Monday, 18 May 2020

Week 5 [18-24.05.2020] Does the brain wash itself?


Deep, peaceful sleep is essential for our physical and mental health.  It is also necessary  for maintaining cognitive functions.  Slow waves in neural activity contribute to memory consolidation. Cerebrospinal fluid purifies the brain of metabolic products.  Now we have another argument that long and deep sleep is good for us: it triggers rhythmic waves of blood and cerebrospinal fluid that seems to work like a washing cycle, creating oscillations that in turn correlate with the flow of cerebrospinal fluid.  Such oscillations can help to clear the brain of toxic waste in real time. These results were recently published in the Science journal .  The authors of the study are the first to indicate that the brain, through its electrical activity during sleep, can trigger waves of cerebrospinal fluid.   Purifying itself in this way.  Further research into this phenomenon may help to explain why bad sleep or lack of it was previously associated with the spread of toxic proteins and worsening memory loss in people with Alzheimer's disease..

Questions
  1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?
  2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you  pulled an all-nighter?
  3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study.  Is this enough to draw these conclusions? 
  4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

25 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

    Now that there is a coronavirus pandemic, I am getting enough sleep every day. I am an academic teacher and I conduct classes with students online. I get up, eat breakfast and I'm ready to teach. I don't have to waste time driving to and from my work so I can sleep more. Before the pandemic I had more meetings at work and now they have been kept to a minimum so I have more time to rest.

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?

    During the academic year I don't get to the situation that I don't go to sleep at all. I often go to bed at 2 am but I don't get to the situation when I have to sit all night. The situation is different during the holidays. I travel a lot and then it happens that I get up in the morning, go to the airport, I am traveling all day, then I spend the night at the airport and get on the plane or some other type of transport or I start to go sightseeing. I don't like coffee. Sometimes I feel tired, but the places where I am, are wonderful, and lack of sleep does not bother me.

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?

    The article was published in October in 2019, so maybe the research published is the first in this series and the experiment will be carried out in a subsequent stage on a larger group of people. I think that based on the collected data, the authors can draw preliminary conclusions that can be subjected to a deeper analysis in subsequent articles. I typed fmri and EEG on the Internet and articles appeared that combine these two issues, so I think it's a good idea. Both EEG and fmri relate to brain work.

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?
    I don't really like working at night but if I have to choose between getting up at 4 am to finish the article or prepare materials for the next class I prefer to sit at night on the previous day and go to sleep at 4. Of course, sitting at night is not healthy. Working during night affects the state of well-being and human health.

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    1. Thank you for answering. I'm an academic teacher too. Unfortunately, the deadline for submitting work for many important conferences is approaching, and it also seems to me that I work much more than I did before the pandemic. Going back to the study described. I have the impression that it is poorly designed. The design of experiments for fMRI and EEG differs a lot. The biggest difference in the frequency of stimulation with stimuli.

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  3. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

    Generally yes. I usually sleep well. Even very well. I put my head to the pillow and fall asleep. I have no problems with it. This's due to some regularity. I get up around 5.00 a.m., so I will get tired all day. I think that's just a success. I never sleep longer than 5-6 hours. If I sleep more, I feel bad.

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?

    I worked for a long time at night. Several years. It's hard and the next day is a nightmare. If you can't lie down for at least three hours, you are a zombie. Let people say what they want. It's nice the first few months. No problems really are noticed. It looks different after a few years. Our body isn't used to tyranny at night.

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?

    I think this connection is good. Only the research group is too small. Yes, I think that for these results to be reliable, the research group should be wider. I certainly agree with Monika that a year has passed since the research, so maybe at the moment the study group is larger.

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

    I don't like, and I often have to, and it's definitely not healthy. As I wrote earlier, I worked for several years only at night (between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m.). This's not an easy piece of cake.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. A long time ago I worked nights, I was an administrator in a hotel. It was killing me, I slept until 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. and then at 9:00 p.m. I drove because at 10:00 p.m. I had to work, at work until 6 a.m., then one hour to come back and I lost the whole day on anything. I stayed there for a month, but I left for another reason (low pay, hard work). Additionally, it was overwhelming that it was winter and for the whole week I didn't see the sun at all (the whole "light" day I slept through) - I went to work - it was already dark, I came back - it was still dark, I got up after work - it was already dark and so on.

      I agree with you, the group is too small and the test should be revised.

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  4. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

    I am usually satisfied with the length of my sleep. I sleep about 8 hours a day and this time works well for me, I don't feel tired later in the day. I often wake up before the alarm clock. I also have no problems falling asleep, I try to fall asleep at fairly regular times.

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?

