Feeling Rested with Age

How much you sleep each night matters, but more importantly, it’s about the quality and if you feel rested when you wake up. This seems to shift with age as responsibilities and sleep patterns change.

The following chart shows how rested people felt, based on answers to the American Time Use Survey.

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Age and getting enough sleep

Reuters dug in to the science of sleep and how paying attention to our rhythms affect our health. On dreams:

Sleep itself has cycles, in which the brain and body move through phases, marked by varying brain activity. In the deepest phases of sleep, the brain waves are slowest. The lighter phases have more rapid bursts of activity.

Our most intense dreams usually happen during Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep, when brain activity, breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure all increase, the eyes move rapidly, and muscles are limp. Scientists believe dreams in REM and non-REM sleep have different content – the more vivid or bizarre dreams usually happen during REM stages.

See also: our actual sleep schedules.

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Daylight saving time and circadian rhythms

Daylight saving time ends in the United States this weekend and ended already in other places. This can only mean one thing, which is that we must hem and haw about whether to shift our clocks or not. Aaron Steckelberg and Lindsey Bever, for The Washington Post, illustrated the sleep challenges that arise when we have to change measured time, which is easy to shift with button presses, against our less malleable internal time, which is more in tune with sunlight.

Scrolling through, it started to feel like too many layers on top of that clock, but my main takeaway, and I think we can all agree on this, is that we should all get to sleep and wake whenever we want. Boom, problem solved.

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Sleep Schedule, From the Inconsistent Teenage Years to Retirement

From the teenage years to college to adulthood through retirement, sleep is all over the place at first but then converges towards consistency. Read More

Restless Sleep With Age

It seems like no matter what I do, I cannot sleep through the night. Will it ever let up? According to the data, the answer is no and it will only get worse. Read More

Blanket pattern visualizes baby’s sleep data

Seung Lee collected sleep data for his son’s first year. Then he knitted a blanket to visualize the data. The blanket is impressive. Collecting a baby’s sleep data for a year? More so.

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#PLOS #SfN15 Recap: Hidden variables of behavior

Place_Cell_Spiking_Activity_Example-690x320The Society for Neuroscience meeting is unique in both is breadth and depth. There are sessions on literally everything Neuro, each delving with exquisite detail and nuance into their given topic. While this level of

Sleep Research at #SfN15: From Molecules and Circuits to Behavior, By Jeremy Borniger

CC-BY-SA-Sleep_woman1-690x320The Society for Neuroscience 2015 annual meeting was rife with research on all aspects of sleep and arousal. Indeed, several symposia and dozens of posters covered topics ranging from the most basic look at the

That All-Nighter is not without Neuroconsequences

By Emilie Reas, PLOS Neuroscience Community Editor As you put the finishing touches on your paper, you notice the sun rising and fantasize about crawling in bed. Your vision and hearing are beginning to distort and the words staring back … Continue reading »

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Convex Clustering and Synaptic Restructuring: the PLOS CB May Issue

Here are some highlights from May’s PLOS Computational Biology   Convex Clustering: An Attractive Alternative to Hierarchical Clustering The recently developed method of convex clustering preserves the visual appeal of hierarchical clustering while ameliorating its propensity to make false inferences … Continue reading »

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