I have written in the past about sleep, in particular how interesting and revealing the study of sleep was for me at University (see here). What has always baffled me is that Sleep Researchers still have never scientifically proven why adult human beings need to sleep. We do know that if we don’t sleep enough, typically we suffer from irritability, forgetfulness and fatigue, and our motor skills in low-grade repetitive tasks diminish. One thing I also know is that, in ‘modern’ society, we sure spend a bunch of time THINKING about getting more sleep.

That said, sleep researchers have been making significant progress recently. LiveScience published this article, entitled ‘New Theory Questions Why We Sleep‘, by Charles Choi, which describes the latest research by Jerome Siegel at the University of California at Los Angeles. Sleep “is often thought to have evolved to play an unknown but vital role inside the body…”; but, Siegel suggests that the reason why we sleep is related to an adaptation to the outside environment. Specifically, Siegel “proposes the main function of sleep is to increase an animal’s efficiency and minimize its risk by controlling how a species behaves with regards to its surroundings.”

There are several other theories as to what is the purpose of sleep. These theories include promoting longevity, a role in learning, reversing damage from daily stress… The Choi article continues to say that “in humans, the brain constitutes, on average, just 2 percent of total body weight but consumes 20 percent of the energy used during quiet waking, so these savings have considerable significance…” Intuitively, the idea that the rest we get is most beneficial for the brain makes sense, knowing that the brain’s activity is never fully shut off during sleep and is hyperactive in the REM phases.

“I think this idea of ‘adaptive inactivity’ is an extremely useful way of thinking about the broader picture of sleep without getting lost in individual theories,” said sleep researcher David Dinges at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Dinges noted that regular cycles of light and darkness “put enormous environmental pressures on animals that all play into forced ‘time-outs.’”

Meanwhile, there are all sorts of myths about sleep, in part perpetuated by a lack of evidence, but also our lack of study/research and, more ominously, mis-information. It is worth noting that sleep (or at least getting to sleep) is also, unfortunately, big business: it is estimated that worldwide sales for sleeping pills (hypnotics) will surpass $5 billion in the next several years.

My own interest in sleep stems from a fundamental belief that sleep management is integral to time management. Actively managing one’s sleep should be part of one’s daily hygiene, just as much as eating and doing sports. One of the biggest misconceptions out there is that sleeping more is ipso facto healthier, to the point where taking sleeping pills is better than not sleeping enough. This is unlikely to be the case. From this LiveScience article, I quote, “[a] six-year study [Daniel F.] Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, [Kripke] says.”

I am personally a light sleeper and early riser, always living on the edge of what is necessary to live my conscious day in a comfortable way. While many people express a certain jealousy, it could yet be classified as chronic sleep deprivation. Do I naturally need less sleep or is it a self-imposed internal regime? Research by Ying-Hui Fu, a professor of neurology at the University of California at San Francisco, Mission Bay, suggests that a gene (DEC2) may be responsible for the amount of sleep we need (at least for the short sleepers). So, perhaps I am genetically predisposed?

If one is to sleep or rest effectively, there is also the solution of the nap. On weekends, a longer nap helps to accommodate the sporting endeavours and longer social engagement on the Saturday night… But during the working week, at least for those working in a company, the nap — even the power nap — is basically out of the question. Quite astonishingly, per a Pew Research Center study, reported in this article in LiveScience, napping is an activity done daily by 1/3 of all adult Americans. But for the other 2/3 [i.e. hard at work], it is a daily dream. Imagine a company where you could, without fear of reprisal, just crawl up for a power snooze of 10-20 minutes when the deep urge fell upon you. Would that not feel like a true daily gift? How much do you think that would be worth? Instead, snoozing is, almost uniformly, voraciously frowned upon and left to do on the commute home, stuffed in between two bodies on the tube/metro/subway or, worse yet, swinging upright, hanging on to a handle bar while standing on a moving bus. Of course, for power naps to be permissible, there would have to be some level of controls. The key is to set clear time-delimited objectives without focusing on exactly “when” the work is being done. This would also be a vital condition to creating more flexible hours for employees. On a side note, the much maligned pigeons (at least on this blog), apparently integrate the power nap into their daily crumb-finding, building-desecrating life – read here for more on those napping pigeons.

