Dormivigilia

I saw this in Urban Outfitters and it is based on the works of Freud and Jung. Does dream symbolism actually forecast the future or unveil your unconscious desires for conscious analysis? Not at all! But fabulous book title!

I’ve been anticipating the release of Inception since I saw a movie preview for it six months ago. Even more exciting, the public has taken great interest in the subject of sleep and dreaming as evidenced by the numerous interviews conducted with sleep and dream experts the past few weeks. The movie received a horrific [...]

This “Get Some Sleep” PSA made by students of Dr. Matt Walker at UC Berkeley, who studies the importance of sleep and napping for retaining memories and liberating space in the hippocampus for more memories, was presented at this year’s Sleep Research Society Trainee Day. Be a good Lego and get 9 hours of sleep.

First, I apologize for the tardiness of last week’s Neury Thursday, but I was too busy enjoying the long patriotic weekend doing this: Slip N Slide!!! It was like time travel back to 2nd grade before helicopter parents and neighborhood lawsuits. Speaking of related tardiness, last week’s Journal of Neuroscience featured an article illustrating dopaminergic [...]

This week’s Journal of Neuroscience focused heavily on the integration of reward within the brain. In particular, a group of Dutch neuroscientists elucidated that theta brain activity precedes and proceeds reward stimuli presented in an associated learning task, which obviously requires activation of memory and learning circuitry. Interestingly enough , theta waves are also prominently [...]

While searching for a graph, I discovered a brief communication I wrote to practice scholarly writing (This event preceded my blog). Below is the brief communication, suggesting that basic sleep and circadian rhythm physiology are intricately and reciprocally related to the  traditional Chinese medicine philosophies of Yin and Yang. Yin and Yang are opposing, yet [...]

This was my first year as a “neuroblogger” (per Society for Neuroscience) or even a blogger for that matter. Though I have not perfected the practice of proofreading, and hence, have to re-post several times, I do seem to have a steady audience (so I think). Below are the bests of 2009, month by month. [...]

Finally, there is a publicized science community for lucid dreamers. For years, our unique talents have been overlooked as fabrications, but fear rejection no more. If you happen to; 1) fall asleep in an fMRI machine; and 2) lucid dream in the plastic coffin, the researchers will notice increased activity in the frontal cortex; the [...]

This pathology is not a cousin to dyslexia, but rather a “hidden” side effect of narcolepsy. Even the biologically-versed creator of Montegraphia.Nonsense did not know about symptoms of cataplexy or that it is solely associated with narcolepsy, which means: does the general public have any idea? Cataplexy is characterized by a sudden loss/paralysis of muscle [...]

As a side note, I happen to be listening to a remix of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” while writing this entry, and hence the random title. Over my tenure of blogging, I have neglected to mention another critical structure involved with the regulation of sleep/wake. There have been plenty of discussions about the SCN this [...]