Talking in your sleep

A little over a year ago, I decided to do something I've always wanted to do -- learn Japanese.

I've had a fascination with Japan since I was a kid.  My dad lived there for a while during the 1950s, and while he was there collected Japanese art and old vinyl records of Japanese folk and pop music, so I grew up surrounded by reminders of the culture.  As a result, I've always wanted to learn more about the country and its people and history, and -- one day, perhaps -- visit.

So in September of 2023 I signed up for Duolingo, and began to inch my way through learning the language.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

It's a challenge, to say the least.  Japanese usually shows up on lists of "the five most difficult languages to learn."  Not only are there the three different scripts you have to master in order to be literate, the grammatical structure is really different from English.  The trickiest part, at least thus far, is managing particles -- little words that follow nouns and indicate how they're being used in the sentence.  They're a bit like English prepositions, but there's a subtlety to them that is hard to grok.  Here's a simple example:

Watashi wa gozen juuji ni tokoshan de ane aimasu.

(I) (particle indicating the subject of the sentence) (A.M.) (ten o'clock) (particle indicating movement or time) (library) (particle indicating where something is happening) (my sister) (am meeting with) = "I am meeting my sister at ten A.M. at the library."

Get the particles wrong, and the sentence ends up somewhere between grammatically incorrect and completely incomprehensible.

So I'm coming along.  Slowly.  I have a reasonably good affinity for languages -- I grew up bilingual (English/French) and have a master's degree in linguistics -- but the hardest part for me is simply remembering the vocabulary.  The grammar patterns take some getting used to, but once I see how they work, they tend to stick.  The vocabulary, though?  Over and over again I'll run into a word, and I'm certain I've seen it before and at one point knew what it meant, and it will not come back to mind.  So I look it up...

... and then go, "Oh, of course.  Duh.  I knew that."

But according to a study this week out of the University of South Australia, apparently what I'm doing wrong is simple: I need more sleep.

Researchers in the Department of Neuroscience took 35 native English speakers and taught them "Mini-Pinyin" -- an invented pseudolanguage that has Mandarin Chinese vocabulary but English sentence structure.  (None of them had prior experience with Mandarin.)  They were sorted into two groups; the first learned the language in the morning and returned twelve hours later to be tested, and the second learned it in the evening, slept overnight in the lab, and were tested the following morning.

The second group did dramatically better than the first.  Significantly, during sleep their brains showed a higher-than-average level of brain wave patterns called slow oscillations and sleep spindles, that are thought to be connected with memory consolidation -- uploading short-term memories from the hippocampus into long-term storage in the cerebral cortex.  Your brain, in effect, talks in its sleep, routing information from one location to another.

"This coupling likely reflects the transfer of learned information from the hippocampus to the cortex, enhancing long-term memory storage," said Zachariah Cross, who co-authored the study.  "Post-sleep neural activity showed unique patterns of theta oscillations associated with cognitive control and memory consolidation, suggesting a strong link between sleep-induced brainwave co-ordination and learning outcomes."

So if you're taking a language class, or if -- like me -- you're just learning another language for your own entertainment, you're likely to have more success in retention if you study in the evening, and get a good night's sleep before you're called upon to use what you've learned.

Of course, many of us could use more sleep for a variety of other reasons.  Insomnia is a bear, and poor sleep is linked with a whole host of health-related woes.  But a nice benefit of dedicating yourself to getting better sleep duration and quality is an improvement in memory.

And hopefully for me, better scores on my Duolingo lessons.

****************************************

The shadow knows

One of the most terrifying sleep-related phenomena is sleep paralysis.

I say this only from hearing about the experiences of others; I have never had it happen to me.  But the people I've talked to who have had episodes of sleep paralysis relate being wide awake and conscious, but unable to move -- often along with some odd sensory experiences -- such as feelings of being watched or having someone in the room; hissing, humming, or sizzling noises; a tingling in the extremities that feels like a mild electric shock; a feeling of being suffocated; and (understandably) the emotions of fear and panic.

The reason all of this comes up is an article that appeared over at the site Mysterious Universe about "Shadow People."  The piece was by Nick Redfern, whose name should be familiar to anyone who is an aficionado of cryptozoology; Redfern has been involved in a number of investigations of the paranormal, and is the author of books such as The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, Shapeshifters: Morphing Monsters and Changing Cryptids, The Real Men in Black, The New World Order Book, and a variety of other titles I encourage you to peruse.

So Redfern has a pretty obvious bias, here, which is why I was already primed to view his piece on the Shadow People with a bit of a jaundiced eye.  Let me let him speak for himself, though.  Redfern tells us that there are these entities that we should all be on the lookout for, and then tells us the following:

Jason Offutt is an expert on the Shadow People, and the author of a 2009 book on the subject titled Darkness Walks: The Shadow People Among Us.  He says there are eight different kinds of Shadow People – at least, they are the ones we know about.  He labels them as Benign Shadows, Shadows of Terror, Red-Eyed Shadows, Noisy Shadows, Angry Hooded Shadows, Shadows that Attack, Shadow Cats, and the Hat Man.

Shadow Cats?  Why only cats?  Cats, in my experience, are already conceited enough that they don't need another feather in their caps.  Of course, the positive side is that Shadow Cats wouldn't be very threatening. The cats I've owned specialized in two behaviors: Sitting Around Looking Bored, and Moving Closer To Where We Are So We'll Appreciate How Bored They Are.  If their Shadow versions are no more motivated, it's hard to see why you'd even care they were around, since Shadow Cats presumably don't eat, drink, or use a litter box.  They'd kind of be a low-impact paranormal home décor item.

On the other hand, I'm just as glad there are no Shadow Dogs, because then we'd have yet another source of the really obnoxious noise that dogs make when they are conducting intimate personal hygiene, a sound my wife calls "glopping."  Our three dogs glop enough, there's no need for additional glopping from the spirit world.

