My Science School

Doctors believe that good night’s sleep comes with many benefits, including improved creativity and mental sharpness. Avoid going to bed and you’ll soon suffer the consequences: crankiness, clumsiness – even hallucinations if you miss a few days. Your brain will go on strike, and easy tasks will become supremely difficult until you turn in and switch off.

If you continue to operate without enough sleep, you may see more long-term and serious health problems. Some of the most serious potential problems associated with chronic sleep deprivation are high blood pressure, diabetes, heart attack, heart failure or stroke. Chronic sleep deprivation can even affect your appearance.  Over time, it can lead to premature wrinkling and dark circles under the eyes. Also, research links a lack of sleep to an increase of the stress hormone cortisol in the body. Cortisol can break down collagen, the protein that keeps skin smooth.

 

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Whenever you try to defeat drowsiness to finish one more Harry Potter chapter, you’re actually locked in a losing battle over bedtime with your brain stem. This chunk of gray matter at the base of your brain regulates your sleep, along with other automatic bodily functions such as breathing and the ticking of your heart.

When the stomach is full, then sleepiness will occur. This happens to many people. Sleepiness after eating is caused by many factors, such as the type of food you consume, messy sleeping habits, your health condition and so forth. Bad sleeping patterns can also cause sleepiness post-meal. After a meal, the body feels full and relaxed, making the body feel like it is resting, resulting in a feeling of sleepiness, particularly if you didn’t get a good night’s sleep the night before. 

To avoid this, improve your sleeping habits to prevent stress. Engaging in regular physical exercise can help you get a good night’s sleep. It is recommended that you avoid napping if you are having trouble sleeping at night.

 

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You bet, at least among higher primates such as chimpanzees and bonobos (for the same reason as for humans, researchers suspect). Even more surprising, experiments show that dogs catch yawns from watching people!

When two groups of chimpanzees were shown videos of familiar and unfamiliar chimps yawning, the group watching the chimps they knew engaged in more contagious yawning. This study, by Matthew Campbell and Frans de Waal, supports the theory that yawning plays a role in the evolution of social bonding and empathy.

And dogs not only catch each others’ yawn, they are susceptible to human yawning as well. In one study, 29 dogs watched a human yawning and 21 of them yawned as well — suggesting that interspecies yawning could help in dog-human communication.

 

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Absolutely! In fact, yawning is so contagious that even reading about yawning can make you yawn.(Go ahead and get it out of your system) Studies have shown again and again that people who see other people yawn – even in videos – are more likely to yawn. Yawning most often occurs in adults immediately before and after sleep, during tedious activities and as a result of its contagious quality. It is commonly associated with tiredness, stress, sleepiness, or even boredom and hunger. In humans, yawning is often triggered by others yawning (e.g. seeing a person yawning, talking to someone on the phone who is yawning) and is a typical example of positive feedback. This "contagious" yawning has also been observed in chimpanzees, dogs, cats, birds, and reptiles, and can occur across species.

 

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Video games, track meets, chemistry class – your waking hours are crammed with activities and tasks that give your noggin a real workout. All that processing causes chemicals to clutter your brain. A good night’s sleep clears your head – literally. While you snooze, your brain goes into housekeeping mode, flushing the toxins and preparing itself for a busy day of math classes, socializing, and beating your brother in basketball.

One of the vital roles of sleep is to help us solidify and consolidate memories. As we go about our day, our brains take in an incredible amount of information. Rather than being directly logged and recorded, however, these facts and experiences first need to be processed and stored; and many of these steps happen while we sleep. Overnight, bits and pieces of information are transferred from more tentative, short-term memory to stronger, long-term memory—a process called "consolidation." Researchers have also shown that after people sleep, they tend to retain information and perform better on memory tasks. Our bodies all require long periods of sleep in order to restore and rejuvenate, to grow muscle, repair tissue, and synthesize hormones.

 

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Credit goes to your brain stem, the autopilot for your most important automatic functions: breathing, blood pressure, and heart rate.

The brain controls some of our body activities without us having to think about them. Such examples include breathing, heartbeat, and body temperature. When we sleep or even if we faint, these activities keep working. They are all automatic. 



The brain sends out signals along nerves to the muscles of the heart, intestine, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, bladder, and other internal organs telling them when and how to move. Usually you are not aware of this unless something happens, like when you are frightened and your heartbeat and breathing become faster. 



The part of the nervous system called the autonomic nervous system is a network of nerves that carries these automatic signals back and forth between the brain and the different organs. This system makes sure that your normal body functions continue to run smoothly. 