    Of course, every extension of the time without sleep has a pretty big bite on me. I feel more tired, I find it much harder to concentrate, so I usually try to plan my tasks in such a way that I don't have to work overnight.

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?

    I think this combination makes sense. It allows us to discover connections and dependencies that we had no idea about before. However, the sample was definitely too small to talk about any statistics. The human brain is very complicated and people are very different from each other.

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

    As I mentioned in the previous question, I'm not really one of those people who work at night. I try to plan my tasks in such a way as to finish them early, but if that doesn't work out, I prefer to get some sleep and come back in the morning with a fresh mind.

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    1. And working at night is definitely not healthy.

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    2. Thank you for answering. I also try to sleep 8 hours a day. Unfortunately, I usually wake up at 5am. I'm very surprised at people who don't get much sleep and still function well. Recent research has shown that the modification of the ADRB1 gene causes people to sleep 4 to 6 hours during the night and feel great when they wake up, and also sleep much less than an average person throughout their life. The gene, which causes people to sleep just a few hours, is a receptor for a compound called adenosine. Adenosine receptors are one of the objects on which caffeine acts and are also responsible for other biological processes.

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  5. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

    I realize that my sleep is not always correct. I often go to bed too late, sit at classes or train online at night for a long time. During the day, the son does not always allow him to take care of his things. I know I should have a reasonable time. I mean the division of the day for work, time for myself and sleep.

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?

    work quite often late into the night. Getting up the next day is hard. I heard that the optimal sleep duration should be 6 hours. However, if we want to sleep longer, it is best to get up if the sleep time is a multiple of 1.5 hours (i.e. 6 hours, 7.5 hours). Long work at night is not conducive to well-being. It is difficult to do something constructively the next day.

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?

    I am not interested in research on the human brain and I do not quite understand everything. However, the article shows that such a combination exists and gives interesting results, so it's probably worth combining different research methods. Anyway, more tests allow for more accurate results.

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

    I don't really like working at night. However, when I have to, I try to work until I feel that I literally fall asleep and then go to sleep. I am aware that such work is inefficient and unhealthy. I certainly won't think of anything wise then.

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    1. In an unsleepy person, communication between the tonsil body and the frontal part of the cerebral cortex, the part of the brain we think before we act, deteriorates. I also think that if you get more sleep, you will work better and more efficiently. Unfortunately, modern research shows that 40 percent of working men are sleepy. Although women tend to take more care of themselves, some of their groups - such as working mothers - do not sleep long enough either.

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  6. 1. It depends on the day. I try to sleep at least 7-8 hours a day, in the current period I can sleep much longer, but I bet that this is the result of general fatigue and excessive worry. I am not an early bird and I do not have full energy when I get up no matter what, but I have no problems falling asleep, I do not wake up at night and I feel my body is resting when I sleep. I don't like the moments when I go to sleep and when I wake up, it seems that maybe 5 minutes have passed, and in fact 8 hours have passed. Apparently, when we have such an impression after a dream that it lasted a very short time, our brain rests best, but in my opinion the very feeling of such a short nap instead of sleep is strange.

    2. It happened and even often that I missed nights. I even used to not sleep for two nights in a row, but it was a very bad idea. I was a human wreck on the third day and the only thing I dreamed about was a sleep. I usually don't feel any effects after one sleepless night. I yawn more often during the day, but nothing more. All I can do is sleep the next day. If I sit at the computer all night, my eyes hurt the next day because I often wipe them to chase away fatigue.

    3. I think that the combination of both methods gives an opportunity to look at a given problem in a broader perspective. As for the number of people surveyed, 13 seems to be a very small number, but we must remember that the number of people surveyed depends on the specificity of the problem. If we study a rare disease, it is known that it will be harder for us to acquire a research group. I think that this number of people is enough to draw initial conclusions, but further research or the search for new subjects should help support previous research results.

    4. I will say right away that working at night is not healthy and long-term changes in circadian rhythm can lead to serious complications. On the other hand, it happened to me especially in college and in the first year of work to work at night even everyday. Falling asleep at 4 am was the norm, because you had to finish the research, check the tasks, write instructions, etc. In general, I like to work in the evenings and at night, it is quiet and cool then, so it is better to focus. I went to Warsaw for all my studies, so I remember how I got up after 4 am for a few years to catch the train at 6am or earlier, I came home at 8-9pm, ate something, if I had to do something, I finished reporting and went to bed at midnight and the same day again the same. At one point I could do everything no matter what time of day it was, whether it was sleep or study. Looking at it now it was very unhealthy and when my lifestyle has normalized I can see that it all had a significant impact on my health.

