|
|
| |
|
Best veiw with
Firefox 3
|
|
|
Sleeping Soothes the Heart
Sleep deprivation helps create the lack of ability to control our
limbic brain functions. The word emotions is used in this article in a
curious and vague way, as emotions are far from being understood, which
is another primitive element humans are dealing with poorly.
 |
Emotions run amok in sleep-deprived brains
23 October 2007 - Agencies - chinadaily.com
Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains
dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.
"When we're sleep deprived, it's really as if the brain is reverting
to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans
normally have over their emotions," said researcher Matthew Walker, a
neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Anyone who has ever gone without a good night's sleep is aware that
doing so can make a person emotionally
irrational. While past studies have revealed that sleep loss
can impair the immune system and brain processes such as
learning and memory, there has been
surprisingly little research into why sleep deprivation affects
emotions, Walker said.
Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal
sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35
hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in
volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while
they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such
as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly
negative in tone over time -- for
instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.
"While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would
overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn't predict they'd overreact
as much as they did," Walker said. "They became more than 60 percent
more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That's a whopping
increase -- the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok."
| Comment: It may be
that other factors are also contributing to the reactions recorded
that are related to programming, such as education, television,
movies, entertainment, games, media, etc. |
The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown
of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions
under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution,
"and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain
biological extremes," Walker speculated. "Human beings are one of
the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It's a real
oddity in nature."
In modern life, people often deprive themselves of sleep "almost on a
daily basis," Walker said. "Alarm bells should be ringing about that
behavior -- no pun intended."
Future research can focus on which components of sleep help restore
emotional stability -- "whether it's dreaming REM sleep or slow-wave,
non-dreaming forms of sleep," Walker said.
Many psychiatric disorders, "particularly ones involving emotions,
seem to be linked with abnormal sleep," he added. "Traditionally
people mostly thought the psychiatric disorders were contributing to
the sleep abnormalities, but of course it could be the other way
around. If we can find out which parts of sleep are most key to
emotional stability, we already have a good range of drugs that can
push and pull at these kinds of sleep and
maybe help treat certain kinds of psychiatric conditions."
| Comment: Push and
pull? This article was doing so well. Taking drugs to be able to
be asleep or to be awake is nonsense and dangerous. Playing with
humans like they are mice in China are we? |
The findings are detailed in the Oct. 23 issue of the journal
Current Biology.
|
|
|
The
The
Labors in the Spirits of
Science
Living on the Lost Planet 