 

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Sleep experts say we can seize control of our dreams and do all fantastical things – fly, relive favorite memories, eat a mountain of ice cream – but only after we realize we’re actually dreaming. Achieving this deep – sleep state, known as lucid dreaming, isn’t easy. Wanna be dream masters practice every night for years and still never achieve success. A variety of masks and headbands promise to help sleepers reach a lucid state by flashing tiny lights above the eyelids. Sleep researchers, meanwhile, are researching other methods of triggering dreams.

 

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1. Keep to asleep schedule. Set a bedtime and a wake – up time and stick to them.

2. Relax with a book before bed, but don’t keep your smartphone within reach. It’s a certified sleep stopper.

3. Don’t fall asleep with the television on.

4. Don’t eat any big meals or chug any large drinks within two hours of bedtime.

5. Getting plenty of sun exposure during the day helps you sleep at night, so spend some waking hours outside!

 

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Yawns don’t catch a among children younger than five a among people with emotionally dampening disorders. That leads researchers to believe contagious yawning is just another way humans reinforce social bonds between people. Humans are social and emotional animals. We tend to understand and feel the emotions of friends and even strangers. Yawning falls into that category. When we see someone yawn, we yawn.

 

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Everybody yaws – even unborn babies in the womb – and yet researchers aren’t quite sure why we do it. Although humans yawn more often when we’re tired or bored, scientists have ruled out sleepiness or lack of oxygen (which would cause sleepiness) as causes. Instead, they suspect yawning might help us keep a cool head. As with a super computer, the brain needs to stay cool to function properly. Each yawn pumps air into sinus cavities in the head, cooling the brain in the process. And because the brain and body are slightly warmer just before bed, we tend to yawn when we’re tired.

 

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When it comes to retaining memories, your brain is practically a bottomless pit – one that continues to deepen throughout your life. So why did you forget where you put your towel at swim practice? It turns out your brain is equipped with two types of memory...

Short-term: Powerful but fleeting, short – term memory is meant to store information – such as phone numbers, email addresses, and other humdrum everyday data, like the location of that towel at swim practice – that you won’t need to recall during your golden years. As you’d expect, short-term memories don’t linger. They fade even faster if you were distracted at the time the memory took shape (maybe a teammate was talking to you while put down your towel, or maybe you moved the towel many times during practice and your short – term memory can’t place its exact location).

Long-term: Experiences move from short-term to long-term memory when they’re  repeated (such as when you memorize flash cards to study for a test) or accompanied by meaningful emotions and significant sensory input (such as when you scored the winning goal or the day you got your pooch as a puppy). Scientists believe your brain has a limitless capacity for long – term memories, but sometimes you can’t recall a particular detail without help from sensory clues (a familiar smell is a powerful reminder) or the recollections of friends involved in the event.

Scientists blame such forgetfulness on a flaw on our ability to retrieve memories – a flaw that nonscientists call a ‘’brain fart’’.

 

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Every time you experience something new, electrical charges fire through the white matter in tour brain, creating chemical links that form a network of pathways out of neurons. Your memories are stored in these connected neurons, and the connections become stronger and expand into other neurons with repeated exposure to the new experience. Practicing a song on the guitar makes the same neural networks fire again and again, becoming stronger and thus making the song easier to play. Spending time with a new friend reinforces old connections and builds new ones as you learn about your pal’s habits. As you learn and gain new memories, your brain’s structure changes and makes new connections. The brain you have today will be different tomorrow.

 

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Your cerebellum, the second largest part of your brain, coordinates the movement of your muscles and keeps you from tumbling over when you walk. The frontal lobes process your thoughts and speech, as well as learning, emotions, and some types of memory. Your senses of pain, touch, heat, and cold are handled by the parietal lobes behind the frontal lobes. The occipital lobes at the back of the brain decode visual information from our peepers. The temporal lobes, near your temples, process memories and sounds transmitted from your ears. The entire cerebrum is enveloped in a layer of gray matter called the cerebral cortex. Its deeply wrinkled surface packs maximum processing power into the tight quarters of your skull.

 

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Credit of your uniquely human intellect – your ability to solve algebra problems or play the electric guitar or wonder about the function of your own brain – goes to your cerebrum. Accounting for 85 percent of your brain’s mass, it’s far larger and more complex than the cerebrums of other brainy animals such as dolphin, whales and elephants. It’s also home to your brain’s most important lobes – the sub – processors of that supercomputer between your ears.

 

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It’s a reassuring idea for anyone who thinks they have superpowers or hidden artistic talents: We could accomplish amazing facts if we could just tap into our unused reserves of gray matter. It’s also a total myth. We use nearly every part of our brain all the time. Even a simple activity like brushing your teeth – walking toward the toothbrush, squeezing out just enough toothpaste, keeping track of which teeth you’ve cleaned as you brush away – activates a small electrical storm across your brain as the various lobes, cortices, and cerebellum work together to brush, rinse, spit, and remember to floss. The activity in your brain never stops, even when you sleep.

 

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