From birth, we spend a third of our lives asleep. After decades of research, we’re still not sure why. (…)

If we don’t know why we can’t sleep, it’s in part because we don’t really know why we need to sleep in the first place. We know we miss it if we don’t have it. And we know that no matter how much we try to resist it, sleep conquers us in the end. We know that seven to nine hours after giving in to sleep, most of us are ready to get up again, and 15 to 17 hours after that we are tired once more. We have known for 50 years that we divide our slumber between periods of deep-wave sleep and what is called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when the brain is as active as when we’re awake, but our voluntary muscles are paralyzed. We know that all mammals and birds sleep. A dolphin sleeps with half its brain awake so it can remain aware of its underwater environment. When mallard ducks sleep in a line, the two outermost birds are able to keep half of their brains alert and one eye open to guard against predators. Fish, reptiles, and insects all experience some kind of repose too.

All this downtime comes at a price. An animal must lie still for a great stretch of time, during which it is easy prey for predators. What can possibly be the payback for such risk? “If sleep doesn’t serve an absolutely vital function,” the renowned sleep researcher Allan Rechtschaffen once said, “it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made.”

The predominant theory of sleep is that the brain demands it. This idea derives in part from common sense—whose head doesn’t feel clearer after a good night’s sleep? But the trick is to confirm this assumption with real data. How does sleeping help the brain? The answer may depend on what kind of sleep you are talking about. Recently, researchers at Harvard led by Robert Stickgold tested undergraduates on various aptitude tests, allowed them to nap, then tested them again. They found that those who had engaged in REM sleep subsequently performed better in pattern recognition tasks, such as grammar, while those who slept deeply were better at memorization. Other researchers have found that the sleeping brain appears to repeat a pattern of neuron firing that occurred while the subject was recently awake, as if in sleep the brain were trying to commit to long-term memory what it had learned that day.

Such studies suggest that memory consolidation may be one function of sleep. Giulio Tononi, a noted sleep researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, published an interesting twist on this theory a few years ago: His study showed that the sleeping brain seems to weed out redundant or unnecessary synapses or connections. So the purpose of sleep may be to help us remember what’s important, by letting us forget what’s not.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

related { Fatal familial insomnia | Thanks Anthony! }

{ Cosmetic surgery wasn’t as popular in 2009 as it used to be, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. | NY Times | full story }

The Oswego man charged with fatally shooting his wife and their three school-age children told police he was having marital problems caused by his affair in Mexico seven months earlier and his wife’s lack of interest in adopting his Druid beliefs.

{ Chicago Breaking News | Continue reading }

A controversial alternative health guru is suing after a taste of his own medicine nearly killed him.

Gary Null - described on quackwatch.org as “one of the nation’s leading promoters of dubious treatment for serious disease” - claims the manufacturer of Gary Null’s Ultimate Power Meal overloaded the supplements with Vitamin D.

The buff “Joy of Juicing” author, whose products include Red Stuff Powder and Gary Null’s Heavenly Hair Cleaner, claims he suffered kidney damage and was left bloodied and in intense pain from two daily servings of the supplement.

{ NY Daily News | Continue reading }

A Newport Beach man attempting to steal a pornographic magazine shoved a liquor store owner so fiercely that the man flew through the air and landed on the back of his head.

The owner died the day after the vicious attack on July 28, 2007 from a fractured skull and massive bleeding in the brain.

{ The Orange County Register | Continue reading }

related { Man killed in bizarre high speed crash. }

A drug used as a general anaesthetic may also work as a remarkably rapid antidepressant, according to a preliminary study.

The drug’s hallucinogenic side effects mean it is unlikely to be prescribed to patients, but it could pave the way to new faster-acting antidepressants, the researchers suggest.

Ketamine is used as an animal tranquiliser, but is perhaps better known as an illicit street drug, sometimes called “special K”. Now researchers have found the drug can relieve depression in some patients within just 2 hours - and continue to do so for a week.

One problem with current antidepressants is that they typically take weeks to kick in. Some studies have found that patients may face a high risk of suicide in the first week after starting an antidepressant treatment because of this lag time. So researchers have been searching for alternative drugs.

