Lack of sleep, or poor quality sleep, is one of the risk factors for developing Alzheimer’s disease. Fortunately, there are ways to improve sleep.
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Sleep appears to play an essential role in a number of brain functions, such as memory. So good quality sleep could play a vital role in preventing dementia.
We envisage a future in which sleep is a routine target for reducing or preventing symptoms of mental illness, both in psychiatric settings and people’s homes
Sleep has been an underappreciated strategy for gaining an edge over an opponent at any level of athletic competition.
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Studies show college athletes sleeping less than 7 hours per night are almost twice as likely to be injured when compared with athletes sleeping more than 8 hours.
In 1981, Keith Hearne and Stephen Laberge asked dreamers to send “telegrams” to the outside world. More than 30 years later, scientists continue to blaze trails to communicate with the sleeping mind.
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Dreams keep our brains ticking over. They wash the thoughts from the day’s events at a molecular level. They might even help us imagine what’s possible during our waking hours.
Past age 50, men are much more likely to have REM sleep behavior disorder than women.
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By learning what parts of the brain are crucial for imagination to work, neuroscientists can look back over hundreds of millions of years of evolution to figure out when it first emerged.
Yuta Senzai, University of California, San Francisco and Massimo Scanziani, University of California, San Francisco
Why your eyes move during the REM stage of sleep has puzzled scientists for years. Researchers measured mice brains to look for a possible explanation.
A bad sleep can make you more reactive to stressful situations the next day.
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Dreams help us regulate our emotions and adapt to stressful events. Repetitive content may represent an unsuccessful attempt to integrate difficult experiences.
Octopuses might be able to dream.
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Dreams that are more vivid, more frequent and more striking… Lockdown seems to trouble our nights as well as our days, and there’s reason to believe that’s not just a figment of our imagination.
During times of stress and anxiety we either dream more or remember our dreams more often, as a way of coping with challenging circumstances and new information.
While blue light has been blamed for sleep loss, it’s not the only bad light.
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Blue light has been getting blamed for sleep interruption and eye strain. But the facts are that any bright light interferes with sleep, and computers themselves cause eye strain, an eye doctor says.
Sleep paralysis is when you wake up but feel like you can’t move.
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Sleep paralysis – when you wake up but feel like you can’t move – seems to be more common if you sleep on your back. But we don’t know why.
Even when we are asleep, we can still feel if we are comfortable and our ‘sixth sense’ is working to let us know where we are in our beds.
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Our body knows how it is moving and where it is because of a sense called proprioception, a ‘sixth sense’ that helps your body know where it is in the world. And it works even while you’re asleep.