Neuroscience
First, a non-neuro "thank you" to The Washington Post and Mark Felt for the roles they played all those years ago. Today's lead editorial in the Post (free registration required).
Second, a "thank you" to MindHacks.com for their kind words earlier today about this blog.
Finally, an article from the new issue of The American Psychological Association Monitor about the brain during periods of fatigue:
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Anthony H. Risser | neuroscience | neuropsychology | brain
- Students: It's Time To Ditch The Pre-exam All-nighter
Lack of sleep impairs the human brain's ability to store new information in memory, researchers have found. Past research has already shown that sleep is vital for consolidating recently-learned material but now Matthew Walker and colleagues have...
- Wake Up And Smell The Coffee?
It seems to work for rats... Wonderful World of Rats Is a sniff as good as a cup of coffee? 11 June 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. DRINKING a cup of coffee can wake you up, but perhaps just a whiff of Java is enough to reverse the effects of...
- Sleep Deprivation And Learning
From the Science website: Asleep at the Memory Wheel By Greg Miller ScienceNOW Daily News 18 October 2006 ATLANTA, GEORGIA--Going a night without sleep may cause your hippocampus to go on strike. A new study has caught this crucial memory-encoding...
- Predicting Stimuli From Fmri Data
Though the headline and subhead they use are unfortunately over-dramatic, this from the BBC:'Thoughts read' via brain scans The researchers monitored activity in the brain. Scientists say they have been able to monitor people's thoughts via...
- Sleep Now
["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news] Last week, the New York Times had several articles on sleep. You can see the list at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock blog: Sleeping with the New York Times. David Corcoran of the New...
Neuroscience
Deep Throats, Hacked Minds, and Sleepy Heads
First, a non-neuro "thank you" to The Washington Post and Mark Felt for the roles they played all those years ago. Today's lead editorial in the Post (free registration required).
Second, a "thank you" to MindHacks.com for their kind words earlier today about this blog.
Finally, an article from the new issue of The American Psychological Association Monitor about the brain during periods of fatigue:
Sleepy heads[ ... Read the full article ... ]
A pilot Air Force study finds individual differences in how brains respond when tired.
BY RACHEL ADELSON
The APA Monitor
June 2005
Print version: page 20
[snip]
When on a long plane flight, do you ever wonder how fatigue affects your pilot? So does the U.S. Air Force. In the June issue of Behavioral Neuroscience (Vol. 119, No. 3), military psychologists report on a study that revealed different patterns of brain activity that corresponded with individual differences in how tired pilots performed mentally.
The study launches a new approach for research into ways to reverse the cognitive effects of sleep deprivation and to improve job safety among pilots and others who work long, demanding hours.
At the Air Force Research Laboratory at Brooks City-Base in San Antonio, a Fatigue Countermeasures Team led by John Caldwell, PhD, compared how well fighter pilots and nonpilots performed certain tasks when snooze-deprived, and related that performance to brain activity via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results are sufficiently intriguing to warrant further study with larger samples and more rigorous controls, say the researchers.
It seems that sleepy people had sleepy brains, or, more specifically, less activity in specific regions of the cortex. The Texas team also confirmed and extended previous findings that while on average, sleep deprivation hammers thinking skills, everybody's different--and no one knows why. This perplexing phenomenon prompted the Air Force psychologists to take the problem into the lab.
"As is often the case, this initial study is not perfect, but it will motivate bigger studies designed to more directly test the hypotheses," says Sean P.A. Drummond, PhD, a psychologist with the Laboratory for Sleep & Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, and the VA San Diego Healthcare System. "One of the holy grails of sleep deprivation research right now is the quest to find biological markers of individual vulnerability to sleep deprivation."
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Anthony H. Risser | neuroscience | neuropsychology | brain
- Students: It's Time To Ditch The Pre-exam All-nighter
Lack of sleep impairs the human brain's ability to store new information in memory, researchers have found. Past research has already shown that sleep is vital for consolidating recently-learned material but now Matthew Walker and colleagues have...
- Wake Up And Smell The Coffee?
It seems to work for rats... Wonderful World of Rats Is a sniff as good as a cup of coffee? 11 June 2008 From New Scientist Print Edition. DRINKING a cup of coffee can wake you up, but perhaps just a whiff of Java is enough to reverse the effects of...
- Sleep Deprivation And Learning
From the Science website: Asleep at the Memory Wheel By Greg Miller ScienceNOW Daily News 18 October 2006 ATLANTA, GEORGIA--Going a night without sleep may cause your hippocampus to go on strike. A new study has caught this crucial memory-encoding...
- Predicting Stimuli From Fmri Data
Though the headline and subhead they use are unfortunately over-dramatic, this from the BBC:'Thoughts read' via brain scans The researchers monitored activity in the brain. Scientists say they have been able to monitor people's thoughts via...
- Sleep Now
["... Now" is a short post of cog sci topics in the news] Last week, the New York Times had several articles on sleep. You can see the list at Bora Zivkovic's A Blog Around the Clock blog: Sleeping with the New York Times. David Corcoran of the New...