Movie Review 14: Inception

Inception is a tough film to write about for two reasons.  First of all, it has a complicated plot with twists and turns can be difficult to conceptualize, let alone vocalize (or in this case, literalize). Second, explaining key plot elements requires spoiling parts of the story, and I don't plan to do that.

The bottom line is that Inception is a good film.  It's worth seeing on the big screen, but the effects aren't so grandiose that it requires an Imax experience.  If you miss it in the theater, don't worry; it's still worth seeing on DVD.

Critics have compared its mind-bending properties to Memento and Mulholland Dr. I haven't seen Memento so I can't comment on that.  Inception is a better film than Mulholland Dr, however.  The story, while complex, is also more compelling.

Inception follows a team of "extractors" as they pursue their schemes.  Extractors can share and and enter the dreams of other people.  They do this for the purpose of corporate espionage.  In Inception, someone hires the extractors to implant an idea in someone's subconscious through their dreams so they think it's their own idea.

The surprises and plot twist come from the nature of dreams.  The characters have to be aware of whether they are dreaming or awake, and the audience needs to keep track of the various dream states as well.

It's a great premise and the story telling is, for the most part, quite strong.

The effects in the dream worlds are impressive in their execution, but disappointing in their vision.  While it's important for the dreamer to not see things that reveal to them that they are dreaming, the fact is that people's "normal" dream worlds -- that which they accept as real at that moment and without question -- are a lot weirder and more creative that those envisioned in Inception.  The mundanaity of most of the dream worlds detracts from their credibility in the film.

The bigger flaw with the film is the use of the characters. It's hard to keep track or who is whom once the action starts flying. While a few of the main characters are easy to distinguish, others blend into one another.  They're simply not drawn in enough detail to make it easy to tell them apart and understand what they are doing in different scenes.

The other problem with the way the movie draws the characters is that I'm not sure why most of the them are there.  In many "scheme" films, a leader assembles his or her team.  Each team member has a distinct role, and we get to see each of them execute their role.  In the TV world, shows like Leverage and Mission Impossible are prime examples of this.

With Inception, that doesn't happen. Some of them appear to have roles, but those roles don't necessarily carry through the film.  Additionally, while some of them may have a clear prep role in the plan, when they move to the execution stage, I'm not sure why everyone who participates is actually participating in that execution.

The action in the dream worlds is fairly easy to follow for the most part, though I did start to lose track once we got to what resembles Hoth.  Again I think part of the reason for this is that I had already started to lose track of who was whom and what they were doing.

Despite those concerns, this is still a very good movie, and it's one well worth seeing.

I guess it's bedtime

The other night I made significant progress in Super Mario Galaxy 2.  But I guess I was playing kind of late.  You know it's time to put down the controller and go to bed when the game is telling to put down the controller and go to bed.

Okay, it was 4:AM, but still...

Sleep 11: Naps for better memory

Today while waiting for my plane to reach the magic 10,000 feet, I did some of my back reading in Scientific American. I was a little surprised when they were talking about what the next President should do. I thought, "Have they given up on Obama already?!" Then I realized I was reading the May 2008 issue.

Regardless, they reported a sleep study that may have shown that a 6 minute nap has a significant, positive impact on memory. This study, like many others, reinforces the idea that sleep is not a time for the brain to shut down. Rather, it is a time for the brain to engage in alternate information processing tasks when it's not distracted by things like the conscious world.

The subjects in Lahl’s study reported to the university’s sleep lab at 1 p.m. They were given two minutes to memorize a list of 30 words and tested on their recall an hour later. In the interim, they either stayed awake, took a six-minute nap or a longer snooze averaging 35 minutes. On no sleep, subjects recalled an average of just under seven words. A short nap raised performance to more than eight. A longer nap, including some time in deeper sleep, boosted recall to more than nine words.

...

A sleeping brain is not merely on standby; it runs through a suite of complex and orderly activities. One of these is a flow of neural activity from the hippocampus, where short-term memories are formed, to the cortex, where they are stored in more durable forms—a possible reason people can remember things better on awakening. Nor is this process simply a matter of scribing data into neural tissue. Several recent studies of sleep and sleeplessness show that slumber is especially important for doing clever stuff with information, such as extracting the gist of what has been learned, combining facts in interesting ways and dealing with the day’s emotions.

“Executive thinking is particularly impaired by sleep loss,” Horne says. “You become much more blinkered in your thinking, less able to deal with novelty and less able to evaluate risk.” This is bad news for medics, shift workers and military commanders, he observes, and perhaps explains why casinos stay open all night.