But then there's "Hat Man."  On first glance, that seemed fairly non-threatening, but Redfern tells us that Hat Man is the scariest one on the list:

I sat and listened at my table [at a conference, speaking to an attendee] as he told me how, back in July of this year, he had three experiences with the Hat Man – and which were pretty much all identical – and which were very familiar to me.  He woke up in the early hours of the morning to a horrific vision: the outside wall of his bedroom was displaying a terrifying image of a large city on fire, with significant portions of it in ruins.  It was none other than Chicago.  The sky was dark and millions were dead.  Circling high above what was left of the city was a large, human-like entity with huge wings.  And stood [sic] next to the guy, as he watched this apocalyptic scenario unravel from his bed, was the Hat Man, his old-style fedora hat positioned firmly on his head.  The doomsday-like picture lasted for a minute or two, making it clear to the witness that a Third World War had begun.  On two more occasions in the same month, a near-identical situation played out.  It’s hardly surprising that the man was still concerned by all this when we chatted at the weekend.

So he talked to some other people, and more than one person mentioned seeing Hat Man, and always associated with images of doom and destruction.  Toward the end, he mentions the fact that one of the people who'd seen Hat Man suffered from sleep paralysis... which kind of made me go, "Aha."

In a paper by Walther and Schulz back in 2004 entitled, "Recurrent Isolated Sleep Paralysis: Polysomnographic and Clinical Findings," it was found that people who suffered from sleep paralysis showed abnormal patterns of REM and non-REM sleep, and (most interestingly) fragmentation of REM.  REM, you probably know, is associated with dreaming; suppressing or disturbing REM causes a whole host of problems, up to and including hallucination.  Another paper -- Cheyne, Rueffer, and Newby-Clark, in 1999, "Hypnagogic and Hypnopompic Hallucinations during Sleep Paralysis: Neurological and Cultural Construction of the Night-Mare" -- has another interesting clue, which is that during sleep paralysis, cholinergic neurons (the neural bundles that promote wakefulness and REM) are hyperactive, whereas the serotonergic neurons (ones that initiate relaxation and a sense of well-being) are inhibited.  This implies that the mind becomes wakeful, but emotionally uneasy, before the brain-body connection comes back online.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The problem here is that if you're in sleep paralysis, or the related phenomenon of hypnagogic experiences (dreams in light sleep), what you are perceiving is not reflective of reality.  So as creepy as Shadow People are -- not to mention "Hat Man" -- I'm pretty certain that what we've got here is a visual hallucination experienced during a dream state.

Not sure about the Shadow Cats, though.  I still don't see how that'd work.  Given my luck at trying to get cats comply with simple rules such as "Stay The Hell Off The Kitchen Counter," my guess is that even feline hallucinations wouldn't want to cooperate.  If you expected them to show up and scare some poor dude who was just trying to get a good night's sleep, they'd probably balk because it wasn't their idea.  Shadow Dogs, on the other hand, would be happy to climb on the sleeping dude's bed and glop right next to his ear.  They're just helpful that way.

****************************************

Dream a little dream of me

In one of my favorite novels, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin, the main character -- an unassuming man named George Orr -- figures out that when he dreams, his dream changes reality.  The problem is, since when the change occurs, it alters everyone else's memories of what had happened, the only one who realizes that anything has changed is him.

At first, of course, he doesn't believe it.  He must be remembering wrong.  Then, when he becomes convinced it's actually happening, he starts taking drugs to try to stop him from dreaming, but they don't work.  As a last resort, he tries to get help from a psychologist...

... but the psychologist realizes how powerful this ability could be, and starts guiding George into dreams that will shape the world into what he wants it to be.

It's a powerful cautionary tale about what happens when an unscrupulous person gains control over someone with a valuable talent.  Power corrupts, as the oft-quoted line from John Dalberg-Acton goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I couldn't help thinking about The Lathe of Heaven when I read about some new exploration of lucid dreaming taking place at REMSpace, a California startup, that will be featured in a paper in The International Journal of Dream Research soon (a preprint is available at the link provided).  A lucid dream is one in which you are aware that you're dreaming while you're dreaming, and often have some degree of control over what happens.  Around twenty percent of people report regular lucid dreaming, but there is some research that suggests many of us can learn to lucid dream.

Dickens's Dream by Robert W. Buss (1875) [Image is in the Public Domain]

At this point, I'll interject that despite a long history of very vivid dreams, I've never had a lucid dream.  I did have an almost-lucid dream, once; it was a weird and involved story about being a groomsman in a wedding in a big cathedral, and when the priest said the whole "does anyone have any objections?" thing, a gaudily-dressed old lady in the front row stood up and started shouting about what an asshole the groom was and how the bride could do way better.  And I'm standing there, feeling horrified and uncomfortable, and I thought, "This is bizarre!  How could this be happening?  Is this a dream?"  So I kind of looked around, then patted myself to reassure myself that I was solid, and thought, "Nope.  I guess this is real."

So the one time I actually considered the question of whether I was dreaming, I got the wrong answer.

But I digress.

Anyhow, the researchers at REMSpace took a group of test subjects who all reported being able to lucid dream, and hooked them up to electromyography and electroencephalography sensors -- which, respectively, measure the electrical discharge from voluntary muscle contractions and neural firing in the brain -- and gave them the pre-sleep suggestion that they would dream about driving a car.  Using the output from the sensors, they created a virtual avatar of the person on a computer screen, and found that they were able to use tiny motions of their hands to steer it, and even avoid obstacles.

"Two-way interaction with a computer from dreams opens up a whole area of new technologies," said Michael Raduga, who led the experiment.  "Now, these developments are crude, but soon they will change the idea of human capabilities."