{ NewScientist, 2006 | Continue reading }

The question of nutrition is closely related to that of locality and climate. None of us can live anywhere; and he who has great tasks to perform, which demand all his energy, has, in this respect, a very limited choice. The influence of climate upon the bodily functions, affecting their retardation or acceleration, is so great, that a blunder in the choice of locality and climate may not merely alienate a man from his duty, but may withhold it from him altogether, so that he never comes face to face with it. Animal vigor never preponderates in him to the extent that it lets him attain that exuberant freedom in which he may say to himself: I, alone, can do that. (…)

The slightest torpidity of the intestines, once it has become a habit, is quite sufficient to turn a genius into something mediocre, something “German;” the climate of Germany, alone, is more than enough to discourage the strongest and most heroic intestines. Upon the tempo of the body’s functions closely depend the agility or the slowness of the spirit’s feet; indeed spirit itself is only a form of these bodily functions. Enumerate the places in which men of great intellect have been and are still found; where wit, subtlety, and malice are a part, of happiness; where genius is almost necessarily at home: all of them have an unusually dry atmosphere. Paris, Provence, Florence, Jerusalem, Athens–these names prove this: that genius is dependent on dry air, on clear skies–in other words, on rapid organic functions, on the possibility of contenuously securing for one’s self great and even’s quantities of energy. I have a case in mind where a man of significant and independent mentality became a narrow, craven specialist, and a crank, simply because he had no feeling for climate. I myself might have come to the same end, if illness had not forced me to reason, and to reflect upon reason realistically.

Now long practice has taught me to read the effects of climatic and meteorological influences, from self-observation, as though from a very delicate and reliable instrument, so that I can calculate the change in the degree of atmospheric moisture by means of this physiological selfobservation, even on so short a journey as that from Turin to Milan; accordingly I think with horror of the ghastly fact that my whole life, up to the last ten years–the most dangerous years–has always been spent in the wrong places, places that should have been precisely forbidden to me. (…)

But it was ignorance of physiology–that confounded “Idealism”–that was the real curse of my life, the superfluous and stupid element in it; from which nothing good could develop, for which there can be no settlement and no compensation. The consequences of this “Idealism” explain all the blunders, the great aberrations of instinct, and the modest specializations which diverted me from my life-task; as, for instance, the fact that I became a philologist–why not at least a doctor or anything else that might have opened my eyes? During my stay at Basel, my whole intellectual routine, including my daily schedule, was an utterly senseless abuse of extraordinary powers, without any sort of compensation for the strength I spent, without even a thought of its exhaustion and the problem of replacement. I lacked that subtle egoism, the protection that an imperative instinct gives; I regarded all men as my equals, I was disinterested, I forgot my distance from others–in short, I was in a condition for which I can never forgive myself. When I had almost reached the end, simply because I had almost reached it, I began to reflect upon the basic absurdity of my life-ldealism. It was illness that first brought me to reason.

{ Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 1888 }

photo { Reto Caduff }

That post was about sleep researcher Jerry Siegel, who argues that sleep evolved as a state of “adaptive inactivity”. According to this idea, animals sleep because otherwise we’d always be active, and constant activity is a waste of energy. Sleeping for a proportion of the time conserves calories, and also keeps us safe from nocturnal predators etc.

Siegel’s theory in what we might call minimalist. That’s in contrast to other hypotheses which claim that sleep serves some kind of vital restorative biological function, or that it’s important for memory formation, or whatever. It’s a hotly debated topic. (…)

Dreams are simply a result of the “awake-like” forebrain - the “higher” perceptual, cognitive and emotional areas - trying to make sense of the input that it’s receiving as a result of waves of activation arising from the brainstem. A dream is the forebrain’s “best guess” at making a meaningful story out of the assortment of sensations (mostly visual) and concepts activated by these periodic waves. There’s no attempt to disguise the shameful parts; the bizarreness of dreams simply reflects the fact that the input is pretty much random. (…)

While Hobson’s theory is minimalist in that it reduces dreams, at any rate in adulthood, to the status of a by-product, it doesn’t leave them uninteresting. Freudian dream re-interpretation is probably ruled out (”That train represents your penis and that cat was your mother”, etc.), but if dreams are our brains processing random noise, then they still provide an insight into how our brains process information. Dreams are our brains working away on their own, with the real world temporarily removed.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

First, while the Mexican government has lost control over matters having to do with drugs and with the borderlands of the United States, Mexico City’s control over other regions — and over areas other than drug enforcement — has not collapsed (though its lack of control over drugs could well extend to other areas eventually). Second, while drugs reshape Mexican institutions dramatically, they also, paradoxically, stabilize Mexico. We need to examine these crosscurrents to understand the status of Mexico.