... More

Not everyone agrees, and the article does cite some skeptics of the study.

It's a reasonably short article and accessible to the non-scientist reader. You can see the whole thing here.

Sleep 10: Genes, sleep, and age-related disorders

(Thanks to LDK in STL for sending me this article)

I rolled back into my hotel room this evening at about 8:30, and by 9:00 my body simply demanded, "SLEEP!"

It's to be expected. After getting just 3 hours of sleep the night before, 5 hours the night before that, and 2 hours the night before that, it was bound to happen. So I set my alarm for a few hours, got up just after midnight, refreshed enough to once again start typing.

I don't adhere to those patterns every day, but my sleep routine is bizarre enough that the concept of Sleep itself is one I continue to find fascinating.

This article from the Record at Washington University in St Louis (a school known for producing brilliant astronomer/educators in the early-mid 90s) discusses research that identifies the mechanism linking the circadian rhythm to age-related disorders such as diabetes.

"Our study establishes a detailed scheme linking metabolism and aging to the circadian rhythm," said one of the lead authors, Shin-ichiro Imai, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and of developmental biology. "This opens the door to new avenues for treating age-related disorders and ways to restore a healthy daily circadian rhythm. It also could yield new interventions to alleviate metabolic disorders such as obesity and diabetes."

...More

It's an interesting idea. But now I face my scientific article conundrum. I have some problems with the article. It appears to make some assumptions that it doesn't justify. Perhaps the actually scientific study addresses these concerns, and the article writers simply drop them for the sake of brevity and simplicity. Unfortunately, those shortfalls lead me to question the credibility of the data, even though it may be sound.

Of course, bloggers drop further details as we comment on articles about scientific papers, leading to further bastardization of the material.

This phenomenon leads to a lot of bad science writing for mass consumption, and that can drown out the good science writing. Unfortunately, bad writing about science encourages people to question what may actually be sound scientific principles and studies.

Speculating even further (and contributing more to the problem myself) I wonder how much of the controversy surrounding human-made global climate change can be attributed to simply bad interpretation of actual scientific study. But that's a topic for another post.

In the meantime, I'm just going to go ahead and exacerbate the problem myself. It's much easier than providing an actual solution.

The article leads off by saying:

All animals, including humans, have an internal 24-hour clock or circadian rhythm that creates a daily oscillation of body temperature, brain activity, hormone production and metabolism.

...More

I may be nitpicking here, but that's not quite true. While there is a definite circadian rhythm that governs the body's wake/sleep cycle, it's not a 24-hour rhythm. It fluctuates and we routinely force it into a 24-hour cycle (through alarm clock, prime time TV schedules, and the general mechanisms of modern life).

Other studies have shown that the actual rhythm runs about 25-hours. Studies in Germany in the late 60/early 70s isolated people in underground bunkers, removing all artificial time cues (such as clocks) and natural time cues (such as the sun).

Over the course of the experiment, almost all of the people settled into a 25-hour cycle, gradually falling out of sync with above-ground dwellers on a standard 24-hour cycle. Interestingly, a small percentage of them developed a cycle that was closer to 48-hours, often staying awake and active for very long stretches of time. However, their body temperatures still fluctuated on cycle that was close to 25 hours.

...More

When left to my own devices, I seem to drift onto a 36 hour wake/sleep cycle, but that's just me.

The article that kicked off this post deals with the gene SIRT1:

SIRT1 influences glucose breakdown and production, cholesterol metabolism, fat burning, and insulin sensitivity. Increasing the activity of proteins related to SIRT1 extends the life span of yeast, worms and flies. SIRT1 is activated when calories are restricted below normal, which has been shown to extend the life spans of some laboratory animals until food becomes more readily available.

...More

In order for SIRT1 to work, it relies on a chemical called NAD.

In mice, the researchers found a daily oscillation of the metabolite NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), an important compound that is the body's way of exchanging energy and moving it where it's needed. Previously, scientists believed the amount of NAD in cells stayed fairly constant.

...More

While the chemical is a natural one produced by the human body, the name makes me wonder how smoking/tobacco consumption influences this process.

Regardless, the research in this article found that the body does not produce a consistent amount of NAD. Instead, the production is tied directly to the clock genes, and therefore subject to the wake/sleep cycle. At different points in the circadian cycle, the body produces more or less of it.

The researchers found that this NAD rhythm was linked to the daily rise and fall of the activity of "clock" genes, those that serve as the gears that run the body's internal clock. They discovered that the clock genes directly interact with a biochemical process that produces NAD.