Maybe so, but it also puts the dreamer in the hands of the experimenter.  Now, I'm not saying Michael Raduga and his team are up to anything nefarious; and obviously I don't believe anyone's got the George-Orr-like ability to change reality to conform to what they dream.  But does anyone else have the feeling that "two-way interaction" into your dreams is potentially problematic?  I've heard a lot of people say things like, "hypnosis isn't dangerous, you can't be given a post-hypnotic suggestion that induces you to do something you wouldn't ordinarily do," but if there's one thing my knowledge of neuroscience has taught me, it's that the human brain is highly suggestible.

So as interested as I am in lucid dreaming, I'm not ready to sign up to have my dreams interacted with by a computer controlled by someone else.  And I hope like hell that when Raduga and his group at REMSpace start "changing the idea of human capabilities," they are extremely careful.

Anyway, that's our interesting-but-a-little-scary research for today.  Me, I'm gonna stick with my ordinary old dreams, which are peculiar enough.  And given my failure at detecting a potentially lucid dream when I had the chance, I doubt I'd be all that good at it in any case.  I'd probably drive my virtual dream car right into a telephone pole.

****************************************

Balm of hurt minds

The main character of Haruki Murakami's brilliant and terrifying short story "Sleep" is a perfectly normal middle-class woman living in Tokyo.  Her husband is a dentist, and they've got a lively, cheerful five-year-old son.  Everything about her life is so ordinary that it's hard even to describe.

Then, in one instant, all that changes.

One night, she awakens -- or thinks she has -- to a terrifying vision that even afterward, she's not certain was real or a hallucination during sleep paralysis.  A dark shape is huddled by the foot of her bed, and unfolds itself to reveal the figure of an elderly man, dressed in black, staring at her with an undisguised malevolence.  She attempts to scream, and can't.  After a moment, she forces herself to close her eyes, and when she opens them, the man is gone.  She's drenched with sweat, so she gets up, showers, pours herself a brandy, and waits for morning.

But after that moment, she is completely unable to go to sleep.  Ever.

The remainder of the story could be a teaching text in a fiction writing course lesson about how to create a believable Unreliable Narrator.  She returns to her ordinary life, but everything starts seeming... off.  Some senses are amplified, others dulled into nonexistence.  Everyday objects appear surreal, as if they've changed subtly, but she can't quite tell how.  One evening, she watches her husband as he's sleeping, and realizes that his face suddenly looks ugly to her.  She takes to going out driving at night (once her husband and son are asleep) and meets people who may or may not be real.  Her progressive slide into insanity reaches its apogee in the wee hours of one night, after seventeen days with no sleep, when she drives farther than she has ever driven, and ends up in an empty parking lot overlooking the ocean.  Dark figures raise themselves on either side of her little car, grab it by the handles, and begin to rock it back and forth, harder and harder.  She's thrown around by the motion, slamming against the door and steering wheel, and her last panicked thought is, "It's going to flip over, and there's nothing I can do to stop it."

An apt, if disturbing, summation of what is happening to her mind.

Sleep is an absolutely critical part of human health, but even after decades of research, it is unclear why.  Just about every animal studied sleeps, and many of them seem to dream -- or at least undergo REM sleep -- the same as we do.  (I know my dogs do; both of them bark and twitch in their sleep, and our sweet, gentle little dog Rosie sometimes growls as if she was the biggest meanest Rottweiler on the planet.)

Now, a team at the Binzhou Medical University's Shandong Technology Innovation Center has found one reason why sleep is so critical.  Sleep-deprived mice stop producing a protein called pleiotrophin, which apparently has a protective effect on the cells of the hippocampus.  Reduced pleiotrophin levels lead to cell death -- impairing both memory and spatial awareness.  Pleiotrophin decline has also been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Sasha Kargaltsev, Sleeping (10765632993), CC BY 2.0]

What's unclear, though, is what direction the causation points.  Does the decline in pleiotrophin from sleeplessness cause the neurodegeneration, or does the neurodegeneration lead to insomnia and a drop in pleiotrophin levels?  The current research suggests the former, as the mice in the study had been genetically engineered to experience sleep disturbances, and the pleiotrophin loss seems to have followed as a consequence of the sleep deprivation.  Then, the question is, if pleiotrophin decline does trigger neurodegeneration, could the damage from Alzheimer's be prevented by increasing the production of the protein?

Uncertain at this point, but it's intriguing to find one piece of a puzzle that has intrigued us for centuries.  It seems fitting to end this musing on the power of sleep with the famous quote from Macbeth:

Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,’ the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

****************************************

Dream weavers

In Ursula LeGuin's amazing and disturbing novel The Lathe of Heaven, a very ordinary guy finds that he has a completely unordinary ability.

When he dreams, he wakes up and finds that whatever he dreamed has become reality.

George Orr, the protagonist, is terrified by this, as you might imagine.  It's not like he can control what he dreams; he isn't able to program himself to dream something pleasant in order to find he has it when he wakes.  No, it's more sinister than that.  Consider the bizarre, confusing, often frightening content of most of our dreams -- dreams that prompt you to say the next morning, "Where the hell did that come from?"

That is what makes up George's reality.

The worst part is that George is the only one who knows it's happening.  When his dream content alters reality, it alters everything -- including the memories -- of the people he knows.  When he wakes up and finds that the cityscape has changed and that some people he knew are gone, replaced with others he has never seen before, everyone else's memories changed as well.  George wakes to find he has a girlfriend, but she doesn't think it's sudden and weird; being George's girlfriend is what she remembers.

Only George sees that this is just the latest version of a constantly shifting reality.

So when he tries to explain to people what he can do, and (if possible) find a way to stop it, no one believes him.  No one... except a ruthless and ambitious psychiatrist who realizes that if he can figure out how to manipulate George's dreams, he can fashion a world to his own desires, using George as a tool to create the reality he wants.

LeGuin's terrifying vision of what happens when grasping amorality meets a naïve but useful skill is turning out not to be far from being realized.  George Orr's paranormal ability is the stuff of fiction, of course; but the capacity for influencing our dreams is not.

