7:30hr every night. I wake up without an alarm and fall asleep quickly and have great dreams. (the app has some "lucid dreaming" features that will play a little sound when you get into the deepest sleep state, and that got me in the habit of lucid dreaming - during which I'm almost always playing music, for some reason).
It's worth taking an informed approach to sleep instead of just assuming "I need 9 hours". We sleep such a large percentage of our lives, and most of us really don't give much thought to it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's about spot on. You falling asleep quicker would account for the discrepancies, it takes most people thirty minutes to fall asleep.
When it's said that you should get eight hours of sleep per night, what's actually meant is that you should get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep in a dark, silent, and comfortable room on a consistent and precise schedule.
Naturally there's more to sleep than simply duration. A lot more, in fact.
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I envy people like you. For some reason fate has decided to curse me to severe insomnia, and I require sleeping pills to maintain anything remotely normal.