Brain study: Sleepy, grumpy and ... primitive?

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science EditorWed Oct 24, 5:54 PM ET

A few nights without sleep can not only make people tired and emotional, but may actually put the brain into a primitive "fight or flight" state, researchers said on Wednesday.

Brain images of otherwise healthy men and women showed two full days without sleep seemed to rewire their brains, re-directing activity from the calming and rational prefrontal cortex to the "fear center" -- the amygdala.

"It's almost as though, without sleep, the brain had reverted back to more primitive patterns of activity, in that it was unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses," said Matthew Walker of the University of California Berkeley, who led the study.

That a lack of sleep can make people grumpy is hardly news. "We all know implicitly the link between bad sleep the night before and bad mood the next day. We are just adding the brain basis to what we knew," Walker said in a telephone interview.

Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School used functional magnetic resonance imaging, which can scan brain activity in real time, to see what was going on in the brains of their 26 young adult volunteers.

Half were kept awake for a day, a night and another full day. The other half slept as normal.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, Walker's team said they noticed profound changes in the brain activity of those volunteers who stayed up.

"We found a strong overreaction from the emotional centers of the brain," Walker said. "It was almost as if the brain had been rewired, and connected to the fright, flight or fight area in the brain stem."

SWINGING LIKE A PENDULUM

And lab workers noticed a difference in the behavior of the sleep-deprived volunteers.

"They seemed to swing like a pendulum between the broad spectrum of emotions," Walker said. "They would go from being remarkably upset at one time to where they found the same thing funny. They were almost giddy -- punch drunk."

Next Walker wants to test people who are chronically sleep-deprived, perhaps by letting them have just 5 hours of sleep over several days. The average adult needs 7 to 9 hours of sleep a night.

He said the findings may shed light on psychiatric diseases. "This is the first set of experiments that demonstrate that even healthy people's brains mimic certain pathological psychiatric patterns when deprived of sleep."

"Before, it was difficult to separate out the effect of sleep versus the disease itself. Now we're closer to being able to look into whether the person has a psychiatric disease or a sleep disorder."

A second study in the same journal suggests daylight-savings time regimes may cause similar effects.

Till Roenneberg of Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, Germany examined the sleep patterns of 55,000 people in Central Europe.

He found people's internal circadian clocks adjusted well when the clock moved back in the autumn months, but failed to adjust when it moved forward, costing them an hour of sleep, in the spring.

He said the effects held for weeks, perhaps causing people to feel continually sleep-deprived in the spring and summer.

--------------------------------

I just found it funny because the bolded part sounds very familiar! but we don't see giddy, drunk-like zombies walking around school.. fortunately. although it would be extremely amusing :P

anyway, it's the penultimate lap! so ALL THE BEST!!
We will thrive from the survival of these seemingly be all and end all exams (:
mug hard everyone.

<3>

sneakytrixie || escaped 11:16 PM_*;

Friday, October 12, 2007

6S <3 farewell

Hey 6S!

it has been a great pleasure of mine to spend two years with you guys. to me it was a very fruitful two years and i have to say i learnt a lot throughout this time spent in RJ.

i just thought that time has passed really fast and that we'll no longer be able to sit as a class in a classroom asking madam lee about her baby Jo-en, laughing (well not really) at (extremely lame) jokes that helen ng cracks, telling mrs lee chye keow (every thurday) that lesson has ended at 2.45pm and bullying her with the laptop she brings in during GP, and most importantly, bleaughx simultaneously as a class when mr jason "ego" teo (he won't read this right) proclaims his suave-ness and hot-ness and the number of girls that have fallen for him.

it's all over.

BUT let's keep in contact with various class outings after the A's yea =)

thanks for two great years, and all the best for the coming A's and the future!

Ben Tham || escaped 11:02 PM_*;

Sunday, October 07, 2007

6S <3 distressing language errors

~ “Confucius” is often misspelled as “Confucious” and the adjective “Confucian” is often misspelled as “Confucion”.

~ The word “think-tanks” has the greatest number of misspelled variations – “think-thanks”; “tink-thanks”; “tink-tanks”… etc. Shudder.

- Many students seem to know the author of Passage 1 personally and refer to him using his first name “Guy”. Conventions in Western academic writing require one to refer to an author using either the full name or the last name – although exceptions could be made for writers of non-Western origins whose names follow the patronymic system in which the “last name” is actually the first name of one’s father – eg. Sumana (son of Rajarethnam).

the teacher who wrote the comments for GP prelims is so acerbic, that it's funny!
haha random post :P

anyway check out what IJ did! They experimented on trying to use SecondLife to carry out GP discussions and whatever :O it's quite a long report, but this is rather amusing too:

Evaluating on-going performance

Even though students did have to reflect on the content and nature of their online interaction, there was sometimes a mismatch between their perceptions of the depth and complexity of the ideas discussed during their online conversations as captured in the reflections they penned down after their experience in the virtual world and what we discovered in the logged text. Even those assigned as student observers in Term 1 could not fully appreciate the range of views represented in the online interactions. It might have been a simple problem of recall. It would probably have been better if we had churned out the logged texts of their online conversations and gotten them to analyse their own conversations. This would have facilitated their understanding of what they were discussing at a meta textual level and supported evaluation of their own performance.