Questions tagged [sleep]
The biological process characterized by reversible unconsciousness, unresponsiveness to external stimuli and motor passivity.
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Does binge watching cause sleep problems?
According to a study from 2017, binge watching is correlated with various sleep problems:
The people who reported binge-watching were 98 percent more likely to report poor sleep quality compared with ...
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Does sleep schedule affect circadian rhythm?
During the circadian rhythm, the internal human body temperature supposedly peaks around 4-6 pm. Let us assume that the average person goes to bed around 11 pm and sleeps for 8 hours. In that case ...
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What are the data behind the claims of high predictive power of biomarker tests for sleep deprivation?
Today's (6th May) Guardian is reporting that blood tests for tiredness have achieved high predictive power:
Prof Clare Anderson, at Monash University, in Melbourne, Australia, who is leading efforts ...
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Do whales really sleep "head down"?
Currently there is a broadcast in German TV (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swarm_(TV_series)) where there was a scene of multiple whales sleeping in suspended state, vertically heads down.
The ...
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How are the receptors in the thalamus weakened/shut down during sleep?
During sleep, GABAergic inhibition of the thalamus occurs and along with that, it should "block" our senses. Are the receptors weakened, or completely shut down? If they are weakened, what ...
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How widespread among mammals is the glymphatic system's metabolite clearance in the brain during sleep currently known to be?
The glymphatic system and "brain washing" (metabolite clearance) during mammalian sleep:
Xie et al. (2013) Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain (also here) has been cited ...
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Are there any biometrics that can measure tiredness (sleepiness)?
Are there any biometrics that can estimate how tired someone is? I specifically refer to tiredness in the sense of sleepiness (as opposed to physical tiredness that might happen after a workout, for ...
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Why do people get headaches after oversleeping?
I've tried a web search, but the results are mostly non-scientific advice on good sleep etc. One link provides some explanation, but I have not noticed them providing links to that referenced research:...
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What are the essential criteria for sleep in living organisms?
I was reading this fascinating article about how sleep evolved before brains, and it got me thinking "can plants sleep" and "what is sleep anyway".
A line in the article states:
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How do people wake up just before their alarm goes off?
I can wake up less than 2 minutes before my alarm goes off regularly.
I read the common wisdom on the subject which says "circadian rhythm; PER proteins; internal clock". I am skeptical of ...
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Parts of Brain Active for Dreams | Right Hemisphere or Cortex
I found a research that states cortex is responsible for the contents of the dream. Contents could be people, place, objects etc.
The cortex is responsible for the content of dreams, including the ...
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Is once per day the optimal sleep pattern for all mammals?
If a typical human body clock is 8 hours sleep, 16 hours awake, interested to know if any mammals have:
a 12 hour body clock (4 hours sleep, 8 hours awake)
a 6 hour body clock (2 hours sleep, 4 hours ...
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Do circadian hormones fluctuations follow sleeping patterns or the time of day?
It is said that testosterone and cortisol are at their highest early in the morning, at 8 am, and lowest at night.
What happens, though, if someone regularly goes to sleep at 8 am and wakes up in the ...
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How does sleep prevent our eyes from drying out?
If we don't sleep for about 16 hours, our eyes start to get dry, and no amount of eye drops helps. You use eye drops and then you're dry 10 minutes later.
However, after you've slept for 8 hours, your ...
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Why do morning people have shorter biological clocks?
First of all, we all have a circadian clock than is run endogenously by differential gene expression and controls our change in awakeness, temperature, hormone levels, etc.. Circadian clocks are not ...
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Do lack of sleep affects the process of digestion? [closed]
Many times due to lack of sleep I felt discomfort in digestive tract.Why did it happen?Do lack of sleep affects the process of digestion?
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What is the function of dreaming? Does a particular hormone secretion interfere with dreaming? Why do some people dream more?
I'm really interested to know when we are sleeping how a series of stories come to our mind that we called this process dreaming. If you know a useful article on this topic, please tell me thanks.
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Can sleep be a barrier against aging?
I know that what I'm writing about may be a little strange, but as far as I know,when we are asleep, our human body is programmed to carry on biological functionalities in a really optimized way and ...
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Why do cats sleep in a curled up position?
I've noticed that cats will usually sleep curled up like ball, heads down and titled, with tails near their face. Is there any specific reason that cats would have a tendency to sleep this way?
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How fast do we fall asleep?
When looking at the process of sleeping, most research I find point to a group of mutually inhibitory cells which form a sort of biological "flip flop." There's cells that promote awakenness and ...
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Does sleeping fewer hours than needed cause common cold?
Does sleeping fewer hours than needed cause the common cold? If so, how?
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Why have we evolved to snore yet find snoring so annoying?
Human's snore. I doubt this is a new occurence over the last millenia. I find it hard to believe that for the past million years, no human ancestor has been a snorrer.
And yet, the sound of snoring ...
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What happens to eyelids when we feel sleepy?
Why is that whenever we feel sleepy, our eyelids start to feel heavier.
It is not like we can any time close our eyes and will immediately fall asleep. But, when we feel sleepy our eyelids ...
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Is it possible for a human being to live on a different day cycle?
I am considering writing a story where a character lives on a 30-hour day cycle.
That is, this person sleeps for 9.5 hours and is awake for 20.5 hours. Then this person repeats the schedule.
I'd ...
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If mammals evolved to be nocturnal, then how did we get so staunchly diurnal in such short time?
Much of human health revolves around sleeping well through the night. We know about circadian and body temperature rhythms which make us sleepy at night, peak melatonin production in the middle of ...
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Why do we fall asleep when our eyes are closed?