NAD is required for SIRT1 to function, suggesting that SIRT1 activity increased and decreased along with NAD oscillation in the mice. Since SIRT1 is known to inhibit the clock genes, the cycle of its activity feeds back into the clock mechanism.

...More

In other words, the sleep cycle influences NAD production, which impacts the functioning of the SIRT1 genes, which in turn influences glucose and insulin production and cholesterol breakdown. It impacts things like aging, obesity, and diabetes.

And tying it all back to the beginning of the cycle, SIRT1 activity also impacts the clock genes and the circadian rhythm, which in turn impacts NAD production, and we are once again, off to the races.

So that's my contribution to bad science writing and likely my misinterpretation of data. Since this research was mainly about the mechanism involved, it may not provide actionable information. Follow-on research will be needed for that.

My speculation would be that this would be relevant to other studies which have demonstrated a link between obesity and lack of adequate sleep. It may provide further insight to the nature of the link and exactly what the cause/effect relationship is.

And perhaps it could lead to a deeper unstanding of or treatment for diabetes. Or perhaps even aging itself.

But for now, it's time to go to bed.

Sleep 09: Spring Cleaning

I found this article linked on Fark.com.

Sleep: Spring Cleaning For The Brain?

ScienceDaily (Apr. 11, 2009) — If you've ever been sleep-deprived, you know the feeling that your brain is full of wool.

Now, a study published in the April 3 edition of the journal Science has molecular and structural evidence of that woolly feeling — proteins that build up in the brains of sleep-deprived fruit flies and drop to lower levels in the brains of the well-rested. The proteins are located in the synapses, those specialized parts of neurons that allow brain cells to communicate with other neurons.
...
Higher levels of these synaptic proteins during waking may be evidence of random experiences that fill the brain every day and need to be dissipated to make room for the learning and memories that are truly significant.

"Much of what we learn in a day, we don't really need to remember," Cirelli says. "If you've used up all the space, you can't learn more before you clean out the junk that is filling up your brain."

...More

Researching are reporting that one purpose of sleep is to clear out synapses. Experiments on flys show that after they've been awake for a while, synapses are larger, and have a higher quantities of proteins associated with those synapses.

In subjects that were well rested, scientists discovered lower levels of proteins and weaker synapses.

In essence, the purpose of sleep is to clean out and reset the nervous system.

My understanding from the article (and parts of it did go over my head (I'm in a large synapse phase right now)) is that throughout the day, the nerves in the brain transmit more and more data. As they do that, the synapses (space between nerve endings) grow and more proteins accumulate. To effectively transmit data then requires more proteins and stronger neuron firing. As this cycle increases, that puts greater stress on the nerves and requires greater physical resources to continue transmitting data.

Though I may be misunderstanding something.

Sleep is therefore biologically necessary in order to promote a properly functioning nervous system. By sleeping and resetting the nerves, the body cleans out a days accumulation of junk.

It's an interesting thought. I would be interested though, in understanding how this process relates to dreaming. It seems that in dreams and deeper levels of sleep, the brain is anything but inactive. With significant internal brain activity, does the nervous system really have time to reboot? Extended sleep without REM or dreaming isn't healthy. It doesn't refresh the body in the long term. Yet, this theory would seem to indicate that lower activity to allow for clearing out the cobwebs is what is called for.

It continues to amaze me that a process that occupies 1/4 to 1/3 of our entire lives is still largely a mystery to us. Between the normal sleep process, sleep disorders, and the entire process of dreaming, there are few concrete answers. Other than, of course, that we generally need it.

More of my musings on Sleep are available here.

SAGE!

A few days ago I woke up with the word "sage" screaming in my head.

I have no idea why.

I like sage. It has a strong, woody flavor and a wonderful scent. It's perennial, which means it keeps growing for several years. You don't have to replant it every season.

The robust Mediterranean herb is easy to grow in containers. It stands up surprisingly well to both over watering and drying out.

Have you had Fried Sage leaves? Heat up some oil in a frying pan and drop the leaves in. They fry up quickly and crisply. Take them out after just a few moments (15-30 seconds), and add salt.

The GF suggests waiting for them to be slightly translucent and instead of regular Kosher Salt, try a little Fluer De Sel.

The soft green leaves turn into light, crispy snacks that make for great appetizers or TV snacks. It's a nice alternative to potato chips. If you find yourself with extra sage leaves, give it a try.