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    1. Thank you for your long and comprehensive answer.
      I haven't slept for two days either. I flew to madeira then and had two shifts. One in Berlin and one in Lisbon. In both places I was afraid to sleep. When I arrived in Funchal (the capital of Madeira). I heard all the sounds doubled. Now I know that this disorder is called Diplacusis is a different kind of double hearing. It is a form of hearing loss where the same sound is perceived differently by each ear. The brain interprets the sounds we hear. The results of fatigue create such a neurological disorder.

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  7. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?
    I am not exactly satisfied with my sleep. I often are sleepy. I need about 10 hours to be rested. When something happend in day or I have problem to solve then I can woke up on 4 am. In the morning my sleep is light and every sound can woke me. When I sleep to long then I have a headache. In summer vacation when I don’t need to work and solve problem I sleep very well.

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?
    Yes, I did. I remember that in college with friends we done homework all night. In the morning I was exhausted. I went to college and gave a task. After that I went to home and go sleep. I felt terrible. I was as a zombie.

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?
    I think its a good idea. This two methods can be used to answer many questions about our brain. In my opinion a group of 13 participants is too small. We need more people to be examined to be sure that our results are good. I think we need to do more research to make conclusions. I think it's a good start for another research.

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?
    I like working at night because nobody disturb me. I can focus on my job. Some work is going faster than on day. I think its not healthy for our body. We need time to sleep. If we change day with night then our body will accept it. Some people sleep by day and work by night.

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    1. If you have a light sleep, and you wake up easily, maybe you should change your sleeping environment and ask for sleep hygiene. I am most disturbed by light. If we expose our body to light at the wrong time, we will disturb the rhythm around the clock. This is why you should avoid contact with light in the evening. The quality of later sleep is extremely affected by the blue light falling on our eyes, which is emitted by various types of devices: smartphones, tablets, computer screen. I do not touch my smartphone half an hour before going to sleep.

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  8. 1 Are you satisfied with your sleep?
    No, I'm not. I sleep too little, but otherwise I'd have problems with stuffing all the things into the schedule. Recently, I'm trading slightly over one hour of sleep for really intense training, the kind that approaches physical limits, and it seems like a good deal.

    2 Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?
    After one all-nighter, there is just pleasant stimulation. If I won't pay back the debt and try to pull second and then third one, the things in my peripheral vision come to life, and stand still back when I look at those directly. I know that I'm hitting the limit then and I don't push it further.

    3 Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?
    Seems like a good idea, combining methods with different principle of operation. I think when observing such fundamental phenomenon, the sample size is sufficient. It's unlikely that all examined specimens were somehow special in a way their organisms perform such fundamental task.

    4 Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?
    I used to like work at night much more, now I like evenings and early morning more. Of course, it must be something really important to justify getting up much earlier :-)

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    1. Thank you for answering.
      If we take into account the level of compilation, this test sample may indeed seem sufficient. In my opinion, the problem is the time resolution of both devices. The eeg time resolution is milliseconds. The EEG can record a change in the signal that occurred within one millisecond. And the time resolution of the most advanced fMRI is 300ms. The resolution of fMRI is 300 times slower than EEG. Waves and fMRI should not be studied simultaneously. I'm not talking about Low Resolution Electromagnetic Tomographs here because it's a completely different matter.

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  9. I'm rather satisfied with my sleep, especially since I decided to not use an alarm for waking up. Surprisingly I wake up even earlier than when I was using the alarm.

    After all-nighters I usually have headaches but I'm quite fit mentally.

    I'm not sure, but having fMRI, EEG doesn't seem necessary as it much lower quality data. I suppose it may add some noise to the results. As for the number of samples, 13 people are very small number but in such studies it seems to be a standard. It's often difficult or costly to examine more.

    I like working at night or rather working late. I find it the time of my greatest effectiveness. In my case i think it's healthy, when I work for too late I just wake up accordingly later.

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    1. If no EEG had been used in the study, how would researchers know the correlation of brain waves with the triggering of cerebrospinal fluid waves? I think EEG is a good method in this case. But I think that fMRI could be replaced by Positron CT. It has a much better temporal resolution, and you can see the distribution of fluids that are deprived of oxygen.

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  10. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?
    Unfortunately no, I have frequent sleep problems. Sometimes I even drink sleeping pills or antidepressants to fall asleep. I also have to give up coffee and tea to improve the quality of my sleep

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?
    Yes, after this I had an apathy and depression. Because of what, I sometimes go to a psychiatrist, and take sleeping pills with antidepressants. But my condition is already better than it was a year ago

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?
    Since the article is dated 2019, and are the first studies of this type, I think we should wait to get more data from different sources

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?
    Sometimes I like to work at night, because you can be in complete silence and alone with yourself. But I'm sure it is not healthy for the body.