Nor, apparently, is the potential for using our dreams as a conduit for suggestions that might alter our behavior -- with or without our permission, possibly with or without our knowledge.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons stephentrepreneur, Hurtle Square dreams, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I found out yesterday from a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia that there is a cohort of powerful corporations who have teamed up to see if there's a way to insert advertising content into our dreams.  Xbox, Coors, Microsoft, and Burger King, among others, have been experimenting on volunteers to see if they can introduce targeted advertising while we're asleep, and (especially) while we're at the neurologically hyperactive REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, in order to induce people to alter their behavior -- i.e., purchase the product in question -- once they wake up.  They've had some success; a test by Coors found that sixty percent of the volunteers were susceptible to having these kinds of product-based suggestions influence their dream content.

Forty sleep and dream researchers are now pushing back, and have drafted a document calling for regulation of what the corporate researchers are calling "dream incubation."  "It is easy to envision a world in which smart speakers—forty million Americans currently have them in their bedrooms—become instruments of passive, unconscious overnight advertising, with or without our permission," the authors state.

My fear is that the profit motive will outweigh any reluctance people might have toward having their dreams infiltrated by corporate content.  If cellular service providers were willing to give users a discount on their monthly fees, provided they agreed to allow themselves to be exposed to ads during the nighttime hours, how many people would say, "Sure, okay, go for it"?  I know for myself, I'm often willing to tolerate ads on games and video streaming services rather than paying extra to go ad-free.  I'd like to think that I'm able to tune out the ads sufficiently that they're not influencing my behavior, but what would happen if I'm exposed to them for all eight to ten hours that I'm sleeping every night?

Not all scientists are concerned about the technique's efficacy, however.  "Of course you can play ads to someone as they are sleeping, but as far as having much effect, there is little evidence," said Deirdre Barrett, a dream researcher at Harvard University.  "Dream incubation doesn’t seem very cost effective compared with traditional advertising campaigns."

Even if it doesn't have the manipulative capability the corporations are hoping, the idea still scares the hell out of me.  When every moment of our days and nights become just another opportunity for monetization, where will it all stop?   "I am not overly concerned, just as I am not concerned that people can be hypnotized against their will," said University of Montreal dream researcher Tore Nielsen.  "If it does indeed happen and no regulatory actions are taken to prevent it, then I think we will be well on our way to a Big Brother state … [and] whether or not our dreams can be modified would likely be the least of our worries."

Which is it exactly.  As I've pointed out before, my main concern is about the increasing control corporate interests have over everything.  And here in the United States, the problem is that the people who could potentially pass legislation to limit what the corporations can get away with are being funded largely by corporate donors, so they're not anxious to put the brakes on and see that flow of cash dry up suddenly.  It's a catch-22 that would require the government to police its own behavior for no other reason than simple morality and ethics.

And you can guess how successful that is likely to be.

I'm hoping that at least someone is listening, though.  I tend to agree with Nielsen; I don't think our dream content will be as easily manipulable, or as behavior-altering, as the corporations hope.  But what I'm more worried about is that once we refuse to delineate a hard line around our personal lives, and say to them, "Here, and no further," we've opened ourselves up to there being no part of our personal space that isn't considered a target for monetization.

**********************************

In 1924, a young man named Werner Heisenberg spent some time on a treeless island in the North Sea called Helgoland, getting away from distractions so he could try to put together recently-collected (and bizarre) data from the realm of the very small in a way that made sense.

What he came up with overturned just about everything we thought we understood about how the universe works.

Prior to Heisenberg, and his colleagues Erwin Schrödinger and Niels Bohr, most people saw subatomic phenomena as being scaled-down versions of familiar objects; the nucleus like a little hard lump, electrons like planets orbiting the Sun, light like waves in a pond.  Heisenberg found that the reality is far stranger and less intuitive than anyone dreamed, so much so that even Einstein called their theories "spooky action at a distance."  But quantum theory has become one of the most intensively tested models science has ever developed, and thus far it has passed every rigorous experiment with flying colors, providing verifiable measurements to a seemingly arbitrary level of precision.

As bizarre as its conclusions seem, the picture of the submicroscopic world the quantum theory gives us appears to be completely accurate.

In Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution, brilliant physicist and writer Carlo Rovelli describes how these discoveries were made -- and in his usual lucid and articulate style, gives us a view of some of the most groundbreaking discoveries ever made.  If you're curious about quantum physics but a little put off by the complexity, check out Rovelli's book, which sketches out for the layperson the weird and counterintuitive framework that Heisenberg and others discovered.  It's delightfully mind-blowing.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

A little life, rounded with a sleep

An unsolved mystery of biology is the question of why we -- and just about every other animal studied -- have to sleep.

I've looked at this issue before here at Skeptophilia, and from the research I've read, we're no closer to a definitive answer.  There's the physical rest aspect, of course, but I think we can all attest that when you're exhausted, you don't recover equally well by sitting quietly awake for two hours or by taking a two-hour nap.  (In fact, if you're like me, when you're exhausted, sitting quietly for two hours without falling asleep is damn near impossible.)  There's some indication that sleep, especially the REM (rapid eye movement) stage wherein we dream, is critical for memory consolidation.  Other studies have found that during sleep, potentially toxic metabolic byproducts are cleared from the brain and cerebrospinal fluid, so sleep may act as a time for cleaning house.

Or all three.  And probably others.  But even if these are partial answers to the conundrum of sleep, they leave a number of facets of the sleep cycle unaccounted for.  Why, for example, does sleep need vary so greatly?  Elephants in the wild sleep about two hours a day; lions, on the other end of the spectrum, snooze for eighteen to twenty hours a day.  Famously, dolphins and whales do something even stranger.  They let half of their brain sleep at a time -- one side becomes quiescent, then that side wakes up and the other one takes a nap.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jamain, Sleeping man J1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Recent studies have shown that however far you go down the animal-brainpower-scale, they still sleep.  Insects and other arthropods sleep.  Even roundworms do.  One difficulty is that at that stage, it's a little hard to define what sleep is; certainly, the mental activity isn't going to be closely analogous to what goes on in a human's brain during the sleep cycle.  So most biologists use a functional definition: sleep is occurring if (1) the animal becomes quiet and hard to rouse, (2) the behavior is on some kind of a circadian rhythm, and (3) if you disturb the animal's sleep one day, they make up for it by sleeping longer the next day (something called sleep homeostasis).  These are sufficient to differentiate it from other behaviors that might mimic some aspects of true sleep -- hibernation, coma, anesthetization, inebriation, fainting, and so on.