But whether you add a few leaves to chicken, stuff a turkey's cavity with it, or shred it for a steak, sage is a great herb to play with.

But that still doesn't explain why I woke with "sage" exploding loudly in my head. I don't recall any plant related dreams. Or oil related dreams, for that matter. My existing sage plants are still in good shape. And it's not like my alarm clock calls our random plant names.

Fortunately, while this outburst rocked the inside of my skull, it didn't actually come through my larynx. It was a silent shout.

Can you imagine the neighbors calling the police? "Um yeah. There's some guy screaming about herbs next door...No, not that kind of herb...Yes, the other kind. Here -- Listen:"

[Through the wall] "Mint! Sage! Sage! Oregano! Rosemary! Basil! Spider Plant! Basil!"

Have you ever woken up with with a random thought banging against your temple trying to burst out? Was it garden related?

And how do you use your sage?

Sleep 08: Partial Sleep

Waking up for me is a process. I've learned to allot plenty of time for it.

Usually the first alarm will go off and I'll ignore it. It will blare for several minutes before some corner of my brain realizes that sound is from "out there" and it's not actually part of that weird cat in my dream. That part of my brain is sharp enough to engage my arm, which will they flail wildly, whacking at different stuff on my night stand.

Eventually I strike the alarm and all is quiet for 9 minutes.

Then it blares again. This time, other parts of my brain have started to come on line, and we can dispense with the dream illusion. That snooze button is more directly targeted now, and the alarm is quiet in seconds, rather than minutes.

At least for the next 9 minutes.

This time when it comes on, the pseudo-rational parts of my brain have started to come on line. I know have a chance to actually "wake up." They look at the facts and determine:

• It's comfortable in bed.
• I don't have to be up for another 15 minutes.
• If I don't check my email, I can sleep for 20 more minutes.
• It's comfortable in bed.
• The only responsible thing to do is hit the snooze button again.

Now, if I'm lucky, that's all that happens. If the mischievous parts of my brain have started their boot up sequence, there's a chance they'll interfere and say, "It's okay. You're awake. Turn off the alarm. Just curl up in those blankets for 2 minutes -- that's all. Then you can get up."

Those lying bastards.

Around this time, my cell phone alarm will start going off. That emergency back up is just right for these circumstances.

Eventually, enough of my brain fires up that I can get out of bed, 30 minutes later than I wanted to, but still early enough to be on time.

So is this whole process my imagination?

Not quite, according to a recent study on sleep at Washington State University. I found out about this through a post on Loud Noises, Big Plans! It's a fascinating concept.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the researchers say, there’s no control center in your brain that dictates when it’s time for you to drift off to dreamland. Instead, sleep creeps up on you as independent groups of brain cells become fatigued and switch into a sleep state even while you are still (mostly) awake. Eventually, a threshold number of groups switch and you doze off.

Lead author James Krueger said the view of sleep as an “emergent property” explains familiar experiences that the top-down model doesn’t, such as sleepwalking, in which a person is able to navigate around objects while being unconscious, and sleep inertia, the sluggishness we feel upon waking up in the morning.

...

If sleep were being directed by a control center, the whole brain would respond at the same time, said Krueger. Instead, it behaves like a self-directing orchestra in which most sections are more-or-less in sync, but a few race ahead or lag behind at any given time.

During sleepwalking, he said, the neuronal groups needed for balance are in a wake state while those needed for consciousness are in a sleep state. Conversely, in sleep inertia, enough neuronal groups are in a wake state for you to be awake in a general sense, but some groups are still in a sleep state—enough to hamper your ability to perform tasks.

“Everybody has sleep inertia every morning,” said Krueger. “It takes 30 minutes to an hour to recuperate from being asleep” and get all your neuronal groups up and running.

... More

You can also find the actual paper here, but it looks like it costs $32.

It's a fascinating concept -- the idea that the body's sleep system is not controlled from one point, but rather is more loosely coordinated. Different groups or functions can enter a sleep state even if the whole thing does not.

It's analogous to how modern computers work. They can shut down peripherals, components, or even individual parts of the processor to save power, and yet still run.

Or a house that gives light. Sure, it starts giving out light when you turn on the lights in one room, but it doesn't offer the full spread and volume of light until the lights are on in every room. In the same way, a person is not fully functional until they have turned on all the aspects of the nervous system.

And it helps explain why I just can't get it through my head to wake up when that first alarm goes off. There's no one switch to flip. There's dozens.

And it's really comfy under my blankets.

