The problem of lack of sleep or lack of time for sleep is familiar to all creative people. h3> How can I sleep a third of his life, when the project is burning, time is running out, or find inspiration? At the same time the desire to finally sleep becomes permanent, and the coffee is transformed into fuel for life. Why do some people enough 6:00 sleep a day, others for 10 and not get enough sleep? Scientists are trying to find an answer to this and other issues related to the mechanisms of sleep and value in human life.
Sleepless Elite h3>
In the English language, a new catchy neologism - Sleepless Elite (sleepless elite). This term came up with scientists studying sleep.
Studies of American experts have shown that there is a small (1-3%), the percentage of short sleepers - people able to go to bed late and wake up early on a regular basis without harm to health and the reduction of tone. Short sleepers always sleep little, even when it is possible (at the weekend). Such people are energetic, optimistic, ambitious, they have different circadian rhythms, increased metabolism (which leads to greater Hagen), decreased pain threshold and increased psychological stability.
Not surprisingly, with such inclinations short sleepers often succeed in life. Widely known examples of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci and Napoleon, who slept on a minimum (although there is a theory that Napoleon was ruined lack of sleep).
How to get to the number of such people? If there is a genetic predisposition, it does. Scientists have found that short sleepers all have the same gene hDEC2. Most likely, it is not only the gene and how the whole work mechanisms of sleep, scientists are still a mystery. It is not clear even dream destination.
What is the dream h3>
There is a very attractive theory explaining why you need a dream: to secure the memory trace by "playing" the day the newly formed connections in the cortex and hippocampus. This hypothesis also explains the dreams as a result of the simultaneous playback of different memory traces. This idea is much like, because we are all interested in the damn dreams (though only his), and we highly value our memory as the basis of personality.
The problem is that taking memory consolidation as the main purpose of sleep, we also have to recognize that the opossum who sleeps 19 hours a day, has a very active life and he, unlike us, there is something to remember. Or, on the contrary, he has great difficulty remembering, and he needed on this matter a long time. But then once it appears that the rate of remembering we do not compare with the donkeys. Donkeys 3:00 sleep.
The obvious way to check why we need some process - to see what happens in its absence. Experiments on rats have shown that the total sleep deprivation inevitably causes the death of the animals in 2-3 weeks. In the absence of sleeping rats lose weight on a background of increasing food intake. They appear ulceration of the skin and hair falls out. Body temperature rises first, and then begins to fall. Energy metabolism becomes very inefficient (heat loss and body weight, with increased inflow of calories). Rats disintegrating thermoregulation, they begin to freeze. Sometimes deprived rats blood poisoning occurs, presumably due to the deterioration of the barrier properties of the gastrointestinal tract. Antibiotics do not prevent the death of rats from sleep deprivation. The cause of death in rats is not clear. To the surprise of researchers, the brain of rats was almost not damaged by sleep deprivation.
In public, the experiments were performed with partial sleep deprivation. At the four-hour sleep for 6 days in people having disorders of energy metabolism. Regular sleep restriction to 6 hours per day leads to obesity (probably due to overcompensation worsening metabolism increase in the amount of food eaten), problems with the digestive tract and the cardiovascular system. People who are forced to continuously change the rhythm of sleep and wakefulness (eg, working day-by-two) there are ulcerative colitis and other disorders of the intestine.
Of course, sleep deprivation and suffers from memory. But with such major effects of deprivation somehow strange to assume that the main function of sleep - to strengthen memory. Sleep is clearly necessary to eliminate some metabolic problems, but we do not know either what exactly the problems, nor how the liquidation thereof. It is believed that the body while awake accumulated metabolic problems that must be solved, the body of their addresses, and the brain "spare time" doing something their own, such as the reorganization of the memory.
A quick way to build your dream h3>
There is a known method of treatment of sleep disorders, called Stimulus Control Therapy. It consists of the following steps:
Do not eat, drink, read, listen to music or watch TV in bed. The bed should be associated only with sleep. Do not take caffeine in the last 6 hours before bedtime. Regular exercise, but not later than 4 hours before bedtime. Do not sleep during the day. Every day in the wake at the same time (preferably 6-7 am), without exceptions. Go to bed only when he feels tired. If you can not fall asleep within 10 minutes, get out of bed and go into another room. Read, listen to music, but only a return to the bedroom with the intention of going to bed. The bedroom should be associated only with sleep. At first, the new regime will be given hard, but that's okay.
