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Thursday, March 23, 2006 |
Sleep Deprivation: The Great American Myth.
A six-year study of more than a million subjects headed by psychiatrist Daniel Kripke establishes that those who sleep an average of 6-7 hours a night function no worse and have no added health consequences than those getting the mythical 8 hours a night. Indeed, the mild sleep deprivation may extend their life, as well as making them more productive. The myth that we are a nation of zombies walking around bleary-eyed, making more mistakes, having more accidents and showing more emotional instability may be mostly a sales pitch for the lucrative pharmaceutical trade in hypnotics (sleeping pills). (Yahoo! News)
I routinely sleep more like 6-7 hours a night than 8 hours during the week, and, although you might argue that I would be the last to know, I don't feel I suffer for it. If I get down to 4-5 hours, I do see the difference, especially in terms of irritability and especially if I do so for several nights in the same week. (There's also no such thing as making up a cumulative sleep deficit by sleeping in on the weekend, I am convinced...) And, in my psychiatric practice, both because of physiological addictiveness and the risk of rebound insomnia, I strictly adhere to the practice of only prescribing sleeping pills for my patients for acute use (less than about two weeks at a stretch, better if used intermittently than consistently). Because of the development of physiological tolerance, most of the medications lose their effectiveness if used for longer anyway, although patients become psychologically dependent on them and physicians often renew their prescriptions indefinitely. If the patient ever tries to go off the medication, indeed they have trouble sleeping and they never persist in avoiding using their sleeping pills for long, but despite their belief that the drug-free triel confirmed their ongoing need for sleeping medication, all it really shows is the phenomenon of rebound insomnia, which would probably abate if they remained drug-free for long enough. And "a poor night's sleep never killed anyone..."
Newer sleeping pills are marketed as less addictive and effective for longterm use, but don't believe it. There are few free lunches in brain chemistry. Zolpidem (Ambien®) and the others are really not very different from the benzodiazepine sleep aids (Halcion®, Dalmane® etc.) they are supplanting, in my opinion. Medications that interact with the benzodiazepine receptor — which all of these medications do — interfere with the acquisittion of new learnng while under their influence and, at high doses, can cause the somnambulist activities so much in the news these days, including sleep driving and sleep eating. There is nothing special about Ambien in this regard except that it is now so broadly prescribed. Other hypnotic medications do the same thing. At high doses, especially in combination with alcohol, they are respiratory suppressants (read: lethal in overdose), and they accumulate to high levels in the systems of those with impaired ability to metabolize them, such as the medically ill and the elderly. Not benign at all...
But, of course, we can try to compensate for all these hypnotic effects with the daytime-alertness drug that is all the rage these days, modafinil (Provigil®), right?
And Eliot also blinks:
No Head for Numbers. New Insight into How We Count: A recent functional MRI study gives us a new appreciation for the fact that specific brain circuitry underlies processing 'how many' (and that it is different from how we process 'how much'). The intraparietal sulcus lights up with the former taks but not the latter when they are cleverly distinguished by the study design. The region may be involved with the learning disorder called dyscalculia, which affects perhaps 6% of the public and involves difficulty envisioning numerical sequences and even distinguishing which of two numbers is bigger. Dyscalculia is not the only way in which someone might have difficulty with calculation and other mathematics, but it is the most severe. (Yahoo! News)
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9:18:20 PM 
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take the f-train.
I love Hanne-Lovise Skarstein’s interactive documentary from the F-train in New York. Hanne-Lovise has been working on interactive documentaries here in Bergen for a few years now, but moved to Brooklyn last year. Take the F-train is a beautiful little documentary which combines video of the place with audio interviews and animations of the characters in the piece. You put the characters you want to ride with into the train, and then you can listen to their stories by mousing over them while inside. Most of their stories are about being from elsewhere and yet being at home in New York City. At least most of the ones in languages I can understand were. I was particularly happy to find Hanne-Lovise herself as one of the characters in her own story. There’s an interview with her discussing the piece too, in Norwegian.
Her piece is part of Digitale Fortellinger, a series of new, Norwegian, digital stories sponsored by Norsk kulturråd, PNEK, BEK and NRK. [jill/txt]
6:39:34 AM
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Microsoft delays launch of Vista operating system. Blow as upgrade misses Christmas spree · More time needed to improve security features [Guardian Unlimited]
Raise you hand if you were shocked by the announcement. OTOH, it looks like they found what could be the right spin: it's for security, about which apparently anyone else with an updated OS must not care, or they wouldn't have an updated OS.
6:39:19 AM
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A method and a culture.
Some of the Science Bloggers are coming up with taxonomies of biologists, physicists and anthropologists and chemists. This is great, and I don't have anything to add except that it is always important to remember that science the method is irrelevant without the science the culture. It itself is embedded within the broader culture, and as books like The Lunar Men show science's growth and efflorescence are tied together with currents that sweep through the broad expanse of a society. Attempts at "modernization" of a "traditional" culture via science as in the 19th century Egypt of Muhammad Ali failed because science is likely less an engine of "modernity" than a product of it.
Read the entire post
[Gene Expression]
6:39:14 AM
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Finding Humor in Meat Patents. Most comedians go to great lengths to find fresh material. An aspiring New York City comic, however, says funny stuff is easy to find with a few mouseclicks on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website. By Joanna Glasner. [Wired News: Top Stories]
6:39:07 AM
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T-shirt looks like you have a FedEx envelope under your arm. 
Instructables has instructions for building magnet-backed LEDs that you can arrange on your fridge into glowing, whimsical pixel-art that will scare you when you come to the dark kitchen for some midnight ice-cream. 