As those of you that know me know all too well, I struggle with insomnia and strange sleep patterns like going to bed at 7am and waking up at 11:30am then going to bed at 2am and waking up at 9am. I wish I could get this under control. I’ve had a lot of issues with feeling brain dead and unproductive and a lot of headaches. Then I read a report on sleep at Scientific American that states snoozing makes me smarter because:
- As we snooze, our brain is busily processing the information we have learned during the day.
- Sleep makes memories stronger, and it even appears to weed out irrelevant details and background information so that only the important pieces remain.
- Our brain also works during slumber to find hidden relations among memories and to solve problems we were working on while awake.
With my lack of sleep and weird sleep patterns I must come across like a total idiot these days! Of course, I’m writing this at 2:38am.
It appears that solutions to the day’s problems are actually processed by our brains in our sleep, but if we lose sleep that night we may lose our chance at sorting through and retaining that input:
while we sleep, our brain is anything but inactive. It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised—an unsettling thought in our fast-paced, sleep-deprived society.
I guess I need to take this sleep deprivation a little more seriously and maybe even get some medical attention, even though I absolutely hate taking medications of any kind! Time to pray about this.
Read the full story here.
Related posts:
- A personality test confirms that I like hip-hop!
- Brother-in-law update: December 10, 2009
- This just makes me laugh :D
- Psalms 3, 4 & 5: sleep in peace
- Who am I?
Tags: insomnia, memory, scientific american, sleep