This generates a fascinating result when you look at some of the simplest animals in the world; because a recent paper in the journal Science Advances has demonstrated that by this definition, hydras sleep.

Hydras are a group of freshwater animals in the Phylum Cnidaria, and thus are related to jellyfish, sea anemones, and corals.  This generates a difficulty if you try to apply any brain-based evolutionary reason for the ubiquity of sleep, because hydras don't have a brain.  They have a decentralized nerve net with no central nervous system whatsoever.  And yet, they undergo behavior that meet all three of the criteria of the functional definition for sleep.

This not only raises some interesting questions about the purpose of sleep, it brings up an entirely different one for the evolutionary biologists.  When did sleep evolve?  There's a general rule that the more ubiquitous a feature is (be it an organ, a protein, a gene, a behavior, whatever), the older it is evolutionarily and the more important it is to survival.  By this argument, sleep is really critical (which we already sort of knew), and it's really old.  Hydras are almost as distant as you can get from mammals on the family tree of Kingdom Animalia; our last common ancestor with hydras lived at least five hundred million years ago.  Amongst animals, only sponges are more distantly related.  It is possible that sleep is not a conserved feature -- that it was evolved independently on more than one of the branches of the family tree -- but in my mind, given the fact that every animal studied shows sleep behavior, it seems like it requires a great many more ad hoc assumptions to claim that sleep evolved over and over than it does to assert that we all inherited it from a common ancestor a very long time ago.

Nota bene: you might be thinking that the same could be said for the presence of eyes, but eyes almost certainly evolved separately in different groups.  We can tell this because however functionally similar the eyes of (for example) humans, flies, flatworms, and squids are, they are structurally different.  It may be that they all come from a common ancestor with light-sensing patches of some sort, but if so, in the interim each branch of Kingdom Animalia refined those structures in entirely different ways.  The same, by the way, is true of wings and the presence of flight in a number of different animal groups.

So the discovery that hydras sleep makes a curious question even curiouser.  Clearly, if sleep aids higher brain functioning and memory consolidation in humans, those were advantages it gained us much later, because as I mentioned, hydras don't even have brains.  The presence of sleep behavior in hydras and other simple animals points to it having a function in maintaining metabolism, so perhaps the "sleep as time to clean house" answer will turn out to be closer to the universal answer.

And who knows?  Maybe the next thing they'll find out is that sponges sleep, or that amoebas sleep.  At that point, we'll have a whole new set of questions, because those are organisms that not only lack a brain, but don't have nerves at all.  But given the ubiquity of snoozing in the animal kingdom, I actually wouldn't be surprised if it were true.

***********************************

Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Dream weaving

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Night Terrors," the ship gets trapped in a phenomenon called "Tyken's Rift," one of the myriad hand-waving scientific phenomena they came up with as plot devices.  It's some sort of rip in the space-time continuum -- I swear, given how often it rips in that show, you'd swear the space-time continuum was made of wet Kleenex -- and the upshot is that it causes a weird result for the crew.  They lose their ability to drop into REM sleep, so they're prevented from dreaming.

And it causes them to start hallucinating, and eventually, to go violently insane.  It'd happened to another ship, whose crew ended up killing each other.  This led to one of the single creepiest images the show ever came up with, while Dr. Crusher is in the morgue doing post-mortems on the dead crew members -- and is beginning to hallucinate herself.

There are a number of aspects of the episode that are pretty silly, but this one scene works brilliantly, mainly because it highlights exactly how surreal and terrifying dreams can be.  While you're inside them, they seem absolutely real.  In the last couple of years, I've had a number of dreams of being attacked by an animal -- odd in and of itself, because I always have gotten along with animals.  Dogs, in fact, like me a great deal better than people do.  But each time, I'm minding my own business, and some animal charges me, causing me to wake up, and more than once, to shout out, waking my poor long-suffering wife.

Why do I dream this stuff?  In fact, why does anyone dream what they do?  That's an interesting, and not an easy, question.  It brings to mind a topic that came periodically in my biology classes, involving the difference between proximal and ultimate causes.  In a proximal sense, we know that dreaming is caused by an activation of the visual and auditory cortices and a reduction in activity of the prefrontal cortex during REM sleep, triggering us to imagine vivid images and sounds while simultaneously shutting off one of the primary "reality filters" we have (explaining why dreams can seem to make sense while we're in them, and completely batshit insane once we wake up).

But when students asked "why do we dream?" that's not usually what they meant.  They were looking for a deeper, ultimate cause -- what purpose does it serve?  What is the overarching reason for dreaming?  And there, we go into what is largely uncharted territory.  Science, it turns out, is not so good at teleology -- the analysis of ultimate causes, explanations that don't just look at the mechanism, but the purpose or driver behind them.

This is why I was a little dubious about a paper by Erik Hoel of Tufts University that appeared in the journal Patterns last week.  Entitled, "The Overfitted Brain: Dreams Evolved to Assist Generalization," Hoel claims that his study of artificial intelligence/deep neural networks suggests that the purpose of dreams is to help us generalize what we've learned -- that our ordinary experience gives us limited ability to develop flexibility (i.e., we usually are confronted with the same stuff over and over again), so dreams interject a hefty dose of pure weirdness to help us learn to deal with the unexpected.

