Here’s what we are reading today:
“Another study looking at people’s ability to make conscious decisions in waking life as well as during lucid and non-lucid dreams found a large degree of overlap between volitional abilities when we are awake and when we are having lucid dreams. However, the ability to plan was considerably worse in lucid dreams compared to wakefulness.
Lucid and non-lucid dreams certainly feel subjectively different and this might suggest that they are associated with different patterns of brain activity. But confirming this is not as easy as it might seem. Participants have to be in a brain scanner overnight and researchers have to decipher when a lucid dream is happening so that they can compare brain activity during the lucid dream with that of non-lucid dreaming.”
“To find relevant stories, the researchers sorted through 20 million blog posts using software developed at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
“We wanted to know how people tell stories in their daily lives. It was kind of like finding stories in their natural habitat,” said Kaplan, assistant research professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.”
““The problem with sleep studies is that they are technically difficult and expensive, which limits the number of mice that can be studied,” says Hiroki Ueda of RIKEN QBiC, who led the research published in Cell Reports.
The low cost and ease of use of the Snappy Sleep Stager allowed the researchers to accurately test a new mouse genetic modification system, the next-generation triple CRISPR method.
“The major advance of our method is the efficiency,” says Kenta Sumiyama, a co-first author from RIKEN QBiC. “Our goal was more than 90% efficiency and we achieved that. Now our goal is to be able to completely knock out any gene we want.””
““Most or perhaps all of the behaviors present in birds today originated in nonbird dinosaurs,” says Darren Naish, a paleontologist at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. “If these scrape marks are really what the authors say they are, this study is pretty compelling support for that contention.”:
“The findings, described online Dec. 31, 2015, inNeurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, show that the “window of opportunity” for recovering motor function after a stroke isn’t permanently closed after brain damage from an earlier stroke and can reopen under certain conditions, in conjunction with rapid rehabilitation efforts.
The investigators strongly emphasize that their experiments do not and will never make a case for inducing strokes as a therapy in people with stroke disability. But they do suggest the mammalian brain may be far more “plastic” in such patients, and that safe and ethical ways might be found to better exploit that plasticity and reopen the recovery window for people who have never fully regained control of their motor movements.
“If we can better understand how to reopen or extend the optimal recovery period after a stroke, then we might indeed change how we treat patients for the better,” says Steven Zeiler, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “”
“Study leader, Jenny Read, Professor of Vision Science said: “Despite their minute brains, mantises are sophisticated visual hunters which can capture prey with terrifying efficiency. We can learn a lot by studying how they perceive the world.
“Better understanding of their simpler processing systems helps us understand how 3D vision evolved, and could lead to possible new algorithms for 3D depth perception in computers.”
“”It is impossible to explain enormous variations in age at maturity and other developmental milestones just by looking at differences in this daily rhythm,” said Dr. Timothy Bromage, a professor of Biomaterials & and of Basic Science & Craniofacial Biology at the New York University College of Dentistry. “This suggests that another biological timing mechanism is at work.”
Through metabolomic analysis of blood plasma, Dr. Bromage and his team, have for the first time, linked these variations to another biological timing mechanism operating on multi-day (multidien) rhythms of growth and degradation. The findings were published today in the online journal PLOS ONE.”
8 Comments
BrittanyNelson · January 27, 2016 at 7:26 pm
I find sleep studies to be very interesting. However, one question that comes to mind is the interference the equipment needed for sleep studies can have on the normal sleep cycle. I, for one, would not feel very comfortable falling asleep with electrodes or something of the like attached to my head. I worry that this added stress could interfere with the quality of sleep that night. I would like to look into further research on how this might effect, if at all, the brain activity recorded.
hannahphelps · February 24, 2016 at 12:23 pm
Although difficult and expensive to conduct experiments on and study, what we know about sleep and dreaming is extremely interesting. I found it especially interesting that the ability to use one’s will/have power over our actions is prevalent in both our waking state and in lucid dreaming. I had no idea this was a reality for when we are in lucid dreams. This article mentions that what lucid dreaming lacks, though, is the ability to plan. I am curious as to how we have a degree of volitional abilities but cannot simultaneously achieve planning skills.
bailey_arthur · May 23, 2016 at 8:27 pm
The article about morals displays the importance of values in cultures and to a person. There are different parts of the brain that are activated when there are values in the story and that to me makes me think that our values are somewhat ingrained into our brain. Even though the values vary in cultures, the activation in the network of the brain is still present. Values are part of us and can be triggered by are not always permanent. I can think of many ways in which my ideas about my own personal values and morals change due to my environment. Because I am in an individualistic culture, my own personal values really are important to me and the values of my culture are somewhat less important to me because our cultural is not always morally sound in my eyes. I wonder if you could detect those differences of importance placed on morals and values in scans and tests eventually.
Bcrowley712 · May 31, 2016 at 7:27 am
The article on Lucid Dreaming was very intriguing to me. I was actually really surprised at how rare it is to lucid dream: only half of humans will have at least one in their lives. That is extremely uncommon. It is also interesting to me that lucid dreamers can control their eye movements when in REM to show that they are dreaming, and that those dreams cause different wavelengths. I often dream about reality, however I am not sure whether I have had a lucid dream or not. It would be interesting to have one because controlling your unconscious sounds incredibly fascinating.
alexandrabush · May 31, 2016 at 12:06 pm
Sleep experiments have always been very interesting to me. I did not know that a difference between wakefulness and lucid dreaming was the ability to plan. It is crazy how similar the two states are because of the power over our actions. I wonder why we can’t plan during lucid dreaming. I am sure we all find the answer to this eventually.
kaylabakhshi · June 5, 2016 at 2:24 pm
RE: lucid dreaming!
I actually recently met someone in a Rideshare who had just graduated from UCSC for psychology and somehow we got into talking about lucid dreaming. He said that it was something he was super interested in, and after keeping a dream journal for a while, lucid dreaming is something he is aspiring to do. He tries drawing an “X” on his hand before going to bed, that way if he looks down at his hand and sees the “X” on it, then he can control the dream. So far, it hasn’t worked but it is something he is still working on. I personally have never lucid dreamed before either, but it would be really cool to experience.
kaylabakhshi · June 5, 2016 at 2:29 pm
RE: Stroke window of recovery
Usually, this is something I would skip right over, but just this past friday night, my grandma had her second stroke, and it really interested me that there could be a possibility in helping recovery. One of the sad things about strokes and other mental conditions is that even if the person survives, you know that their brain is still diminishing because of the damage it may have caused. Therefore, if we can figure out a way to bring that person back up to even more than 50% of their original motor functions, that could be really great.
kmmenden · February 17, 2017 at 3:21 pm
I read the article about the shorter sleep gene. I have always been a person who needs lots of sleep. I need at least 9 hours to feel fully rested the next day and people have always made fun of me! Well, it seems maybe they have different genes than I that lead them to only need 6/7/8 hours of sleep a night and still be fully functional. It’s interesting that they have found a way to do sleep studies non-invasively and on a larger scale than before.