Book Review 32: Bedtime Stories

I was happy. I loved the night, I loved it so much it almost hurt. In the night everything seemed possible. I wasn't sleepy at all.

Page 112

Banana Yoshimoto's "Asleep" is a short novel made up of 3 stories. They are "Night and Night's Travelers," "Love Songs," and "Asleep."

The book is a quick read, but those few pages transport the reader to another world. Yoshimoto's meditations on the night and her descriptions of sleep as a force resonated strongly with me. While I haven't had the experiences here characters have, the world they live in both frighteningly and reassuringly real.

The common thread in these stories is that people are stuck in a transition phase in their life. They are waiting for a morning that never seems to come, until they do what it takes to make the sun rise themselves.

In the first story, Yoshimoto tells the story of one woman's night wanderings after the death of lover. The woman's cousin is the one telling the story.

The narrator describes her cousin the way:

Looking at her, you had the feeling that she existed in some way more real than any of the other people in the crowds waiting for the plane -- that she more thoroughly filled the space she occupied.

Page 23

This is an interesting choice. By choosing to tell the story through the cousin's eyes, we get a bit of distance from the actual heart break and we can look on the heart broken woman with a melancholy that might not have been possible had she told the story herself. There would have been too much self-pity.

It's also easier to see how the world continues to spin, despite the tragedy that comes in to people lives.

Yoshimoto's describes another character this way:

But Sarah was still enough of a child that she could have such dreams, and she had enough leeway to do so. The courage of a person who has no fear of the future.

Page 8

In Yoshimoto's stories, the night itself is a character. She describes the night as a force that engulfs the day. And what many people see as fearful, Yoshimoto describes as comforting.

It was that time of the evening, when off in the distance the other bank of the river is just beginning to drop away into the darkness of night. Soon the halo of light that always hung over the town at night would be reflected in the river, and even now the clear air was gradually filling with indigo, the indigo air drifted up, so that you almost felt as if you were seeing the air itself. The sky gleamed ever so faintly with the last traces of daylight, and everything was blurred, difficult to distinguish. Everything was beautiful.

Page 10-11

Like in the passage I opened this article with, Yoshimoto sees the night as something truly special. Even though it happens as often as day, there is something precious about it. That appreciation for the night makes these stories possible.

Another passage I liked in this story is her description here:

The lobbies of these giant hotels always feel deserted. It doesn't matter how crowded they really are; the feeling is a fundamental part of these places, it drifts through every corner.

Page 45

The contrast with the night is striking. Whereas the night is a place of possibility, the bustling hotel lobby, with people running everywhere, may as well be a dead space.

In the second story, Yoshimoto's character has trouble sleeping and begins to think back to a woman she knew before -- a woman with whom she competed for the attention of a man.

She once stormed out after a fight with this woman and described her this way:

Her small, tackily made-up face was half hidden by her long hair. I noticed how lovely and insubstantial she looked when you saw her from a distance. Without saying a word, I closed the door.

Page 84

In comparison to the first story, we see a character drifting slightly out of our reality, as opposed to being more firmly real than most other people.

As the story goes on, we learn this woman has died, and the main character has to come to terms with that relationship.

While the first two stories in the book are great, the third story is in another league. In this one, Yoshimoto's main character has trouble staying awake. She is dating a married man whose wife is in a coma. Her life is stuck in neutral because the man won't leave his wife, and still has deal with her relatives. As time goes on, the main character finds her self sleeping more and more, as there is little else for her to do.

Sleep would rush over me like an incoming tide. There was nothing I could do to resist it. And this sleep was infinitely deep, so deep that neither the ringing of the phone nor the rumble of the cars driving by outside found their way to my ears. I didn't feel any sort of pain; I wasn't even particularly lonely. Nothing existed but the free-falling world of sleep.

Page 107

This story is a fascinating exploration of her consciousness, her lover's relationship with his wife, and what happens when there is nothing to do.

Yoshimoto fills the story with descriptions of this woman's decent into the bowels of sleep, the stories of her friend's negotiations with sleep, and the relationship with a guilt-ridden husband.

One of the narrators friends also has a peculiar job. It's sort of a sleep prostitute. It's not a sexual gig; her job is to stay awake while the client sleeps, and attend to their needs should they wake up. It's to provide comfort and take on the person's burdens. I seem to recall a character having this same sort of job in a Haruki Murakami novel, but it's not something I've heard about in American literature.

The story also spawned this line which stuck me as oddly philosophical:

Photocopying requires almost no time at all when you take it seriously.

Page 169

I'm going to have to give that some more thought one of these days.

