DailyDirt: When You Sleep, What Do Your Fingers Know?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Tue, Dec 6th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Everyone sleeps, or at least everyone besides one Vietnamese guy sleeps. Some medications to help people sleep have led to weird sleep-walking behaviors, but there are plenty of other strange things that people do in their sleep. Here are just a few examples.

Lee Hadwin is somewhat productive while he sleeps and becomes a decent sketch artist while he's unconscious. He started sleep-drawing while he was 4 years old, and he got better and better at it over the years. So apparently, the 10,000 hour rule for mastery also applies to unconscious learning. [url]
Swiss researchers are studying how sleeping in a hammock changes people's unconscious brain activity. Gentle rocking motions seem to induce a different kind of sleep -- measurable with scalp electrodes. [url]
Scientists at UC Berkeley have found that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep can help relieve painful memories. Memories seem to be reactivated during REM sleep, and understanding this phenomenon may help treat post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. [url]
To discover more interesting articles on the human mind, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: brain, memories, rem, sleep, sleep-walking, unconscious

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McCrea (profile), 6 Dec 2011 @ 8:45pm

Learn something every day
What's the 10,000 hour rule for mastery?
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- Michael Ho (profile), 6 Dec 2011 @ 11:42pm
  
  Re: Learn something every day
  Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book (Outliers) that popularized the idea that if you practice something for at least 10,000 hours -- you'll achieve some degree of mastery in that activity.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
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Jose_X, 15 Dec 2011 @ 2:16pm

Reworking strong memory pieces pulled in by senses
I associate REM with deep reliving of junk in my head. Reliving memories, generally, offers a way to overcome/change/re-script/re-associate other mental pieces ("negatives" or "positives") associated with those memories. To learn or relearn, for example, you "grab" the context that is the associated neurons/memories and then change the conclusion of the story. Eg, to learn the answer to a question, you might call in the question or the context that suggests that question and the provide a new answer ("answer" need not necessarily be an image or sound memory of the answer as written in a particular language like English). Anyway, dreaming is like wandering around your mind on strong impulses/memories. REM is just a vivid version of dreaming. The strong memories grab your attention when you are tired and your senses are taking a break. [This is a guess of course.]
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- Michael Ho (profile), 15 Dec 2011 @ 2:50pm
  
  Re: Reworking strong memory pieces pulled in by senses
  the brain activity during sleep makes me wonder sometimes if artificial intelligence projects need to look into simulating sleep when developing artificial neural networks.... I'll have to search around a bit to see if any other animals have an REM stage of sleep..? I would be interesting if REM sleep was present in parrots/dolphins/chimps/etc...
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