Sleep for Success: Creativity and the Neuroscience of Slumber
For years, scientists thought that the function of sleep was merely to rest the body and mind, but recent research suggests that sleep is essential for both learning and creativity. It’s no surprise that people who are well rested learn better and are more creative. What is new is the value of sleeping after learning something or during a break in trying to solve a problem. Studies have looked at the benefits of taking naps as well as sleeping through the night.
During sleep, rat’s brains (and yours) practice what they’re recently learned.
Researchers have discovered that your brain becomes very active when you sleep, and that during certain phases of sleep, your brain becomes even more active if you’ve just learned something new. In an early study that identified this process, rats were hooked up to measure the electrical activity of their brains while they learned a maze. Later, while the rats were sleeping, the researchers observed that their brains were emitting the same pattern of activity they had emitted during maze learning. Apparently, the rats’ brains were “re-running” the maze in their sleep and using this time to consolidate their memories of what they had learned. These rats performed better on the maze the next day than rats that were prevented from re-running the maze during sleep.
This same phenomenon has been observed in human learning. In other words, if you learn something and then sleep on it, what you’ve learned becomes clearer just as a function of sleeping. But what’s even more interesting is that sleeping on a problem helps people find better solutions. In a study titled “Sleep Inspires Insight,” participants were given puzzles that involved finding the final number to complete a series of digits. The way they were trained to solve the puzzle was to compare every two-digit pair in the series. What they were not told was that there was a shortcut that allowed people to identify the solution after only two steps. Participants performed three trials of the puzzle and then were given an eight-hour break before returning for ten more trials. Some of them slept during the break and some did not. The people who slept between the two sessions were twice as likely as the others to discover the easier way to solve the problem. According to the researchers, sleeping on a problem apparently allows for a restructuring of the brain connections, “setting the stage for the emergence of insight.”
So does this mean my 4 hours of sleep a night is making me dumber?
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The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes… As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money powers of the country will endeavor to prolong it’s reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.
Abraham Lincoln (via azspot)
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Will 2050 be another movie based on a year in the not-so-distant-but-still-future future?
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Everyone knows health insurance cannot continue to operate as it does. When you ask an American if they want to keep their health insurance, they’ll say yes…but that smile on their face is actually a rictus. Only people on defined benefit programs are really happy, and those things haven’t been offered since 401Ks became the thing to do. Worse for the insurers, none of the other industries that pay for politicians is defending it. For well over a decade there’s been an annual ritual of reviewing and renewing your employer-provided health insurance. You find your deductable went up this year, your share of the premium went up last year and this new paper is talking about the co-pay. And all the while your employer’s payments are going up too. You as a human may feel you must absorb any rate increases that befall you but when a corporation finds health insurance benefits too expensive to provide they can simply stop doing so. The first public corporation that does this will see a spike in its stock price, which would start the general abandonment of employer-provided health insurance. Yes, it would almost certainly happen given an effective public insurance option. When the health insurance industry’s politicians say if we create a a public insurance plan, everyone will be forced to join it, this is what they are talking about. But it would also almost certainly happen if, as the Republicans would prefer, no regulatory change is made. In either case the only way that can happen in our system is if employers decide en masse to stop providing health care coverage, and in neither case is the decision yours. The decision belongs to the medical insurance industry’s customers…Corporate America, with its non-human priorities. The decision you face is, will your government do what it can to protect you, or to protect the health insurance industry?
Prometheus 6 (via azspot)
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Chilling Arrest at G-20
We are witnessing Freedom of Speech’s slow death. Everyone paying attention knows that these aren’t isolated incidents. Check out Naomi Wolf’s documentary, The End of America. Chilling.
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I have asked on several occasions and have never had an answer, which does not mean that there isn’t one, how millions of pieces of unburnt, uncharred paper can be floating over lower Manhattan from the destruction of the WTC towers when the official explanation of the destruction is fires so hot and evenly distributed that they caused the massive steel structures to weaken and fail simultaneously so that the buildings fell in free fall time just as they would if they had been brought down by controlled demolition. What is the explanation of fires so hot that steel fails but paper does not combust? People don’t even notice the contradictions. Recently, an international team of scientists, who studied for 18 months dust samples produced by the twin towers’ destruction collected from three separate sources, reported their finding of nano-thermite in the dust. The US government had scientists dependent on the US government to debunk the finding on the grounds that the authenticity of custody of the samples could not be verified. In other words, someone had tampered with the samples and added the nano-thermite. This is all it took to discredit the finding, despite the obvious fact that access to thermite is strictly controlled and NO ONE except the US military and possibly Israel has access to nano-thermite.
Paul Craig Roberts (via azspot)
Dangerous questions and observations…
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…I got an email blast from MoveOn.org this morning inviting me and several million other people in their address book to a set of nationwide rallies to fight the insurance giants. Sure, I’d like to do that—but they’re organizing these rallies in support of the reform proposed by the administration and Congressional Democrats. As I’ve been saying over and over, there’s nothing in these proposals that seriously, or even semi-seriously, cramps the style of the big inscos. Quite the contrary. We’re all going to be forced to carry insurance, should this legislation pass, meaning buy it from the insurance companies. If you’re sort of poor, the gov will subsidize your purchase. They won’t be able to drop people for pre-existing conditions, but they will be able to force them to pay through the nose for crummy policies. Doesn’t MoveOn know this? Don’t they know that over the last three months Aetna’s stock has gone up 30%, about twice as much as the broad market? Is MoveOn so in thrall to the Democrats that they haven’t bothered to scrutinize the proposals? Or have they, and they don’t care? In other words, are they naïve or devious? For a lot of liberals, it all seems to have come down to the so-called public option: will the reform create a public entity to compete with the private insurers? Never mind that in the unlikely event the public option were to happen, it would be so crippled as to be meaningless. But what about the rest of the scheme? What about the noxious habits of the insurance companies, like denying a quarter or a third of the claims that patients file? That’s likely to continue unabated. I think we may be better off if these reform schemes fail and we have time to organize to press for something better.
Doug Henwood (via azspot)
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The hierarchy of success
Why isn’t reading Tumblr at work somewhere on here?
- Attitude
- Approach
- Goals
- Strategy
- Tactics
- Execution
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And that is what the attack on Van Jones is about: exploiting white fears and anxieties. Anxieties about a black President, anxieties about a basket-case economy (which they’re trying to blame on the black President even though it was well in the crapper before he came along), anxieties about a changing demographic balance in the nation (which animates their fear and anger over immigration), anxieties about a popular culture whose icons look less and less like them as the years go by. And so they play up the militant black guy image, turning a low-level bureaucrat into a “Green Jobs Czar,” (the latter of which term they have sought to spin into a communist thing, despite the fact that the Russian Czars were actually the royalist pigs who were thrown out by the Russian left, a small historical detail which doesn’t matter to illiterate people of course), and making him the bad guy who’s running the Obama administration from behind the scenes. No, it’s not only about race. But if you think it’s merely a coincidence that the right has sought to make Jones such an issue—rather than some of the other administration officials they are now threatening to “expose” (two of whom are white)—then you haven’t been paying attention to Republican and conservative politics for the past forty years. This is what they do. It’s the only language they speak, at least fluently.
The Afrikaner Party Draws First Blood: Van Jones, Barack Obama and the Audacity of Capitulation (via azspot)
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Naka On Wood Productions: Knock Here
Looks this good don't grow on trees
