If the butchered Shakespeare in my title has not scared you away, then hello. My name is Kaleb, and for the last seven weeks or so I have been doing an project on sleep. Sleep is a central part of life, and many of us do not value it enough. The way that sleep affects our brains and our bodies is insanely complicated, and the field of sleep research is relatively new (not even a hundred years old, which is tiny compared to many other disciplines), so there is much that is still not known. The human brain is often called the most complex object in the universe; despite personally not agreeing with that claim, I admit that it does give a good idea of how difficult it is to analyze the brain. Sleep, as an activity with its center in the brain, is equally mysterious. Still, over the last fifty years, somnologists have learned a fair bit about sleep, and I’ve been spending the last several months reading their work.
First, a brief summary of what is known to happen during sleep. There are two stages of sleep: REM sleep, short for rapid eye movement, and NREM sleep, or slow wave sleep. NREM sleep occurs first, and during this stage the brain is in a low energy state. The body begins to repair itself during this state, and the brain absorbs the free radicals released by waking activity. REM sleep occurs in cycles that start a few hours after sleep begins, and last for longer and longer as the night goes on. The first REM cycle will typically last only about ten to twenty minutes, but the last one can take over an hour. During REM sleep, the muscles are completely locked up and dreams occur. Both types of sleep are associated with different kinds of memory: REM with declarative, and NREM with procedural. REM sleep is found only in mammals and birds, although certain mammals, such as dolphins, do not experience REM sleep.
My classmates have been abnormally interested in what effect sleep has on non-human brains. In particular, after mentioning the above dolphin tidbit once in class, I was bombarded by requests for more information. If you are similarly interested, sorry to disappoint, but I’m not. I am tired of talking about platypi, dolphins, the evolutionary history of sleep, oxycontin, fruit flies, brain-independent restful states, and like. If you are interested, click on the links or use Google.
In addition to researching just what sleep does to the brain, I have also been looking at sleep deprivation in teens. The results so far, while not surprising, are depressing. Of the thirty students who I talked to, just three had had eight or more hours of sleep the day I talked to them, and only one was getting that amount of sleep most nights. For teens, eight to ten hours of sleep a night is the recommended amount, with seven hours being low but acceptable. Teens who sleep less than six hours a day habitually are officially sleep deprived, and will experience poor memory retention, decreased cognitive abilities, increased susceptibility to stress, poorer impulse control, and intense fatigue.
Another aspect of my project that I’ve tacked on for fun is a small game. In it, a four year old boy explores his dreams, in which the terrors of real life are magnified and distorted. It is a third person exploration game, and I drew the artwork for it myself. It’s not directly related to my research, but it was still a fun side project with a sleep theme. I’m hoping to get it polished by the end of the semester to show at my presentation. My next blog post will have pictures and videos of it, if I can manage it. If the game interests you, I am willing to give anyone who asks a free copy once I finish polishing it. And if none of the above interests you, then why did you read to the end of this?
~Kaleb
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