Word: sleeping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...difficult, and people are struggling. And wouldn't we be better off if every New Year's, we thought about the things we did right and we resolved to keep doing them, no matter how wacky they were. For example, sometimes, I admit this even for TIME.com, that I sleep in my clothes. I did last night. It's easier. I'm wearing sweatpants, so it's great because I wake up and I'm already dressed and I'm warm at night. So, my UnResolution is to keep sleeping in my clothes. Or kissing my dog on the lips...
That's the conclusion of a recent report in the journal Science by neuroscientists at Northwestern University, who carried out a small study, with 12 volunteers, to figure out whether specific sounds played during sleep would boost the memory of information learned while awake. (See the year in health...
...shower cap with a jungle of wires sticking out of it - that tracked their brain waves in order to determine their stage of slumber. Using an electroencephalogram (EEG), investigators monitored the sleepers' brain activity, and just when the squiggly lines on the screen showed that participants had entered deep sleep, researchers began playing a series of 25 of the sounds that the individual had heard earlier in the memory game. "[The volume] was a little over a whisper, probably much [quieter] than ... your iPod," says John Rudoy, one of the study's authors and a graduate student at Northwestern...
When the participants woke up about an hour later, they said they hadn't heard a thing. But the test results suggested otherwise. On average, each person did slightly better at remembering the correct locations of the 25 objects whose related sounds had been cued during sleep than those of the other objects. The sounds appeared to have entered the sleeping brain and helped consolidate associated memories...
...Houben's case come to light? Over the past five years, Laureys and others have studied brain-injury patients classified as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). In such states, patients awake from a coma and return to a normal sleep cycle, but show no signs of awareness or consciousness. Laureys and others have found that around 40% of such patients are misdiagnosed. Most of these misdiagnosed patients fall under a classification called "minimally conscious," in which they show subtle but consistent signs of awareness. (The "minimally conscious" classification was only recognized in 2002 thanks to the work...