In a somewhat counter intuitive result of the Pew study, the most frequent nappers according to revenues were actually those in the middle, i.e. the middle managers : “Among people making more than $100,000, 33 percent said they nap regularly, while 42 percent of those making less than $30,000 clock out during the day. The income group that naps least? Those who make $75,000 to $99,000 (21 percent).” If such is the need for the human body, for the bolder CEO’s or leaders among you, is it not the smart thing to do to invest in organising a nap room, like they did for NASA’s Phoenix mission team members?

What’s your opinion? Is napping a luxury or truly necessary? Which do you prefer, the power nap or 90-minute snooze? Would a nap room make work conditions remarkably better? How might you go about instituting a ‘nap policy’ in an organisation?

I have a few questions/comments to make about this video:
1/ Can the chimpanzee be made to understand the value of the numbers?
2/ What does the baby chimp pick up in the exercise?
3/ Clearly, our own minds have not reached their maximum capacity.

Take a view and drop me your thoughts!

Chimpanzee AI from Javed on Vimeo.

You can also play the game yourself here, to see how good your own memory is. Since the site is in Japanese, here are the instructions before you go to the site: 1. Touch ‘start’ 2. The numbers 3-2-1 will pop up on the screen. Immediately following the number 1, several numbers will flash on the screen for barely one second. 3. Memorize the numbers’ position on the screen then click the circles from the smallest to the biggest number. 4. At the end of game, the computer will cheekily tell you in years, how old your brain is. http://flashfabrica.com/f_learning/brain/brain.html

You have to admire the researchers who have patiently enabled this experiment. For further reading: a Dec 2007 article in The Guardian and the Kyoto Research Institute website. Also, a quick “news” report on ABC.

Credits to Brain, Mind, Consciousness & Learning blog from Professor Javed Alam for allowing me to discover AI.

If you can’t get enough of these swarming starlings, this second video is set entirely to music and is quite pleasurable, if the quality of the film is a tad less good.  The music and the viewing make for a calming moment.

Finally, you can click here to view a third video on YouTube.  Provided by the Westmorland Gazette in the Lake District of England, they have chosen not allow the film to be embedded.

This Hammy the Hamster Goes Organic video (and especially the out-takes further below) is bound to produce a smile. And, if you are sensitive to the quality of the food you eat, then you could find the experiment of interest. Created by the authors of the The Cooks Den blog and posted just March 2nd, this clip has already had nearly 1/2 million views, a very quick offlift (thanks to an MSN posting).

“At The Cooks Den, we decided to apply the scientific method to that important question. We brought in an unbiased test subject — one who has superior taste buds, is unaffected by marketing hype, and is unafraid to express her opinions publicly.”

What if a food company latched on to this? Shouldn’t some organisation like Whole Foods sponsor Hammy? I can imagine a deal that allows Hammy to do some purchasing decisions? “This aisle for Hammy products…”

Here are the outtakes of Hammy. A quick 1 minute spin, worth the watch … at the very least to authenticate the techniques!

A few more pieces of information that you can discover on the Cooksden site: Hammy prefered conventional walnuts over the organic variety. The odd thing was I didn’t even know that organic walnuts existed. The broccoli left Hammy indifferent the most. The item for which organic was most important was cheese. Gives a whole new meaning to who moved my cheese.

Next up: organic milk and apples, I hope.

I would like to share with you with a little thought today.

There used to be a time when I thought it desirable to live life in the fast lane. What does that mean? Well, by my understanding it means living with time whizzing by, memories blurring, names & faces forgotten and years merging into decades. Surely, going to lose your mind… Oops, might have plagiarized that from somewhere (call it my Eagle eye).

Now, for many of us, life in the parking lot seems to be all we can handle. Between having to crane your neck (it’s so stiff) around as you reverse in the ever smaller spaces and watching out for the piping hot coffee in your lap, while answering the cell phone and inserting your earpiece and, simultaneously, turning down your music… life in the parking lot is sometimes as fast you might want life to be.

Then again, life in the odd lane might be the more fitting route these days. The search for the rarity and the personality. I came across this charming site, typically Canadian in a way, Life In the Fast Lane.ca. And what is quirky in this “Life in the Fast Lane” post is that everyone is walking with heavily laden horses to visiting the Hukuo Waterfalls of the Yellow River in China. And while I’m at it (nice one Deborah), here is a hoot: The new Hooters Calendar 2008. I attach this month’s oogle hooter to ogle.

