— Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
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There is just one thing. From this moment forth, and for the rest of your child’s entire life, he will repeatedly and routinely lapse into a state of apparent coma. It might even resemble death at times. And while his body lies still his mind will often be filled with stunning, bizarre hallucinations. This state will consume one-third of his life and I have absolutely no idea why he’ll do it, or what it is for. Good luck!
Based on a rich, new scientific understanding of sleep, we no longer have to ask what sleep is good for. Instead, we are now forced to wonder whether there are any biological functions that do not benefit by a good night’s sleep.
The old maxim “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is therefore unfortunate. Adopt this mind-set, and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse.
If you didn’t set an alarm clock, would you sleep past that time? (If so, you need more sleep than you are giving yourself.)
Each and every night, REM sleep ushers you into a preposterous theater wherein you are treated to a bizarre, highly associative carnival of autobiographical themes.
he memory refreshment was related to lighter, stage 2 NREM sleep, and specifically the short, powerful bursts of electrical activity called sleep spindles
y boosting the electrical quality of deep-sleep brainwave activity, the researchers almost doubled the number of facts that individuals were able to recall the following day, relative to those participants who received no stimulation.
ou have, as a consequence, selectively enhanced only those individual memories that you want to keep. It all sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but it is now science fact: the method is called targeted memory reactivation.
something that violated the most repeated and entrusted teaching edict: practice makes perfect. Not so, it seemed. Perhaps it was practice, with sleep, that makes perfect?
Both the placebo and the sleeping pills reduced the time it took people to fall asleep (between ten and thirty minutes), but the change was not statistically different between the two. In other words, there was no objective benefit of these sleeping pills beyond that which a placebo offered.
The obvious methods involve reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, removing screen technology from the bedroom, and having a cool bedroom. In addition, patients must (1) establish a regular bedtime and wake-up time, even on weekends, (2) go to bed only when sleepy and avoid sleeping on the couch early/mid-evenings, (3) never lie awake in bed for a significant time period; rather, get out of bed and do something quiet and relaxing until the urge to sleep returns, (4) avoid daytime napping if you are having difficulty sleeping at night, (5) reduce anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries by learning to mentally decelerate before bed, and (6) remove visible clockfaces from view in the bedroom, preventing clock-watching anxiety at night.
One of the more paradoxical CBT-I methods used to help insomniacs sleep is to restrict their time spent in bed, perhaps even to just six hours of sleep or less to begin with. By keeping patients awake for longer, we build up a strong sleep pressure—a greater abundance of adenosine. Under this heavier weight of sleep pressure, patients fall asleep faster, and achieve a more stable, solid form of sleep across the night. In this way, a patient can regain their psychological confidence in being able to self-generate and sustain healthy, rapid, and sound sleep, night after night
In a carefully controlled study of healthy adult individuals, a four-day diet high in sugar and other carbohydrates, but low in fiber, resulted in less deep NREM sleep and more awakenings at night.
ne practice known to convert a healthy new habit into a permanent way of life is exposure to your own data.
When it comes to the quantified self, it’s the old adage of “seeing is believing” that ensures longer-term adherence to healthy habits.
One practice known to convert a healthy new habit into a permanent way of life is exposure to your own data.
Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons. First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia.
Of a total of 299 dream reports that Stickgold collected from these individuals across the fourteen days, a clear rerun of prior waking life events—day residue—was found in just 1 to 2 percent. Dreams are not, therefore, a wholesale replay of our waking lives.
Through its therapeutic work at night, REM sleep performed the elegant trick of divorcing the bitter emotional rind from the information-rich fruit. We can therefore learn and usefully recall salient life events without being crippled by the emotional baggage that those painful experiences originally carried.
Cartwright demonstrated that it was only those patients who were expressly dreaming about the painful experiences around the time of the events who went on to gain clinical resolution from their despair, mentally recovering a year later as clinically determined by having no identifiable depression.
when it comes to resolving our emotional past. Her patients required REM sleep with dreaming, but dreaming of a very specific kind: that which expressly involved dreaming about the emotional themes and sentiments of the waking trauma. It was only that content-specific form of dreaming that was able to accomplish clinical remission and offer emotional closure in these patients, allowing them to move forward into a new emotional future, and not be enslaved by a traumatic past.
If the brain cannot divorce the emotion from memory across the first night following a trauma experience, the theory suggests that a repeat attempt of emotional memory stripping will occur on the second night, as the strength of the “emotional tag” associated with the memory remains too high.
He had created precisely the neurochemical condition—a lowering of the abnormally high concentrations of stress-related noradrenaline—within the brain during REM sleep that had been absent for so long in these PTSD patients. Prazosin was gradually lowering the harmful high tide of noradrenaline within the brain, giving these patients healthier REM-sleep quality.
when I woke them up out of REM sleep, from the dreaming phase. Overall, problem-solving abilities rocketed up, with participants solving 15 to 35 percent more puzzles when emerging from REM sleep compared with awakenings from NREM sleep or during daytime waking performance!
Solutions seemed more effortless when the brain was being bathed by the afterglow of dream sleep. Based on response times, solutions arrived more instantaneously following an REM sleep awakening, relative to the slower, deliberative solutions that came when that same individual was exiting NREM sleep or when they were awake during the day.
It is sleep that builds connections between distantly related informational elements that are not obvious in the light of the waking day. Our participants went to bed with disparate pieces of the jigsaw and woke up with the puzzle
As with the effects of REM sleep on our emotional and mental well-being explored in the previous chapter, the latter would prove that REM sleep is necessary but not sufficient. It is both the act of dreaming and the associated content of those dreams that determine creative success.
Participants who slept and reported dreaming of elements of the maze, and themes around experiences clearly related to it, showed almost ten times more improvement in their task performance upon awakening than those who slept just as much, and also dreamed, but did not dream of maze-related experiences.
Clearly, the dreaming brain was not simply recapitulating or re-creating exactly what happened to them in the maze. Rather, the dream algorithm was cherry-picking salient fragments of the prior learning experience, and then attempting to place those new experiences within the back catalog of preexisting knowledge.
Set an alarm for bedtime.