sleep – Harmonia Philosophica

Staying awake at night…

Photo by **Spiros Kakos** from **Pexels**

What’s keeping us up at night? One of the largest longitudinal studies to date examined evening consumption of alcohol, caffeine and nicotine among an African-American cohort and objectively measured sleep outcomes in their natural environments instead of laboratory or observatory settings. The study involved 785 participants and totaled 5,164 days of concurrent actigraphy and daily sleep diaries that recorded how much alcohol, caffeine or nicotine they consumed within four hours of bedtime. Results may be good news for coffee lovers, bad news for smokers. (1)

What is keeping is us asleep should be the question. How can we close our eyes and sleep while a cosmos full of dangers, hate, death, misery, oppression? How can we sleep peacefully in a world full of evil? No matter how you look at the question – either metaphysically or literally – the only way to answer is by denying the question itself.

We do not go asleep! There are no dreams!

Unless you are ready to accept your everyday life could be a dream as well. You never close your eyes! It is actually only when you dream that you see the more vivid of visions!

Sleep. The moon is still shining.

Open your eyes. The universe is still watching.

There is no one asleep. No one is awake! Do you see? It is the world that is tired. It is the world that is afraid of us. A world that is constantly awake. Always there. Even when we don’t look. For he is afraid of what might happen when he stops looking.

Take a moment to realize the meaningless of your existence. And you will immediately find its meaning when the moon shines bright in the morning day. And right when the world is not watching, you will for the first time catch a glimpse of it…

Do lizards dream like us?

Do lizards dream like us? Researchers have confirmed that lizards exhibit two sleep states, just like humans, other mammals, and birds. They corroborated the conclusions of a 2016 study on the bearded dragon and conducted the same sleep investigation on another lizard, the Argentine tegu. Their findings nevertheless point out differences between species, which raises new questions about the origin of sleep states. (1)

Dull science. Making humans go to sleep again, as Wittgenstein postulated.

We should not care about how lizards dream. But what keeps us awake.

Dreaming of dragons. Breathing fire. And you will wake up terrified.

Stepping on the small lizard.

Ready to destroy the cosmos…

And give birth to nothingness which will breed chaos into the stagnant pool of existence…

Memories. Waves. Brain. Immortal souls…

Have you ever tried to recall something just before going to sleep and then wake up with the memory fresh in your mind? While we absorb so much information during the day consciously or unconsciously, it is during shut eye that a lot of facts are dispatched to be filed away or fall into oblivion.

The research team concentrated on a non-REM deep sleep phase (a.k.a. slow-wave sleep) that generally happens throughout the night, in alternation with the REM phase. During slow-wave sleep, groups of neurons firing at the same time generate brain waves with triple rhythms: slow oscillations, spindles, and ripples. Slow oscillations originate from neurons in the cerebral cortex. Spindles come from a structure of the brain called thalamic reticular nucleus and spike around 7-15 per second. Finally, ripples are sharp and quick bursts of electrical energy, produced within the hippocampus, a brain component with an important role in spatial memory.

Scientists believe that the correct timing of these three rhythms acts like a communication channel between different parts of the brains that facilitates memory consolidation.

Scientists at the Center for Cognition and Sociality, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), enhanced or reduced mouse memorization skills by modulating specific synchronized brain waves during deep sleep. The study showed that manipulating sleep spindle oscillations at the right timing affects memory. The full description of the mouse experiments, conducted in collaboration with the University of Tüebingen, is published in the journal Neuron. (1)

We want to help the storing of memories.

Because we believe memories are lost.

We want to create things.

Because we believe things are destroyed.

But nothing is ever lost.

And nothing is ever destroyed.

We must stop seeing death.

And we will enjoy eternal life…

Non-thinking: Harder than thinking! Now go to sleep.

Brain networks at rest appear to be waiting in a state of potentiation to execute even the simplest of behaviors, report researchers.

This evidence comes from a new paper published this week in the journal PLoS One, reporting on a study led by professors Vaibhav Diwadkar, Ph.D., at Wayne State University’s School of Medicine and Steven L. Bressler, Ph.D., interim director of Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences.

In the study, the researchers used a simple experimental task, having each participant perform a simple motor control behavior (tapping their forefinger to a visual cue) that alternated between behavior and rest. Brain activity was acquired using functional MRI (fMRI).

Using relatively complex modeling of fMRI signals, the team studied brain network interactions between two important brain regions: the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), used for control, and the supplementary motor area (SMA), used for motor movements. In their previous studies, the team highlighted the importance of directional network interactions from the dACC to the SMA during simple motor behavior. In the PLoS One paper, they showed a compelling and opposite effect: during the rest periods that alternated between the motor behavior task, network interactions from the SMA to the dACC were now increased. (1)

Brain activity is always there.

Even what at rest or when sleeping.

We believe that having an active brain is the ultimate goal.

And we train to do what the brain does anyway on its own.

However, having an active brain needs no effort at all.

Blocking the functions of the brain which are always there is difficult. Allowing them to carry on filtering the cosmos is the easy path. Being active so as to let go is difficult. Letting go an allow your brain to think is easy. It’s not the thinking but the non-thinking that requires effort.

Go to sleep.

Empty your brain.

It is the cosmos you see.

Empty in its fullness.

Intricate complex in its simplicity…

You are not sleeping.

You’ve never been more awake…

Sleeping. Unlearning. Room to grow…

Sleep research high-resolution images show how the brain resets during sleep: Striking electron microscope pictures from inside the brains of mice suggest what happens in our own brain every day: Our synapses (the junctions between nerve cells) grow strong and large during the stimulation of daytime, then shrink by nearly 20 percent while we sleep, creating room for more growth and learning the next day. (1)

Forget.

It’s the only way to learn…

Give room to ignorance.

So that knowledge can come in and flourish…