Hoel writes:

Understanding of the evolved biological function of sleep has advanced considerably in the past decade.  However, no equivalent understanding of dreams has emerged.  Contemporary neuroscientific theories often view dreams as epiphenomena, and many of the proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves.  Now, the recent advent of deep neural networks (DNNs) has finally provided the novel conceptual framework within which to understand the evolved function of dreams.  Notably, all DNNs face the issue of overfitting as they learn, which is when performance on one dataset increases but the network's performance fails to generalize (often measured by the divergence of performance on training versus testing datasets).  This ubiquitous problem in DNNs is often solved by modelers via “noise injections” in the form of noisy or corrupted inputs.  The goal of this paper is to argue that the brain faces a similar challenge of overfitting and that nightly dreams evolved to combat the brain's overfitting during its daily learning.  That is, dreams are a biological mechanism for increasing generalizability via the creation of corrupted sensory inputs from stochastic activity across the hierarchy of neural structures.  Sleep loss, specifically dream loss, leads to an overfitted brain that can still memorize and learn but fails to generalize appropriately. 

It's an interesting idea.  And I have to admit that the dream I had a few nights ago, wherein a horse jumped a fence and charged straight at me, hooves flying and teeth bared, is pretty fucking stochastic.  I am, however, a bit wary of any claim of the form "X is a widespread phenomenon, and it happens because of Y."  Complex phenomena -- which dreaming certainly is, given people's varied experience of it -- seldom have only a single proximal cause, much less a single ultimate cause.  And as I said, ultimate causes are notoriously tricky to identify anyhow.  Even some simpler questions to frame than dreaming -- such as why humans have upright posture -- have yet to be settled.  (Some suggestions are that it was to give us farther sight distance in the grasslands where we evolved, to leave our hands free to manipulate tools, that it made it easier to wade in order to gather aquatic organisms like shellfish for food, that it improved walking and running endurance, that it allowed our ancestors to reach fruit in trees more easily, that it made it easier for mothers to hold their infants while moving from place to place...  In point of fact, it could be any of these, all of these, or various other advantages not on the list, and it would be extremely difficult to discern which is correct.)

All of which is not meant to criticize Hoel's hypothesis specifically, because it's pretty intriguing.  I'm just always hesitant to jump to an appealing explanation just because "it sounds like it makes sense."  Reality is awfully complex, and explanations can be hard to come by.

But whatever the reason is, I'd sure like it if I could stop dreaming about being attacked by vicious animals.  My wife would like it, too.  Being awakened in the middle of the night because your husband is dreaming he's being attacked by a raging wombat kind of gets old after a while.

***********************************

Too many people think of chemistry as being arcane and difficult formulas and laws and symbols, and lose sight of the amazing reality it describes.  My younger son, who is the master glassblower for the chemistry department at the University of Houston, was telling me about what he's learned about the chemistry of glass -- why it it's transparent, why different formulations have different properties, what causes glass to have the colors it does, or no color at all -- and I was astonished at not only the complexity, but how incredibly cool it is.

The world is filled with such coolness, and it's kind of sad how little we usually notice it.  Colors and shapes and patterns abound, and while some of them are still mysterious, there are others that can be explained in terms of the behavior of the constituent atoms and molecules.  This is the topic of the phenomenal new book The Beauty of Chemistry: Art, Wonder, and Science by Philip Ball and photographers Wenting Zhu and Yan Liang, which looks at the chemistry of the familiar, and illustrates the science with photographs of astonishing beauty.

Whether you're an aficionado of science or simply someone who is curious about the world around you, The Beauty of Chemistry is a book you will find fascinating.  You'll learn a bit about the chemistry of everything from snowflakes to champagne -- and be entranced by the sheer beauty of the ordinary.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Siesta time

I'm a morning person.

I know this is pretty unusual.  I also know from first-hand experience that night owls tend to hate us morning people, who are up with the sun and at least reasonably coherent by six a.m., if not always showered and fully dressed.  (Hell, I'm retired.  Fully dressed sometimes doesn't happen at all, especially when the weather is warm.)

The result, though, is that I fade out pretty early in the evening.  I'm one of those people who, when invited to a party, seriously consider saying no if the start time is after seven in the evening.  By eight I want to be reading a book, and the times I'm still awake at ten are few and far between.

But the lowest time for me, energy-wise, is right after lunch.  Even when I get adequate sleep, I go through a serious slump in the early afternoon, even if I was chipper beforehand.  (Okay, given my personality, I'm never really chipper.  I also don't do "perky" or "bubbly."  So think about it as "chipper as compared to my baseline demeanor.")

Turns out, I'm not alone in finding the early afternoon a tough time to be productive, or even to stay awake.  As I learned from a paper in The Journal of Neuroscience, the problem is a fluctuation in the brain's reward circuit -- it, like many other human behaviors, is on a circadian rhythm that affects its function in a regular and predictable fashion.

The problem is a misalignment of the putamen (part of the brain's reward circuit) and the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which acts as a biological clock.  The putamen is most active when you receive a reward you weren't expecting, and least active when you expect a reward and don't get one.  The cycling of the suprachiasmatic nucleus stimulates the putamen to expect a reward after lunch, and then when it doesn't come -- one in the afternoon is nowhere near quitting time or happy hour, and most people's schedules don't accommodate an early afternoon nap -- the expected payoff doesn't happen.

The result: sad putamen.  Drop in motivation levels.

"The data suggest that the brain’s reward centres might be primed to expect rewards in the early afternoon, and be ‘surprised’ when they appear at the start and end of the day," said neuroscientist Jamie Byrne of Swinburne University.  "[The] brain is ‘expecting’ rewards at some times of day more than others, because it is adaptively primed by the body clock."