Let’s begin by understanding the core problem. The United States consumes vast amounts of narcotics, which, while illegal there, make their way in abundance. Narcotics derive from low-cost agricultural products that become consumable with minimal processing. With its long, shared border with the United States, Mexico has become a major grower, processor and exporter of narcotics. Because the drugs are illegal and thus outside normal market processes, their price is determined by their illegality rather than by the cost of production. This means extraordinary profits can be made by moving narcotics from the Mexican side of the border to markets on the other side.

Whoever controls the supply chain from the fields to the processing facilities and, above all, across the border, will make enormous amounts of money. Various Mexican organizations — labeled cartels, although they do not truly function as such, since real cartels involve at least a degree of cooperation among producers, not open warfare — vie for this business. These are competing businesses, each with its own competing supply chain.

Typically, competition among businesses involves lowering prices and increasing quality. This would produce small, incremental shifts in profits on the whole while dramatically reducing prices. An increased market share would compensate for lower prices. Similarly, lawsuits are the normal solution to unfair competition. But neither is the case with regard to illegal goods.

The surest way to increase smuggling profits is not through market mechanisms but by taking over competitors’ supply chains. Given the profit margins involved, persons wanting to control drug supply chains would be irrational to buy, since the lower-cost solution would be to take control of these supply chains by force. Thus, each smuggling organization has an attached paramilitary organization designed to protect its own supply chain and to seize its competitors’ supply chains.

The result is ongoing warfare between competing organizations. Given the amount of money being made in delivering their product to American cities, these paramilitary organizations are well-armed, well-led and well-motivated. Membership in such paramilitary groups offers impoverished young men extraordinary opportunities for making money, far greater than would be available to them in legitimate activities.

The raging war in Mexico derives logically from the existence of markets for narcotics in the United States; the low cost of the materials and processes required to produce these products; and the extraordinarily favorable economics of moving narcotics across the border. This warfare is concentrated on the Mexican side of the border. But from the Mexican point of view, this warfare does not fundamentally threaten Mexico’s interests.

{ George Friedman | Continue reading }

It seems you’re more likely to die from a heart attack when having sex while having an affair, than during sex with your regular partner, although this seems largely to apply to men.

A case report in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine reports on the death of a woman who had a heart attack during extra-marital sex, something unusual in women. This is not conclusive evidence for the link between heart attacks and affairs in itself, of course, but the article reviews some suggestive evidence about sex, risk of death, physical and psychological stress.

{ MindHacks | Continue reading }

{ Lapham’s Quaterly }

In a rented room between a Southwest Side auto body yard and a scrap metal facility, Francisco Rendon allegedly performed dental work on willing patients, despite not having a dentist’s license, authorities said. (…)

Rendon, 49, clandestinely ran a dentist’s office equipped with syringes, painkillers and dentures. (…)

Instead of sitting in a traditional reclining dentist’s chair, patients sat in a leather office seat, according to police reports. The reports said that Rendon, 49, worked on teeth using something similar to a power tool usually used for polishing metal and that patients spit into a garbage can instead of a sink. Rendon told police he had a dental license he said he had earned in Mexico.

That seemed to be enough for his clientele, police said. Officers arriving to investigate an anonymous tip found five persons waiting to be treated.

{ Chicago breaking News | Continue reading }

related { Venezuelan police have arrested a man and woman accused of impersonating plastic surgeons and providing women with silicone breast and buttock implants from an illegal clinic in an apartment. }

{ Beneficial Bacteria and Good Digestive Health | Mark’s Daily Apple | Full paper }

In any case, suffering is not something to be sought, but, since it is unavoidable, when one does encounter it, one must learn to use it for good. The person who has gone through suffering, and emerges better from the experience, is strengthened but it was not the suffering but the person’s own moral fibre that made them better.

{ Peter Bolton | Continue reading }

Take psychic suffering first of all. Severe depression is one of the most acute forms of pain known to humanity. Those who have suffered from both depression and serious physical illness are almost unanimous in agreeing that the depression is worse. Does this make them better people? Certainly not at the time. I’ve seen depression close up with several people, and one of them hit the nail on the head when they said that depression makes you really selfish. You can see that it’s taking its toll on people close to you, but you are just too self-absorbed to change how you treat them.

