added by TJ and · updated 9d ago
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
the REM-sleep gift of facilitating accurate recognition and comprehension allows us to make more intelligent decisions and actions as a consequence. More specifically, the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night.
from Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. T
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Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
without sleep, our brain reverts to a primitive pattern of uncontrolled reactivity. We produce unmetered, inappropriate emotional reactions, and are unable to place events into a broader or considered context.
from Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
There is no major psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. This is true of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (once known as manic depression).
from Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
a group of overweight men and women who stayed in a medical center for an entire fortnight. However, one group of individuals were given just five and a half hours’ time in bed, while the other group were offered eight and a half hours’ time in bed. Although weight loss occurred under both conditions, the type of weight loss came from very differen
... See morefrom Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
if you don’t sleep the very first night after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories, even if you get lots of “catch-up” sleep thereafter. In terms of memory, then, sleep is not like the bank. You cannot accumulate a debt and hope to pay it off at a later point in time. Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing event.
from Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
there are four main clusters of the brain that spike in activity when someone starts dreaming in REM sleep: (1) the visuospatial regions at the back of the brain, which enable complex visual perception; (2) the motor cortex, which instigates movement; (3) the hippocampus and surrounding regions that we have spoken about before, which support your a
... See morefrom Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
Deprive an individual of their REM-sleep dreaming state, and the emotional tuning curve of the brain loses its razor-sharp precision. Like viewing an image through frosted glass, or looking at an out-of-focus picture, a dream-starved brain cannot accurately decode facial expressions, which become distorted. You begin to mistake friends for foes.
from Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago
the dreaming brain was not simply recapitulating or re-creating exactly what happened to them in the maze. Rather, the dream algorithm was cherry-picking salient fragments of the prior learning experience, and then attempting to place those new experiences within the back catalog of preexisting knowledge. Like an insightful interviewer, dreaming ta
... See morefrom Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
Benyamin Elias added 8mo ago