Up All Night? You May Have Actually Been Asleep
Our default waking mode (and also during dreaming phases of sleep) is not a brain at rest, but what is known as mind wandering.
Venkatesh Rao • Make Your Own Rules
Perhaps most intriguing, REM sleep helps us maintain our emotional awareness. When we are deprived of REM, studies have found, we have a more difficult time reading others’ facial expressions. REM-deprived study subjects interpreted even friendly or neutral expressions as menacing. This is not trivial: our ability to function as social animals[*3]
... See morePeter Attia MD • Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity
In the one study examining REM, unlike both waking and NREM, there appeared a lack of connectivity between the dorsomedial prefrontal subsystem and the posterior central node of the default network in the pCC (Koike et al., 2011). Koike et al. speculate that this disconnection contributes to the illogic and bizarreness of dream cognition, as has al
... See moreFrontiers • Dreaming as a Story-Telling Instinct
One thing is clear: sleep is profoundly intertwined with virtually every aspect of brain health. Lack of sleep over time can lead to an irreversible loss of brain cells—yet another debunking of the myth that sleep debt can be made up.
Arianna Huffington • The Sleep Revolution
we struggle to sleep when we experience “stress and hyper-vigilance.”
Johann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
They tend to increase time spent in stage 2 of sleep, while reducing time in the more restorative deeper stages 3 and 4 and sometimes abolishing REM sleep altogether. This