Mindframe

Sleep: we all know it’s important. We all know we should be getting 7 to 9 hours a night. And yet one in five U.S. adults regularly fails to hit that target. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in twenty-five adults admits to having fallen asleep while driving withinthe last thirty days . That’s bad news to everyone on the road, but sleep deprivation can come back to bite you even if you aren’t literally dozing off at the wheel. For instance, the next time you stub your toe. A new study from the University of Berkeley, California shows that sleep deprivation doesn’t just make you more likely to get in an accident—it actually makes the injuriesfrom those accidents hurt worse . How do you safely study pain in humans, especially given that everyone has a different pain threshold (and even doctors tend to underestimate the pain experienced by some groups, including women as a whole )? First, researchers applied heat to the legs of healt...

For most of us, the thought of getting caught sleeping at our desks is stressful enough to send our brains a zippy little wake-up shot of cortisol. For others, napping at work might bring to mind one of those hyper-trendy companies, the kind with yoga and juice bars, and an almost disturbing zeal to replace desk chairs with exercise balls, or treadmills, or kiddie pools filled with salt water and live tropical fish. (Give it time; it’ll happen.) And indeed, firms like Google, Ben & Jerry’s, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Zappos have all invested in creating a space specifically for employees to close their eyes and take a mid-day snooze. In fact, according to a 2015 article on Inc.com , roughly 6% of employers now offer an onsite nap room of some sort. As with many trends in the U.S., we didn’t invent the nap break so much as we borrowed it from other cultures. In Spain, businesses famously close from 2 to 5 to accommodate a daily “siesta” for workers— although ironically, our ...

Western medicine prides itself on the ability to diagnose and treat a variety of maladies that a very short time ago were considered fatal. Part and parcel of the extension of treatments is the idea of specialization. We’ve become accustomed to specialty medicine. It seems to make sense: someone gaining expertise and mastery over one specific body part, the sum of those parts equaling your aunt Betty. But what if the template for modern medicine, this very concept of the human body, was fundamentally flawed? What if your body is not a tally of parts but one giant complex system with many subsystems operating in tandem? Perhaps you can see where this is going. Scientists are beginning to discover that the body is governed by not just the brain in our heads, but multiple auxiliary sub-brains, located in other organs, connected by neurons, and all carefully timed to operate with each other. The analogy might be a symphony, where musicians must listen to each other to blend into...

What is the evolutionary purpose of sleep? Doesn’t it seem like a huge concession to spend a third of your life inactive? Or is it an amazing strategic adaptation from the days before indoor lighting, when productivity went down once the sun set, and danger came in the form of fast and powerful predatory animals? Jerome Siegel, a UCLA neuroscientist, suggests the latter. He says that for our ancestors, staying awake and mobile during the evening hours would actually have been evolutionarily maladaptive. We are not the brown bat, who can avoid predators by sleeping 20 hours a day and still manage to hunt blind at night via sonar. It's been argued that the way our bodies recharge during our evening REM cycles—not just regaining energy but rebalancing the immune system and performing brain maintenance—is just another example of evolution piggybacking on an existing adaptation and making the most of it. We aren't equipped for echolocation, so this is what we got instea...

“Oh, the thigh bone’s connected to the leg bone and the leg bone’s connected to the…” You probably learned some version of this  classic spiritual “Dry Bones” in grade school. It’s a clever way to teach basic skeletal anatomy. Author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson was actually referring to the prophesy in Ezekiel 37:1-14, but for our secular purposes, the point is that all of your bones connect to create a structure that serves as the functional foundation for everything you do. Chiropractors build their entire livelihood on this vary concept. You throw your back out of joint and it effects your lifting power in a dramatic way. It’s amazing how the simple act of reaching for a bag of groceries in your trunk can compromise your skeletal system and jeopardize your ability to live a normal life for weeks afterwards. Like the skeletal system, we tend to think about diet, exercise and sleep as three separate systems, each vital to the success of the body. But there is an...

Are you sleep-deprived? If you’re a working adult in America, I can probably answer the question for you: yes. Or at least, statistically, you have an 80% chance, according to a January 11 New York Times piece by Maria Konnikova. On the fence about whether or not you qualify? Well, do you constantly feel tired during the day, or do you often find yourself falling asleep within five minutes of lying down? Chances are you’re not an efficient sleeper; you’re just not sleeping enough. That’s not just murder on your coffee budget, it’s bad news if you’re planning on learning anything. According to a 2011 UC Berkeley study, sleep is an essential part of holding onto memories. That's when bursts of brain waves called “sleep spindles” network up to shift fact-based info from the hippocampus, which has limited storage, to the more long-term storage of the prefrontal cortex. The more spindles, the more learning is enabled. Unfortunately, these spindles are much more active during t...

When you think of brainwashing, the name Patty Hearst might come to mind. Daughter of the late newspaper tycoon Randolph Hearst, in 1974, the then nineteen-year-old was kidnapped by a fringe terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army. Several months later, she resurfaced, calling herself Tania and wielding a gun for the SLA during an attempted bank robbery. In September 1975, the local police and the FBI apprehended Hearst in an apartment in San Francisco, along with another SLA member. That January, she was tried for her involvement in the robbery. The Hearst family's legal team claimed Patty had been operating under a "classic case" of Stockholm Syndrome. They argued that after weeks of rape, torment, and imprisonment in a closet, she could no longer withstand an SLA indoctrinement. The prosecution argued that she had willfully decided to aid the SLA, given some circumstantial evidence and her refusal to name names or turn anyone else in. The jury ...

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, and so do humans. I’m talking, of course, about sleep.  We spend roughly 33% of our time on earth in semi- hibernation, with our bodies partially paralyzed and although we can’t live without it, we are still somewhat in the dark (too obvious to be intentional) about how the whole process works. If you ask most people, they will equate sleep with rest, a recharging of the ol’ battery. If you ask neuroscientists about sleep, they will tell you that it’s some of the brain's most important working hours, when memory is consolidated and strengthened. In our waking state, we take in a vast amount of information through our five senses. Hebb's rule says, “ synapses that fire together, wire together.” This is known as synapse potentiation , the idea that synapses, the chemical/electrical wiring connectors in our brains, lock in memory through the frequent friending of other synapses. This in a nutshell is what happens when...