Me, I wonder why this priming happens at all.  What sort of reward did we receive in the early afternoon in our evolutionary history that led to this response becoming so common?  Honestly, I wonder if it was napping; an afternoon nap has been found not only to improve cognitive function, but (contrary to popular opinion) doesn't generally interfere with sleeping at night.  Having evolved on the African savanna, where the early afternoon can be miserably hot, it could be that we're built to snooze in the shade after lunch, and now that most of us are on an eight-to-five work schedule, we can't get away with it any more.  But the circadian rhythm we evolved is still there, and our energy levels plummet after lunch.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jamain, Sleeping man J1, CC BY-SA 3.0]

It reminds me of the three weeks I spent in Spain and Portugal a few years ago.  I was astonished at first by the fact that no one ate dinner -- even considered eating dinner -- until nine in the evening.  (On one of our first days there, we went to a restaurant at about eight, and asked the waiter if we could be seated at a table.  His response was, "Why?"  I think he was genuinely puzzled as to why anyone might want dinner at such a ridiculously early hour.)  But once we got the hang of it -- a big lunch with a bottle of fine red wine, then a three-hour siesta during the hottest part of the day, when businesses close their doors so there's nothing much to do but sleep anyhow -- even I was able to stay up late with no problem.

All in all, a very pleasant lifestyle, I thought.

So we now know there is a neurological reason for the early-afternoon energy slump.  Kind of a fascinating thing how much we're at the mercy of our biological clock.  But anyhow, I better get busy and get some chores done.  Time's a-wasting, and I'm guessing by lunchtime I won't be feeling like doing much but hitting the hammock and conking out for a while.

************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is pure fun, and a great gift for any of your friends who are cryptid fanciers: Graham Roumieu's hilarious Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir.

In this short but hysterically funny book, we find out from the Big Guy's own mouth how hard it is to have the reputation for being huge, hairy, and bad-smelling.  Okay, even he admits he doesn't smell great, but it's not his fault, as showers aren't common out in the wilderness.  And think about the effect this has on his self-image, not to mention his success rate of advertising in the "Personals" section of the newspaper.

So read this first-person account of the struggles of this hirsute Everyman, and maybe even next time you're out hiking, bring along a little something for our australopithecene distant cousin.

He's very fond of peach schnapps.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

In your wildest dreams

So, last night, this weird thing happened.  I was skinnydipping in the Caribbean, swimming along trying to get to the other side, when I noticed some people on a boat following me.  They started yelling at me, not (surprisingly) to ask why I was out in the middle of the ocean, but to let me know that there was a hurricane coming and I'd better swim faster because otherwise I wouldn't reach Senegal (which is apparently on the "other side of the Caribbean") in time to avoid drowning in the storm.  They then motored off to get to safety themselves.  It never crossed my mind to wonder why, if the situation was so dire, they hadn't hauled me aboard.  Maybe it was because they were embarrassed by the fact I was naked and they didn't have an extra pair of swim trunks, although I don't remember being much bothered by the fact myself.  Or maybe it was because I'd apparently gotten out there myself, I could damn well get myself out of it, and they'd done their duty by at least letting me know that I was about to be in the middle of a cyclone.

I don't remember what happened after that.  I think it got a little weird.

Somewhere along the way, I woke up, and in the words that every bad fantasy writer has written at some point, "He realized it was only a dream."  Lying there in the dark, I started wondering why my errant brain had come up with something that odd, and came to the conclusion that it was an amalgam of various things over the last few days, like the NOAA bulletin I read saying we were likely to have an above-average year for dangerous hurricanes, and looking at some photos someone posted on Twitter from West Africa.  The skinnydipping part at least makes a modicum of sense because I love to swim but kind of hate swearing swim trunks.  Fortunately I have a pond that's in the privacy of my fenced back yard and only visible from the road if you look exactly in the right direction at exactly the right time, and my opinion is if someone's that determined to see my bare ass, they can have at it.  (Of course, given the way the weather's currently going in the Northeast, it'll probably be August before I'd be willing to swim without a fully-insulated dry-suit, much less naked.)

And for the record, this dream still wasn't as completely fucked up as my wife's dream a couple of nights ago about being tackled by an enormous kangaroo, or the one last night where she had rented an apartment in Washington D.C. but was dismayed to find that it had no door, and the only way you could get in was by climbing through the mail slot.

Apparently even King Solomon had some weird dreams, because I don't know what the hell this is about.  Luca Giordano, The Dream of Solomon (1694) [Image is in the Public Domain]

All of this comes up because of a paper this week in Cell Reports about a study of two epileptic patients who had implants to monitor their brain activity.  These electrodes were supposed to act as neuromuscular interfaces, allowing the individuals to overcome motor paralysis and move their arms simply by thinking about it, but along the way the devices made sensitive readings of neural firing patterns.  And what the researchers found was that when the patients went into the REM (rapid eye-movement) phase of sleep, during which we dream, the brain was apparently replaying firing patterns for motor control that had been learned the previous day.

So the researchers had the patients play a mental game of "Simon" -- remember the popular electronic toy where you had to press buttons to repeat a pattern of sounds and colors?  Of course, given these individuals' disabilities, they couldn't play the actual game, so the scientists instructed the patients to think through and recall the pattern they'd just seen, picturing themselves pushing the buttons in the correct order.

Then the patients took a nap.  And during REM, the same pattern emerged as they'd seen during the mental game.

Apparently, they were playing Simon in their dreams.

My wife had an experience like this back when she was in graduate school, and engaged in the occupation that all serious grad students take part in, namely: playing video games instead of studying.  In her case, it was Tetris, and she finally realized she was spending way too much time playing it when she started having Tetris dreams.

But evidently this is something we all do, and gives us a lens into why we dream in the first place.  It's long been thought that dreaming has to do with memory consolidation -- reinforcing pathways that the brain has decided are important, moving critical memories into long-term storage, and pruning away information that is less essential.  Your brain makes the understandable (if sometimes erroneous) judgment that if you repeat an activity a bunch of times, it must have some survival value, and you replay it while you sleep so you can do it more fluidly when you're awake.

Even if all you're practicing is your ability to stack up bunches of colored blocks while vaguely Russian-sounding music plays in the background.