Yoshimoto has a beautiful way of telling odd stories about people. The plot in these stories doesn’t go far, but it does go deep into the characters. Her characters are different -- they are not like everyone else in the world. But that's what makes them interesting. And while she does leave most things unresolved, it's okay, because they're supposed to be that way -- people need to work their way through these intense issues in their lives.

Yoshimoto's descriptions of the night, the non-physical world, and places throughout the book are magical and compelling. And the book is over far too quickly.

I heartily recommend Asleep. It's a quick read with some lovely characters and vivid descriptions. It deals with issues of sleep, death, and, most importantly, going on to live life in the morning.




You can find more of my Book Reviews here.

Sleep 07: Broken sleep

I read Fark fairly regularly. It's informative, entertaining, random, and offensive. It can also be a huge time suck.

Tonight, I ran across this link to an article on Yahoo! It basically says that if you don't get enough sleep every night, you will die. The article is interesting and worth a read, although it does seem to confuse cause with effect.

The useful content is actually in the Fark discussion thread about the article. It takes a turn for the serious while some users seek help and others offer advice about sleeping problems.

Sleep apnea. Depression. Insomnia. Not being able to fall asleep. Being tired throughout the day. They're all in there. If you think the way you sleep is different, or broken, someone else may have a similar experience. I'd suggest reading through the thread.

There is some advice about sleep hygiene, but the key thing that most users suggest is that if you have issues with sleep, you should tell your doctor yesterday. They can help, and life can get much better.

The walkaround

Before every flight, one of the Pilots climbs down to the tarmac and inspects the airplane. They walk around, shine a flash light and poke their heads in spots.

I always thought this was rather pointless. Sure, it makes sense on a tiny aircraft where the main altimeter is your ear drums, but why do it on an airliner? Are they checking to see if they engines are there? I think there's an instrument for that. If there's anything wrong won't they see it in the cockpit? They've got more gauges and dials in there than a rotary phone factory.

And if the problem doesn't show up on their instruments, is a guy with epilets on his shirt and a tie going to see it while walking around the aircraft?

Apparently, yes.

What I though was an outdated FAA inspection procedure, or just good, old-fashioned tradition caused a 2.5 hour delay today.

I was on Alaska flight 382 from SEA to Orange County today. As we were getting settled, the pilot announced that the co-pilot found something during the walk around. There was a big dent in the horizontal stabilizer (the small wing at the back of the plane). And that dent could mess with the planes aerodynamics.

It was probably caused by a bird strike or foreign object on the runway when they landed. Regardless of the cause, before plane number N562AS could take off, the mechanics had to measure the dent.

A few minutes later the pilot announced they were working on it. I was in row 2 and got to hear some of the discussion. Apparently, the mechanics were using a magic marker in the process. I'm not sure why, but then again, I barely know what a horizontal stabilizer is so I'll take their word for it. I nodded off.

I woke up in my seat two hours later as they made another announcement about the delay. They were still working on it. Apparently the dent was big enough that they actually had to fix it. Don't you hate it when that happens your two year old aircraft? In the US fleet that's practically brand new.

They allowed people to get off to stretch and get food. I tried to go back to sleep. Unfortunately so many people got off they asked us all to get off, so it would be easier to check everyone back in when we reboarded. So it was official: nap time was over.

We deplaned, and then reboarded a half hour later. The rest of the flight was without adventure, and we reached SNA 157 minutes late.

Which is fine. Because incredibly forgettable flights are what most of us are looking for.

When the dreams get weird

I had one of those odd dreams last night.

I was back at a small run down amusement park / zoo that I hadn't been to in years. It was on the side of a hill with plenty of trees providing shade. It was still in passable condition, but not quite the condition I remember from my youth. The seals were still in their smallish pool, but seemed happy. The garage was still closed up and there were people wandering around doing what people do at such places.

Even the house on the property where those people were killed was just like I remember it...

Except none of that ever happened.

There's nothing trippier than remembering something in a dream that never actually happened. So apparently it's not enough for my brain to throw in random scenes while I'm asleep. Now it has to go and make up fake memories and entire back stories for those random scenes.

I should probably watch less Criminal Minds and CSI before bedtime.

Sleep

2007-05-08
Sleep 01: More Time, Less Sleep

2007-07-24
Sleep 02: Sleep is Obsolete

2007-08-19
Sleep 03: Rip Van Winkle Syndrome

2007-08-22
Sleep 04: What is it?

