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According to new research presented last week at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Seattle, adequate sleep may underpin our ability to understand complex emotions properly in waking life. "Sleep essentially is resetting the magnetic north of your emotional compass," says Matthew Walker, director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
...Past research by Walker and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, which was published in the journal Current Biology, found that in people who were sleep deprived, activity in the prefrontal lobe - a region of the brain involved in controlling emotion - was significantly diminished. He suggests that a similar response may be occurring in the nap-deprived volunteers, albeit to a lesser extent, and that it may have its roots in evolution. "If you're walking through the jungle and you're tired, it might benefit you more to be hypersensitive to negative things," he says. The idea is that with...
...daily existence is largely influenced by our ability "to understand our societal interactions, to understand someone else's emotional state of mind, to understand the expression on their face," says Ninad Gujar, a senior research scientist at Walker's lab and lead author of the study, which was recently submitted for publication. "These are the most fundamental processes guiding our personal and professional lives...
Mindell is careful to emphasize that while her research, which was funded by Johnson & Johnson, does not support co-sleeping, it doesn't absolutely condemn it either. One question that remains: if vast numbers of babies in Asian populations are sleeping less than their Western peers - without any apparently society-wide disadvantage - does it truly matter if babies co-sleep...
...Asian babies need less sleep?" Mindell wonders, adding that understanding how some infants thrive on less sleep is the next step in research: "to figure out why that is, and what's the consequence...