From ScienceDaily: Could Dwindling Testosterone Levels Decrease Sleep?
In young men, deep sleep represents 10 to 20 percent of total sleep. By age 50, it decreases to five to seven percent. For men over 60, it can disappear altogether.
Sound familiar…?
A study looks at how dreaming improves memory. Given a maze test, subjects who napped for 90 minutes improved performance on a retest.
“Our findings suggest that if something is difficult for you, it’s more meaningful to you and the sleeping brain therefore focuses on that subject – it ‘knows’ you need to work on it to get better, and this seems to be where dreaming can be of most benefit.”
From the NYT Opinionator section, In Sleepless Nights, a Hope for Treating Depression–post-partum depression, at least. (Since when did new moms get a lot of sleep anyway?)
Sleep deprivation used as a treatment for depression is efficacious and robust: it works quickly, is relatively easy to administer, inexpensive, relatively safe and it also alleviates other types of clinical depression. Sleep deprivation can elevate your mood even if you are not depressed, and can induce euphoria. This throws a new light on insomnia.
But don’t try this at home:
[P]rolonged sleep deprivation is not exactly a desirable state; it leads to cognitive defects, such as reduced working memory and impaired decision making. Finally, depression recurs after the mother, inevitably, succumbs to sleep, even for a short nap.
From the NYT, a portrait of a malady: Raiding the refrigerator, but still asleep.
Shirley Koecheler, 54, has been a sleepwalker for as long as she can remember. But it wasn’t until she got married that she started eating in her sleep, too. She’d wander into the kitchen — eyes open but asleep — and binge on junk food…