2007-10-03
Sleep 4.5: Cheating Sleep

2007-10-26
Sleep 05: British Sleep Walking

2007-12-28
Sleep 06: Orexin A

2008-10-20
Sleep 07: Broken sleep

2008-12-09
Sleep 08: Partial Sleep

2009-04-13
Sleep 09: Spring Cleaning

2009-06-20
Sleep 10: Genes, sleep, and age-related disorders

2009-08-07
Sleep 11: Naps for better memory

Sleep 06: Orexin A

During the summer I commented on the drug Modafinil (Provigil) and its use in replacing sleep.

Development in other sleep replacement drugs is also going on. Researchers studying narcolepsy discovered that many patients lack Orexin.

The research follows the discovery by Siegel that the absence of orexin A appears to cause narcolepsy. That finding pointed to a major role for the peptide's absence in causing sleepiness. It stood to reason that if the deficit of orexin A makes people sleepy, adding it back into the brain would reduce the effects, said Siegel.

"What we've been doing so far is increasing arousal without dealing with the underlying problem," he said. "If the underlying deficit is a loss of orexin, and it clearly is, then the best treatment would be orexin."

Initial research on monkeys is promising:

The monkeys were deprived of sleep for 30 to 36 hours and then given either orexin A or a saline placebo before taking standard cognitive tests. The monkeys given orexin A in a nasal spray scored about the same as alert monkeys, while the saline-control group was severely impaired.

The study, published in the Dec. 26 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience, found orexin A not only restored monkeys' cognitive abilities but made their brains look "awake" in PET scans.

... More

Assuming the product has few side affects and is not addictive, the potential gains in personal productivity are staggering.

The full article appears on Wired.

Vacation Time

At 11:59 PM tonight, I wrapped up my last major work project for the year. I slept only 4 of the last 36 hours to get things wrapped up. And it feels good.

I'm now done until 2008-01-03. It's a nice break. I tend to push most of my vacation to the end of the year and then just grab some rest. I like what I do, but it's always nice to not have to do anything for a few weeks.

Of course, I'll still log in to the work email from time to time to make sure there's nothing major to deal with. But that will be only a small part of my day for the next couple of weeks. And those quick checks, which almost always prove to me that everything is fine, do help me relax.

So what does the frequent business traveler do on vacation? Apparently, I'm about to get on a plane...

Hotel Bedding

Hotels have been replacing much of their bedding in recent years. In addition to getting rid of those nasty comforters that have never been washed (don't think about it too hard), they are bringing in new sheets, pillows, and blankets.

I don't know a lot about fancy bedding. I never heard of pillow shams until about 5 years ago.

So can someone tell me what this pillow is for?

The cover isn't easily washable, and it's too hard to sleep on. And it's too rigid to be useful in a pillow fight. All I've come up with is that maybe it supposed to protect a small area of the carpet where I toss it each night.

Bedtime shouldn't be so confusing.

Sleep 05: British sleep walking

Studies have found that sleepwalking can be brought on by stress, alcohol, eating cheese or consuming too much caffeine. It generally takes effect an hour or two after going to bed, when people are first slipping into a deep sleep.

Cheese? Really?

Apparently, sleepwalking is on the rise in British hotels. Because of cheese.

The full article (originally found on fark) is available here.

Cheating Sleep

I planned to watch Heroes on Tivo at 2:00 AM tonight, but apparently, Tivo thinks it's crazy for people to watch TV that late, and told me it wouldn't let me watch because it was updating it self.

On Wired's How To section, they offer an introduction to polyphasic sleep, and they offer suggestions on how to get better quality sleep, even if you get few hours.

The schedules the suggest are a bit rigid for my taste. I'll stick with my 4-6 hours a night during the week and 10-12 hours a night on the weekend.

A six-year study Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep.

...More

Sleep 04: What is it?

I've been posting more about sleep these past few months. I suppose that means I should be getting more.

Regardless, WNYC's NPR program, Radio Lab, recently did a show that focused on Sleep.

Radio Lab is a fascinating series. They take a big topic like Morality, Mortality, or Sleep, and spend an hour exploring what it means from a scientific and metaphysical perspective. It's framed with two hosts chatting with one another about what they just learned about the topic. They ask questions and joke, but they do it all in a respectful and profession manner. It comes across as two guys, who love learning about things, having a conversation over a beer.

