[wordup] even more on how to not sleep as much as you should.

[Adam Shand]

From: ItchycooSean at aol.com

> i'm a med student who just took a course on sleep.  if i understood my
> class correctly, taught as it was by some of the finest sleep doctors
> in chicago, this guy gets some of the crucial physiology behind sleep
> completely wrong:
> 
> 1) the restorative, rejuvenating phase of sleep isn't REM but rather
> stage 4.  it turns out that REM is actually more active and waking and
> less rejuvenative than stage 1.
> 
> 2) even if it were, REM doesn't come on in sleep until 3-4 hours later
> in the night.  the cycle works in roughly 90 minute intervals, and for
> the first two, the majority of the time is spent in stage four sleep. 
> After the second interval, REM sleep starts to encroach on stage four
> sleep until you basically stop going into stage four, your metabolism
> increases, and you eventually wake up.
> 
> point being, i don't understand how he's dreaming if he's waking up
> refreshed, or how he's waking up refreshed if he's dreaming the entire
> time.
> 
> some of the things he got right, or that sleep medicine as i
> understand it can explain:
> 
> 1) if he is getting enough restorative sleep, his metabolism would
> shoot up considerably.  this would explain his increase in appetite.  
> 
> 2)there IS a very real danger in messing with your sleep, especially
> for as long as he did.  one experiment involved keep a mouse awake for
> two straight weeks by basically putting it on a treadmill, hooking it
> to its brain, and then turning on the treadmill whenever the mouse
> entered the sleep cycle.  the mouse keeled over.
> 
> 3) what REM is good for is basically reorganizing thoughts.  it turns
> out that those people who fall roughly into the type A personality use
> less REM sleep, while those type Bs use more.  current literature
> indicates that more REM sleep correlates with greater indecisiveness. 
> one possible explanation is that type Bs need more REM sleep to
> organize their goals, thoughts, plans etc.  without it, one begins to
> feel disoriented and out of touch.  if he's getting lots of REM sleep,
> he should be okay in this department.  it's the physical rejuvenation
> i don't understand.
> 
> some things i won't profess to know about either way, but would like
> more info on.
> 
> 1) the human mind is immensely trainable and he very well might have
> found an alternate way to get sleep.  in which case, i'd like to see a
> simple temperature profile.  the body, when its awake, maintains a
> higher metabolism that has to be balanced by a lower metabolism during
> sleep.  as a consequence, the body maintains a higher temperature
> during the day and a lower one at night.  there's a correlation to how
> well one can induce the lower body temperature to how easily one can
> fall asleep.  i'd be really curious to see how his temp profile over
> the day compares to normal.
> 
> 2) the relationship between grape juice and stage 3 and stage 4 sleep
> seems tenuous.  grape juice, especially if pasteurized or processed,
> doesn't have anything in it that other fruit juices or a standard diet
> without it would have.  but the strange cravings he talked about here
> and earlier in the article are significiantly noteworthy.  this could
> speak to a whole range of neurological effects.  if i look anything up
> or talk to anyone in the department, i'll look this one up.
> 
> 
> like i said, i'm a med student so i'm trained to be skeptical of
> alternatives to standard models of medicine (i'm also trained to think
> in bullet points).  but because i'm a med student, i'll look into it
> just to show somebody that i have intellectual curiosity, as well as
> the fact that i myself would like to get more out of less sleep.
> 
> more to come,
> sean park