In terms of riding in the fast lanes in cities, it does seem that the special bus or taxi lane is getting slower every year. As much as the traffic jams get worse, the fast lane slows down too. In large part, that is because there are too many deliveries and odd obstacles in the special lane, not enough police patrolling of the civilian infiltrators and, finally, because the special lane must merge with the plebeian (normal) lanes all too frequently. Enough to say, that life in the fast lane isn’t what it used to be, certainly not what it is cracked up to be and should be fastened onto memory lane, so that we can,–slowly and deliciously–enjoy our every day at the speed we can handle.

If you are needing a mundane definition of the idiom: try here: life in the fast lane.

Now back to my piping hot coffee. Have a great day. Oh yes, and Happy Easter 2008. (Don’t mind the Easter Chick).

Okay, try this new film pitch: the “Cosmic Comedy of Errors” meets “Vaudevillian Shaggy Dog.” If you have seen either of those films, then you are clearly deluded. If you haven’t seen (or don’t remember seeing) either of those films, it’s ok. They are fabrication (clue: there are no links). What’s the point? The current doping saga seems to be taking on cosmic comic proportion meant for a grade C film. Thursday this week just another day in the Tour of Italy bicycle race. And there were three more riders that were tagged with non-normal blood tests. It is amazing that over the years the bicycling community was able to keep a firm lid on the doping — but now the goo is oozing, so many people have already been identified/busted and presumably there is a lot of internal finger pointing within the community. In a few years time we’ll again see normal people racing on television and some may even get off their bike to huff and puff up the Alps. When I watch professional bicycling, I truly believe the excitement matches watching a hamster exercising in its wheel. That said, the physical effort of a “climber” has always amazed me — and, of course, back in the beginning they all were doing it naturally. Maybe fat bottom girls are still in?

For purposes of this blog, I wanted (initially) to refine my analysis, to limit to those things that are true today about big city dwelling, but may not have been so 30 years ago.

The good things today include:
-On any day (in NYC), you can find a $20 bill lying on the ground (used to be just a $1 bill).
-Wifi coverage is generally good (this is the case for whichever new technology will come next) — 30 (nay 20) years ago we didn’t have mobile phones with which to contend.
-Less SUVs than in the suburban towns.

The less good things:
-On any day, you can easily lose a $100 bill (via rip off, mugging, or just leaving an object of value unobserved on a table) versus a $20 bill 30 years ago.
-At any point, you can get run into by a pedestrian absorbed by his/her mobile phone, texting while also listening blithely to the ipod.
-And the topper: a big city has more than one airport, which means you can screw up the departure or arrival. Alternatively, you can have a different arrival airport than the one from which you departed which is a problem when you decide to drive in your car to one airport (happened last week).

In the end, each big city has its tale and it is impossible to generalize [anyway]. Perhaps, it is more appropriate to examine what lies in store for us who have preferred city living. More profoundly, as the city populations continue to grow, real shifts are going to occur. City centres will increasingly become merely cultural or tourist centres and retail spaces, and less and less business offices and even less residential.

As the first world populations age, the retired people will have no call (nor means) to live in cities. The shift in demographics, the stress of space, the expense and the lack of community will all converge to create more “retirement communities” (exacerbated by a lack of the younger generations taking care of their aging parents) outside urban centres.

Travel will become a desperately important criterion as we face the congestion on the roads, the escalating price of fuel (as fuel sources diminish) and higher real estate prices forcing, especially the younger, further afield. Given the propensity to provide only low paying/non paying “stages” or internships, the younger adults may well prefer to stay at their parents’ home where the rent is free and the location may be closer to the city.

And then there is schooling. As far as I can tell, finding good schools is at a premium in any big city (either because there are limited spaces [including playing fields] or there just aren’t any good ones). With the inevitable departure of living quarters, schools will follow the migration. Perhaps, it is or will be the reverse that provokes the change. In any event, education will be another key component to the changes.

I would prefer city centres to remain thriving, creative experiences in which to live, but by the force of economics and demographics, it seems the greener pastures await us (of meeker means) all.