In Sleep, I found the animals stories fascinating. I learned that dolphins, for example, can put half their brain to sleep, while they other stays awake. This way they don't drown. Ducks can do the same thing. They tell the story of 4 ducks on a log. The two ducks in the middle go completely to sleep, with both eyes closed. The two on the ends, however, keep their outside eye open to watch for predators. When the do this, the half of their brain connected to the closed eye sleeps. After awhile, they get up, turn around, and let the other half sleep.

Somewhere in the evolutionary chain, land based mammals lost the ability to sleep just one hemisphere at a time. I don't know if that's a good thing.

You can download the audio from the entire show here. You can also just stream it. And, if you'd rather, you can download just individual segments.

If you like Radio Lab, you can also subscribe to the free, weekly netcast through iTunes.

It's fascinating stuff.

Sleep 03: Rip Van Winkle Syndorme

I originally found this link on Fark.com.

Apparently a rare disorder (that may be related to a bacterial or viral infection) can make teen agers sleep for weeks at a time. Medical professionals have reported some people sleeping up to a year.

The disease sounds as if it came straight out of Grimms’ fairy tales. Teens fall into a slumber, dozing weeks or even months at a stretch. Marathon sleeping spells come and go, cropping up intermittently for roughly a decade. Then, symptoms vanish as mysteriously as they first appeared.

Called Kleine-Levin syndrome, the condition is so rare that only a few cases have been reported in the world medical literature. Though the disorder is little known or understood, a flurry of recent research could change that. A few centuries ago, KLS might have been attributed to a witch’s curse. Now the hunt for its cause focuses on genes and infectious agents.

...More

Sleep is a fascinating topic. For as much time as it consumes from everybody's life, we still know shockingly little about it.

Sleep 02: Sleep is Obsolete

Well, almost.

Sleep-deprived groups ranging from truck drivers to the military have experimented with modafinil, marketed for nearly a decade by Cephalon under what Plotz calls the "creepy, pharma-Orwellian" name Provigil.

Military officials have found it so effective that some now refer to it as a "super drug." But its off-label uses have created a rich debate on how far to push the limits of the human body.

For Plotz, the results were immediate.

"I am the picture of vivacity," he wrote on Slate.com.

Even with only five hours sleep, he could write twice as fast and felt alert.

"I have a desperate urge to write, to make reporting calls and to finish my expense account – activities I religiously avoid," he wrote. "I find myself talking loudly and quickly. A colleague says I am grinning like a 'feral chipmunk.'"

...
Until now, the military has used amphetamines or "go pills" for its pilots, but the side effects of amphetamines can cause problems. Investigators blamed those drugs for a 2002 incident in which American pilots inadvertently killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.

In studies funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Cephalon, modafinil has proved to be a better drug.

Scientists treated 16 healthy subjects, depriving them of sleep for 28 hours and then expecting them to sleep from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. for four days and stay awake through the night. Those on modafinil did far better on cognitive tests than those on a sugar pill. Some could stay awake for more than 90 hours, according to Moreno.

... More

I've followed the developments on Mondafinil and Provogil for several years now. I think I first read about it when I was living in Boise in 1997.

It's an interesting concept for a drug. You don't get high. You don't get addicted. There don't appear to be long term consequences.

But you don't have to sleep. You can stay awake, alert and sharp for ridiculously long periods of time.

When I sleep on weekends or vacations, I can sleep for 10-14 hours straight with now problem. During the week, I can function well, on 5 hours a night. I can get by with the occasional alnighter and do okay on a couple of 3-4 hour nights.

And when I sleep for long periods of time, I do enjoy it.

But.

The idea of having extra hours of high productivity appeals to me. It seems there's never enough time in the day for everything I need/want to do. To get everything done and have time for myself, something has to go. And usually that something is sleep.

A product like Provigil has the potential to change things. When I forgo sleep today, I do suffer a performance penalty. I'd really like to avoid that penalty.

Is it right to take medication to alter the normal function of the body for my convenience? Is it ethical?

I used to think it wasn't. I used to think to most important thing was to rely on sheer Biology. But I've been coming around on that. Why not take advantage of the wonders of modern chemistry?

People legitimately hack their bodies all the time with. And they do it not to heal an injury but to alter they way the body functions to make their lives easier or simpler.

We see new advances in vitamins and nutrition that are anything but natural. Caffeine intake is another way many people try to push pass the limits of the body. Are the complex exercise regimens people take on natural?

And is using something like Provigil to alter human sleep patterns all that different from using birth control pill to alter the human endocrine/reproductive system?

But I haven't done anything yet. Like LASER eye surgery, I still look at Provigil with some concern about the long term effects and the possibility of addiction.

But the more I learn, the more I like what I see.