"This study is fascinating," said Dr. Richard Isaacson, director of the Alzheimer's Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who was not involved in the study, in an interview with CNN.  "Despite decades of research, it remains somewhat unclear how 'short-term' memories get filed away to become 'long-term' memories that can be recalled later.   Using a brain-computer interface is an exciting way to study memory since it can record brain cell activity patterns and then look for those exact patterns later...  This supports the notion that in order to optimize memory function and learning, people need to prioritize restful activities -- most importantly adequate sleep -- to keep our 'engines' running at peak performance."

Which is fascinating, but hardly news to chronic insomniacs like myself.  I know that after a night's poor sleep, everything -- memory, motor responses, mood, sensory awareness -- is affected negatively.  The restorative power of sleep is well-documented, and absolutely essential to health, both physical and mental.

What this study does, though, is to pinpoint one of the ways sleep helps us -- by reinforcing our memory of critical events from the previous days.  We already knew why dreams are so bizarre; during REM, the prefrontal cortex -- which among many other things, acts as a sort of "reality filter," allowing you to sift fact from fantasy -- is essentially offline.  Apparently the memory consolidation function works best when you can get the hypercritical "Okay, that is clearly not real" part of your brain out of the way.

But I still don't think it can explain why I was swimming toward Senegal, naked, during a hurricane.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a phenomenal achievement; the breathtaking mission New Horizons that gave us our first close-up views of the distant, frozen world of Pluto.

In Alan Stern and David Grinspoon's Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto, you follow the lives of the men and women who made this achievement possible, flying nearly five billion kilometers to something that can only be called pinpoint accuracy, then zinging by its target at fifty thousand kilometers per hour while sending back 6.25 gigabytes of data and images to NASA.

The spacecraft still isn't done -- it's currently soaring outward into the Oort Cloud, the vast, diffuse cloud of comets and asteroids that surrounds our Solar System.  What it will see out there and send back to us here on Earth can only be imagined.

The story of how this was accomplished makes for fascinating reading.   If you are interested in astronomy, it's a must-read.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Timing out

One of my ongoing frustrations when I was a teacher was the failure of the educational community to use the latest scientific research to guide our approach to pedagogy.

Of course, I shouldn't be surprised.  We here in the United States have made a national pastime out of ignoring scientific research -- climate change and the safety/efficacy of vaccinations being two of the most obvious examples.  Still, it was maddening to see things like high school students struggling in Spanish I when if we put our resources into bilingual education in preschool, kids would learn a second language as easily as they did their first.

And research into the window of opportunity for language learning has been around for thirty years.

Another example was the subject of a paper this week in Nature: Human Behavior.  In "Interplay of Chronotype and School Timing Predicts School Performance," by Andrea P. Goldin, Mariano Sigman, Gisela Braier, Diego A. Golombek, and María J. Leone, of Universidad Torcuato di Tella (Buenos Aires, Argentina), we find out that people tend to have chronotypes -- natural biological clocks that time our highest and lowest alertness -- and that when schools run counter to a student's chronotype, it drastically impacts performance.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Robbert van der Steeg, Eternal clock, CC BY-SA 2.0]

I know this from my own experience.  I'm naturally a lark -- up with the sun.  Often earlier, even.  My morning classes in college (and teaching morning classes during my career as an educator) were easy for me.  But I have a slow fade after lunch time -- and by a time that for many people is Evening Party Time, I'm ready to be curled up in bed with a good book.

I literally haven't slept past eight o'clock in maybe twenty years.  And staying up past ten PM?

Not if you want me to be halfway coherent.

But I was painfully aware that a lot of students seemed to be on the opposite schedule.  Trying to get them to learn biology first thing in the morning (hell, trying to get them to stay awake) was an ongoing challenge.  And I can't tell you the number of students who told me that they stay up regularly till three AM -- not because of homework or social media (although those did tend to fill the wakeful hours), but because they were wide awake and going to bed earlier than that would be an exercise in frustration.

So it's a double whammy.  We take kids who are naturally night owls, make them get up early (depriving them of much-needed sleep), and then expect them to perform optimally on intellectual tasks.

Goldin et al. pull no punches about this:

Most adolescents exhibit very late chronotypes and attend school early in the morning, a misalignment that can affect their health and psychological well-being.  Here we examine how the interaction between the chronotype and school timing of an individual influences academic performance, studying a unique sample of 753 Argentinian students who were randomly assigned to start school in the morning (07:45), afternoon (12:40) or evening (17:20).  Although chronotypes tend to align partially with class time, this effect is insufficient to fully account for the differences with school start time.  We show that (1) for morning-attending students, early chronotypes perform better than late chronotypes in all school subjects, an effect that is largest for maths; (2) this effect vanishes for students who attend school in the afternoon; and (3) late chronotypes benefit from evening classes.  Together, these results demonstrate that academic performance is improved when school times are better aligned with the biological rhythms of adolescents.

And I strongly suspect that the effect this research will have on the educational community is... nada.

My wife has a poster in her office showing a dude hauling ass in the annual Pamplona Running of the Bulls, a thousand pounds of snorting animal right behind him.  The caption is: "TRADITION: Just because we've always done it this way doesn't mean it's not a really, really stupid idea."

To which the educational establishment of the United States tends to say, "Oh, well, too bad."

The most frustrating thing is that apparently it doesn't take much of a change to make a difference.  Bumping school start times ahead by an hour -- so from eight to nine AM, in the school district where I taught -- was shown to improve daytime alertness and the quality/length of sleep in adolescents in a study done six years ago.  It still wouldn't be optimal for students who are really night owls, but at this point any gain at all would be an improvement.

But given how most schools have responded to thirty-year-old research on language learning, the Goldin et al. study will probably be filed away with lots of other research, in a folder labeled, "Well, It Would Be Nice, But..."

Along with recommendations to our federal government for halting climate change and mandatory vaccination programs.  Seems like it's an uphill battle for most things these days.

*********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]