The Secret to Better Sleep: An Infographic

As I get older, my sleep patterns keep changing and I am finding that a complete night's sleep is very elusive.  Sometimes I have early sleep, some time awake and some late sleep.  Napping is always a welcome part of my day.  I receive a daily email about infographics.  A recent one is below (http://dailyinfographic.com/the-secret-to-better-sleep-infographic).  You can find/subscribe to them here:  http://dailyinfographic.com/.  In an upcoming post, I will share some online tools to creating your own infographics.

posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Share

Teenagers and Sleep

A colleague shared this NPR story with me this morning.  It is a nice overview/background on teens and sleep issues.  The second story is a followup with experts responding to listener questions.

The Other Big Deficit: Many Teens Fall Short On Sleep

Sleep Experts Answer Your Questions On Teens And Shuteye

posted by Chuck Schallhorn

Share

Sleep and torture

I apologize for the delay in fresh "psych in the news" posts and promise new entries soon chock-full of current events in psychology. In the meantime, I thought one current event deserved its own post.

The release this week of the so-called "torture memos" that defined what techniques could be used by U.S. interrogators on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay included one section particularly relevant to our field -- that is, sleep deprivation. The author of one memo, Steven Bradbury of the Department of Justice, writes that "[w]e understand from OMS, and from our review of the literature on the physiology of sleep, that even very extended sleep deprivation does not cause physical pain, let alone severe physical pain." The author goes on to repeatedly mention this "review of the literature on the physiology of sleep" and then proceeds to cite his ultimate reference: a 1998 work called Why We Sleep by James Horne -- a textbook.

So what is learned from this text? That in controlled experiments subjects experienced sleep deprivation for 8-11 days and that this formed the basis for keeping prisoners up for days, at least 3 for more than 96 hours. When contacted by a blog today for his perspective, Dr. Horne was outraged and saddened at how his research had been misused:

"As soon as you add in any other stress, any other psychological stress, then the sleep deprivation feeds on that, and the two compound each other to make things far worse. I made that very, very clear," he said. "And there's been a lot of research by others since then to show that this is the case."
Further, Horne continued, sleep-deprived subjects become so confused that they're highly unlikely to offer useful intelligence. "I don't understand what you're going to get out of it," he said. "You can no longer think rationally, you just become more of an automaton ... These people will just be spewing nonsense anyway. It's pointless!"
In sum, said Horne, he feels "saddened" that the memo's author "didn't fully interpret what I actually wrote." The memo "distorts what I really meant, and I never meant for it to be, in any way, indicative that you could start torturing people in this way. That was not the intention at all."

Share

More on National Sleep Awareness Week

My class began the unit on states of consciousness and I rediscovered some key links that I share and use with them.

http://www.sleepfoundation.org/

Shakespeare Quotes on Sleep http://shakespeare.about.com/cs/criticismmisc/a/sleep.htm

Sleep quotes—http://www.quotegarden.com/sleep.html · Circadian, infradian, and ultradian rhythms

Neuroscience for Kids site about sleep

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/sleep.html

Signs of Sleep Disorders

Videos about narcolepsy and cataplexy
http://www-med.stanford.edu/school/Psychiatry/narcolepsy/

Cataplexy definition

http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=10470

Share