Will Shares

Are you asleep? Exploring the mind's twilight zone (New Scientist)

psychotherapy:

Earlier this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report’s authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair’s brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down (Sleep Medicine, vol 10, p 247).

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. “There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive,” he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either.

one more excerpt:

The boundaries between sleep and wakefulness are particularly blurred when we are sleep-deprived. Around a decade ago, Dinges realised that although his sleep-deprived volunteers seemed to be awake, they were in fact experiencing momentary lapses, or microsleeps. Since then, he has discovered that these fleeting naps last between half a second and 2 seconds, and become increasingly frequent the longer we are deprived of sleep, until finally we cannot recover and nod off. Dinges sees them as the outward sign of a tug-of-war between neural systems that are trying to initiate sleep, and others that are trying to maintain wakefulness.

The article talks more about the balance between sleep and wakefulness and how some have a gene for so called sleep resistance that allows them to stay awake, and how insomniacs are in a constant state of arousal that prevents sleep.

The Islamization of Europe

A total of fifty-four million Muslims now live in Europe .  San Diego University recently calculated that a staggering 25 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim just 12 years from now.  Bernhard Lewis has predicted a Muslim majority by the end of this century.

This is something I am very scared of. I believe the central thesis that there is a strong movement within Islam to create a religious authority that would utterly destroy many common western freedoms. It’s already happening within Muslim enclaves in Europe.

Read the whole article. It’s worth it.

Got Pain? Take Two Photos of Your Loved One and Call Me in the Morning

psychotherapy:

…The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, investigated whether the pain-reducing effects of social support can be activated with a photograph of a supporter instead of the real thing.  Previous research has demonstrated that activating mental representations of individuals can produce effects similar to the person being there. But in this study researchers wanted to know if a photograph could produce an effect similar to someone in pain holding a loved one’s hand — a  higher benchmark to achieve.

The subjects were 28 women in long-term relationships.  They were brought into a testing room and their partners were brought into another to have photos taken.  The women underwent testing to determine their pain thresholds via thermal stimulation. Once the thresholds were established for each subject, they were then exposed to a series of conditions while experiencing pain, including (1) holding the hand of their partner as he sat behind a curtain, (2) holding a squeeze ball, (3) holding the hand of a stranger, (4) viewing a photograph of their partner on a computer screen, (5) viewing a photograph of a male stranger, and (6) viewing nothing.  Subjects rated each condition’s unpleasantness on a 21-box numerical scale (the Gracely Box Scale, used in similar previous studies).

Here’s what happened: As expected, holding their partner’s hand resulted in significantly reduced pain ratings when compared to holding an object or a stranger’s hand.  Viewing their partner’s photograph also produced significant pain reduction when compared to the object and stranger conditions. Interestingly, viewing a photo was also marginally MORE effective than holding their partner’s hand.

What seems to be happening here is that our brains can be primed to conjure mental associations with being loved and supported just by viewing a photo — and this priming is potent enough to actually reduce how much pain is felt.  And, as the results suggest, in some cases a photo may be even more effective than the real thing.

When Feeling grumpy 'is good for you' - BBC

happy people are more trusting…when they shouldn’t be…

How stressed are kids? More than we think - USATODAY.com

I wonder about kids being so stressed about doing well in school - I always thought if you did your best that was good enough, but then I always really well…hmm…I dunno; I’m not sure how healthy it is to be so success oriented from a  young age…

Jon Gosselin Scripted Hailey Glassman's Abuse Claims : LimeLife

Jon actually made the decision to have Hailey go on air and bad mouth him. Jon and Hailey get paid for their appearances on these shows and they need the money. It was easy for Hailey to conjure tears, their lives are less than stellar right now, but Jon hasn’t abused [her].” It actually kind of makes sense, as the source continued, “Jon doesn’t have much money left and he is not currently searching for a real job. Jon still seeks money through his fame and notoriety. He really wants a reality show of his own, and he is stretching out every moment of the drama for a dollar … His whole team heard of the project and was involved in brokering the possible deal … His managers, lawyers and publicists need to get something rolling for him or he won’t be able to pay them. Jon doesn’t have a big bank account loaded with money. He has to do something and this would have been funny, plus Hailey had no problem going along with the fake dates and pretending to be upset. She is along for the ride and enjoys being on TV.”

Getting so disugsted with the Gosselins….and yet I keep reading….

U.S. Commander of Afghanistan only talked to Obama once - Washington Times

Kind of shocking. Our top general in Afghanistan says Obama has only talked with him once. Does he not care? Strange….

thanks hilker:

More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation - Yahoo! News

hilker:

“Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

“Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Duncan told the AP. “I want to just level the playing field.”

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).”

Quality vs. quantity. But, as we’ve seen, Obama has only a secondary (at best) interest in the quality of education.

Yeah I agree, and the most important things, like values for example, you don’t really learn in school…

How to Write With Style, by Kurt Vonnegut

1. Find a subject you care about

2. Do not ramble, though

3. Keep it simple

4. Have guts to cut

5. Sound like yourself

6. Say what you mean

7. Pity the readers

thanks givemesomethingtoread:

Onions lower blood sugar, help prevent cancer

The higher the intake of onion, the lower the level of glucose found during oral or intravenous glucose tolerance tests. Experimental and clinical evidence suggests that allyl propyl disulfide is responsible for this effect and lowers blood sugar levels by increasing the amount of free insulin available. Allyl propyl disulfide does this by competing with insulin, which is also a disulphide, to occupy the sites in the liver where insulin is inactivated. This results is an increase in the amount of insulin available to usher glucose into cells causing a lowering of blood sugar.

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In addition, onions are a very good source of chromium, the mineral component in glucose tolerance factor, a molecule that helps cells respond appropriately to insulin. (21% DV per cup/160 grams).
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Onions contain a number of flavonoids, the most studied of which, quercitin, has been shown to halt the growth of tumors in animals and to protect colon cells from the damaging effects of certain cancer-causing substances.

Behind the Autism Statistics

givemesomethingtoread:

The CDC now says that 1 in 100 Americans has autism. But is the epidemic real? It turns out that many children with other developmental problems are being given autism diagnoses just to get them state funding.

Another great excerpt:

In 1987, the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) began broadening the definition of autism to include not only children for whom socialization is impossible, but also those with varying levels of ability to interact and function. What was once a devastating affliction known simply as “autism” evolved into a “spectrum” of disorders, encompassing everything from profound impairment to far milder challenges. Naturally, this more expansive definition of autism partly explains the exponential increase in diagnoses in recent years.