Why do we fall asleep when our eyes are closed? When we lie down with our eyes closed, eventually we'll fall asleep. Why is that? Is our eyes closing some sort of trigger to our brain that says it's ...
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How loud a sound would need to be to wake someone up?
I have been researching about this and it looks like the term would be auditory arousal threshold. Imagine you fall asleep while listening to music with earbuds. Out of a sudden, the device starts ...
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Would an h1 Full Agonist Prevent Sleep
According to Wikipedia the h1 receptors stop firing to effectively manage sleep. Assuming I understand how blocking and non blocking receptors work would a full agonist on the h1 receptors ...
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Can low melatonin levels and/or LED lights cause or exacerbate macular degeneration?
I have two questions that may or may not be interconnected. My first question is:
Does melatonin prevent macular degeneration? Could low melatonin levels (caused by blue-rich light exposure in the ...
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Delay of sleeping on cortisol cycle
I was told that cortisol has to be measured at 9am or 4pm, because those where its peak level. But I wonder if changes on sleep patters affect the cortisol cycle.
I mean, if I usually go to sleep ...
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Sound volume drop when falling asleep in an airplane
Note: This question has nothing to do with pressure change.
When I'm flying in an aircraft at cruising altitude, the monotonous sound often lulls me to sleep. I've noticed that just as I am on the ...
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Melatonin production, sleep, and "cyan light"; how might this finding be possible?
The BBC News article Cyan colour hidden ingredient in sleep describes research that suggests melatonin levels as measured in saliva could be affected by the presence or absence of cyan color in a ...
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Can varied temperature while sleeping help quality of sleep?
I read an interesting article which is about relations between body temperature and quality of sleep.
I'm interested in the phrase from the article.
Other experiments that varied the ambient ...
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Does the brain always enter alpha/beta waves upon brief awakenings during the night?
If you realize you are awake briefly before falling back asleep, have you necessarily exited REM sleep or another stage? That is, is the experience of waking briefly (tossing and turning, etc.) always ...
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What is "integrated spindle activity" in plain English?
From a research article:
To determine if a combination of spindle parameters allowed for a better group discrimination, integrated spindle activity (ISA) was calculated by integrating over time ...
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Breathing with Clogged Nose during Sleep
This just happened to me recently, I was trying to sleep with clogged nose, so I tried breathing through my mouth. As you can imagine it was hard, but I managed to sleep deeply.
So I became curious, ...
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What is the exact frequency of Delta brain waves during Slow Wave NREM Sleep?
I saw a TED talk about researchers playing pulsating pink noise while a test subject is in Stage 3 Non-REM / Slow Wave / Deep sleep and observing an increase in Delta wave EEG activity. This seems to ...
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Why is Sleep apnea only risk to males?
I was reading this article. In Risk Factors, it clearly mention "Being a male".
Why is Sleep apnea only risk to males?
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Do Vaccinium membranaceum plants need a minimum amount of darkness per 24 hours?
I have Vaccinium membranaceum (black huckleberry) seedlings growing in a greenhouse. I have the option of providing fluorescent light to the plants 24 hours a day.
However, it has occurred to me that ...
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Is it possible to have sleep paralysis while sleepwalking?
At least from a conceptual level, these two disorders don't conflict. The effect of sleep paralysis is being conscious while having the inability to consciously direct motor functions. Sleepwalking is ...
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What in the brain has gone awry during sleep paralysis?
I experience episodes of what I assume is sleep paralysis (lasting ~ 10-30 seconds) a few times a year, where I'm conscious of being somewhat awake but unable to move. I can hear, but not see, and am ...
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Can our body adapt to periodic fluctuations in sleep?
Suppose that if I've to attend a morning class then I must wake at 5 AM in morning. Next, if I don't (attend the class) then I wake up at 7-8 AM.
I've experienced that, since I do attend those ...
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Why do we need to close eyes to sleep?
Out of all our sensory organs, we need to stop taking signals explicitly only from eyes in order to sleep. Even interestingly, those who are not able to receive signals from eyes (i.e., the visually ...
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How does heart rate change when entering N1 sleep?
I would like to know how the heart rate changes as a person enters N1 (NREM 1) sleep from a wakeful state. The focus is on entering N1, and it would be great to have time-series data to see the ...
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Is there a difference between sleeping late and waking up late vs sleeping early and waking up early?
For example, if I sleep at 1 AM and wake up at 10 AM, will it negatively affect my health opposed to sleeping at 10 PM and waking up at 7 AM?
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Names for effects of sleep deprivation on the brain & body
When staying awake for a long period (3 or 4 days), some weird phenomena can occur. In my experience, it was always triggered by thinking too deeply and has in other occasions too.
Do these things ...
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What causes sleep inertia?
Sometimes after a nap, I wake up in a state of grogginess. I learned that this is actually called sleep inertia. I'm able to find lots of methods to overcome this, but what causes it in the first ...
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Origin of melatonin: oxidative stress defense OR circadian rhythm?
Question
Which functional role of melatonin came first?
Regulation of the circadian rhythm
Defense against oxidative stress
Other
Background
I was well aware of the important role melatonin plays ...
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Longest lived land mammal when subtracting sleeping time?
Recently, it has been found that wild elephants only sleep two hours per night. Wild elephants also live quite long, the median life span is 56 years. Now, 56 years lived with 2 hours sleep per day ...
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What is the term for awareness of or inclusion of real sounds within a dream?
I fell asleep while listening to a podcast, and I am sure I was dreaming but I could also still hear the podcast.
The podcast played an important role in the dream, I was searching for the source of ...
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