Are they better having come through the depression? I see no evidence for this, I’m afraid.

{ Julian Baggini | Continue reading | More: Does suffering improve us? | The Guardian }

photo { Shane Lavalette }

Tom Bissell was an acclaimed, prize-winning young writer. Then he started playing the video game Grand Theft Auto. For three years he has been cocaine addicted, sleep deprived and barely able to write a word. Any regrets? Absolutely none.

{ Tom Bissell | full story }

installation { Stephen Johnson, Ice Cream Floats, 2005-2007 }

Most people in most places simply won’t be able to find a toilet when they need one. And for women, the lack of decent facilities is more than a problem. It’s an emergency. Public conveniences are the final battleground in the sex wars, the ultimate declaration of discrimination. (…)

You may think of America as the country that created the allergy, where bathroom culture rules, where germs and dirt are feared more than global warming and where cleanliness is worshipped alongside godliness – but public conveniences in some of its major cities are a disgrace. New York City, for example, is one of the most sophisticated metropolises in the world. Yet its provision of any public toilets at all, let alone clean and decent ones, is woeful. (…)

Today, there are still far fewer public toilets for women than for men in many British cities, in terms of both the number of toilets available and the ratio of male to female facilities. But even if the numbers were more equal, that wouldn’t solve the problem, according to the American sociologist Harvey Molotch, because women suffer “special burdens of physical discomfort, social disadvantage, psychological anxiety” when in public.

{ New Humanist | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen Shore, New York City, New York,September-October 1972 }

{ The patterns of links between buyers and sellers of sex in an online forum differs in important ways from other internet related networks, says a new study. This may have important implications for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases | Patterns of Captured in Social Network | full story }

update/related { A top journalist caught on tape with a pile of cocaine and a party girl named Moomoo, an opposition activist filmed handing over a bribe… Who’s behind the spate of mysterious coke-and-hooker entrapment attacks on Russian opposition figures? The Daily Beast | full story }

{ A teenager gave medics a surprise when he walked into casualty with a 10-inch knife stuck right through in his skull - after a row over computer games. }

What makes a fruit “super?”

First of all, we have to define what characteristics a fruit has to have to be labeled “super.” The superfruit craze seems to have hit a tipping point in 2004, however there appear to be no clear standards as to how a fruit attains a “super” status. Marketing and exotic appeal rather than science have given select fruits a more salubrious appeal. As most health claims however, these are based on perception rather than evidence.

One thing that superfuits do have in common, however, is a high ORAC value.

The Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) assay was developed to directly test the antioxidant capacity of biological samples. There are however many different tests of antioxidant capacity that have been developed and utilized, each with various shortcomings.

{ Nutritional Blogma | Continue reading }

drawing { Ellsworth Kelly, Tangerine, 1964-65 }

{ Wound Man is an illustration which first appeared in European surgical texts in the Middle Ages. It laid out schematically the various wounds a person might suffer in battle or in accidents, often with surrounding or accompanying text stating treatments for the various different injuries. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Is mental illness good for you?

Mental illness is surprisingly common. About 10% of the population is affected by it at any one time and up to 25% suffer some kind of mental illness over their lifetime. This has led some people (many people in fact) to surmise that it must exist for a reason – in particular that it must be associated with some kind of evolutionary advantage.  Indeed, this is a popular and persistent idea both in scientific circles and in the general public. 

Such theories come in two main varieties – the first, that mental illness confers some specific advantage to those afflicted; and second, that the mutations which cause mental illness in one person’s genetic background may confer an advantage when they are in a different genetic background (balancing selection).

{ Wiring the brain | Continue reading }

Can psychiatry be a science?

You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new. Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. (…) After a week, you have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning. After two weeks, you have a hard time getting out of the house. You go see a doctor. The doctor hears your story and prescribes an antidepressant. Do you take it?

However you go about making this decision, do not read the psychiatric literature. Everything in it, from the science (do the meds really work?) to the metaphysics (is depression really a disease?), will confuse you. There is little agreement about what causes depression and no consensus about what cures it.

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

photo { Ujin Lee Dust }