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    1. Thank you for answering. Contrary to appearances, this topic is not new, already in 2013 detected relationship between the increase of BOLD signal and activity at rest.

      https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657465/

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  11. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

    Yes...but I sleep well during nowadays quarantine. I work too much (I have a problem with time management) so after this lock down, when we will come back to stationary work then my sleep will be much worse (I don't remember a day when I sleep 8h if I have to drive to office next day- then I sleepthe most 6 hours).

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?

    Sure! I'm very nervous and I can't really focus on anything in 100%. Moreover I have a problem with sleep during day. If I don't sleep long and well during night, then I'm tired but just can't sleep. That's annoying...

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?

    Yes, if this process was observed in most of the subjects. The processes taking place in our bodies are identical in each of us. They may vary in intensity (e.g. flow of electrical signals), but the mechanics itself remains the same.

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

    I'm not sure if I like but I do it very often. I can concentrate better because nobody bothers me then. I'm not sure if it is healthy. I didn't think about it before.

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  12. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

    I have the abilities to fall asleep very quickly even in various condition In addition to this I react pretty good to sleep deprivation. Two months ago I become a mother and I think that my special abilities are what allows me to survive 😊

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?

    When I’m absorbed in work I don’t feel the passing time and due to that very often I stay working late at night. Moreover I like working under time pressure so I do things at the last moment, it's conducive to work at night. I don’t experience any side effects after I'm not sleeping one night, but I had experienced some mental and physical effects after doing it two nights in a row without any rest in between. I was light headed, my reaction was very slow and I have trouble to concentrate over anything.

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?

    In case of medical studies the problem of a small number of participants is common. It’s always take in to consideration if small test group is enough to draw conclusions. The truth is that I most cases It’s doesn’t enough and experiment should be conducted on a bigger population. Even though, the results gathered on a small sample of patients can be presented as preliminary, and draw attention to the experiment subject.

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

    I like it very much, I heard several times that this is not the healthiest way of working, but it work for me I find it more effective. I get more creative at night, maybe due to all of this unwashed thoughts.

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  13. 1. Are you satisfied with your sleep?
    Yes, I am, thank you :). I try to keep my sleep in the right way because I know that this is important for my brain and my comfort the next day.

    2. Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?
    My all-nighters were always related to sleeping during the next day. I do not like them because I never had the impression that it "gives" me anything in the meaning of time domain.

    3. Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?
    I think that different time resolution of fMRI (seconds) and EEG (milliseconds) is tough to analyze simultaneously, with correlation. And about the number of people - I tried to open https://science.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/2019/10/30/366.6465.628.DC1 (Supplementary Materials), but it's not working. And this article says virtually nothing about even these 13 participants :).

    4. Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?
    Sometimes I do work at night, but I'm trying to keep it somehow hygienic by dimming the screen brightness and using software like f.lux, which changes my screen color.

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  14. Are you satisfied with your sleep?

    Unfortunately I can’t say that I am satisfied with my sleep. I have a lot of troubles with falling asleep. Sometimes I am lying in bed for a few hours before I finally fall asleep. I am trying a lot of things to help me with that, such as drinking herbal tea before bed time, listening to some calming sounds or audiobook while lying in bed. Some of them are better that the others. For about 2 years now I have also a smartwatch that helps me keep tracking of my sleep and its phases.

    Did you have any physical or mental effects when you pulled an all-nighter?

    Of course I had some unwanted effects of pulling an all-nighter ;) sadly sometimes working all night is neccessity in my job, but I try to do this as rarely as possile. As for physical effects, I was for the first few hours of a new day rather full of energy – because of all the caffeine products I drank during the night ;), but later on I was extremely tired, yet I had a true difficulties with falling asleep. As for mental effects – it is safe to say that this wasn’t my brightest ,oments ;) I felt a ittle depressed and stressed.

    Is the combination of fmri and eeg a good idea? Only 13 people were examined in the study. Is this enough to draw these conclusions?

    I can’t say if this combinaton is a good idea, but I think that 13 people to be examined is not enough. In my opinion while doing such reaearch,you should make sure that the group of people you will examine, can be rather wide to prevent some accusations of having less credibility than it should be. So I am not sure that in this case it was enough to examine 13 people and the conclusions which were drawed, may not be 100% accurate.

    Do you like to work at night? If yes, do you think that's healthy?

    I prefer working in the evening or even at night, for sure I am no morning owl, so I’d rather sleep till 10 am, and start working after midday. Sometimes I am working for some part of the night even. I think I am more effective at this hours.I am not sure, if this is 100% healthy, but my rhytm of the day is regular and m ybody got used to that so I don’t think this cause me some spectacular troubles.

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