First Topic–Amazing Facts about Sleep and Dreaming

Following are 20 amazing facts about sleep and dreaming that may surprise you. Select two of them and find a recent (within most recent five years) peer-reviewed scientific article (see Course Resources, e-Readings, Class Resources Psych 301) that addresses each of the two facts that you selected. Then review the article in one paragraph and discuss it in the next. In your post, restate the fact that you are writing about. I

1. Sleep deprivation produces higher levels of corticosterone, a stress hormone and fewer brain cells are produced. Also the nerve cell production (neurogenesis) is severely disturbed and may be what produces the cognitive deficits with people with prolonged sleep deprivation.

2. Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others reckon we dream about things worth forgetting – to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains.

3. Dreams, once thought to occur only during REM sleep, also occur in non-REM sleep, but to a lower degree. It’s possible there may not be a single moment of our sleep when we are actually dreamless.

4. Babies and young children experience more REM sleep than adolescents and young adults. The duration shortens as they age. Roughly 50 percent of a baby’s sleep is in the REM stage while adults experience only 20 percent of this stage during a sleep cycle.

5. Dreams, once thought to occur only during REM sleep, also occur (but to a lesser extent) in non-REM sleep phases. It’s possible there may not be a single moment of our sleep when we are actually dreamless.

6. REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery – obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example.

7. Certain types of eye movements during REM sleep correspond to specific movements in dreams, suggesting at least part of the dreaming process is analagous to watching a film.

8. No-one knows for sure if other species dream but some do have sleep cycles similar to humans.

9. Elephants sleep standing up during non-REM sleep, but lie down for REM sleep.

10. REM sleep may help developing brains mature. Premature babies have 75 per cent REM sleep, 10 per cent more than full-term bubs. Similarly, a newborn kitten puppy rat or hampster experiences only REM sleep, while a newborn guinea pig (which is much more developed at birth) has almost no REM sleep at all.

11. Seventeen hours of sustained wakefulness leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to a blood alcohol-level of 0.05%.

12. Exposure to noise at night can suppress immune function even if the sleeper doesn’t wake. Unfamiliar noise, and noise during the first and last two hours of sleep, has the greatest disruptive effect on the sleep cycle.

13. The “natural alarm clock” which enables some people to wake up more or less when they want to is caused by a burst of the stress hormone adrenocorticotropin. Researchers say this reflects an unconscious anticipation of the stress of waking up.

14. Some sleeping tablets, such as barbiturates suppress REM sleep, which can be harmful over a long period.

15. Humans sleep on average around three hours less than other primates like chimps, rhesus monkeys, squirrel monkeys and baboons, all of whom sleep for 10 hours.

16. Ducks at risk of attack by predators are able to balance the need for sleep and survival, keeping one half of the brain awake while the other slips into sleep mode.

17. Some studies suggest women need up to an hour’s extra sleep a night compared to men, and not getting it may be one reason women are much more susceptible to depression than men.

18. As a group, 18 to 24 year-olds deprived of sleep suffer more from impaired performance than older adults.

19. The extra-hour of sleep received when clocks are put back at the start of daylight in Canada has been found to coincide with a fall in the number of road accidents.

20. The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska, the Challenger space shuttle disaster and the Chernobyl nuclear accident have all been attributed to human errors in which sleep-deprivation played

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