Photo: Suerob/Getty Images/iStockphoto. The European goldfinch, above, was one of the species most affected by the growing amount of light-polluted areas.
I am not a scientific kind of birdwatcher, but I love trying to identifying the birds around here, sometimes by their song. I’ve learned that one “song” of the red-bellied woodpecker, for instance, sounds a lot like a metal windup toy.
Citizen scientists the world over are contributing to what scientists know about birds. Consider how a recent study was able to use a bird lovers’ website to take our knowledge of avian behavior a step farther.
Hannah Devlin, science correspondent at the Guardian, reports that “urban birds stay up significantly later than their rural counterparts, according to research that highlights the impact of light pollution on wildlife.
“The study, based on recordings submitted by bird enthusiasts to a popular species identification and mapping website, showed that light pollution caused birds to sing for an average of 50 minutes longer each day, with some species waking up an hour earlier and settling down for the evening an hour later.
“ ‘We were shocked by our findings,’ said Dr Brent Pease, an assistant professor of biodiversity conservation at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. ‘Under the brightest night skies, a bird’s day is extended by nearly an hour.’
“Light pollution now affects 23% of Earth’s surface and is rapidly growing in extent and intensity, data suggests. There is already evidence for detrimental effects on human health and concerns that many species are affected, with negative consequences including die-offs of insects and the disruption of migration patterns in bats and sea turtles.
“The latest study used bird recordings submitted to BirdWeather, a citizen science project that allows users to submit recordings from birds in their local area to produce a global live library of birdsong and which uses AI to allow users to identify birds in their gardens. In total the scientists analyzed 2.6m observations of onset (morning) bird vocalization and 1.8m observations of cessation (evening) bird calls, for hundreds of species. This data was combined with global satellite imagery measurements of light pollution. …
“The analysis found that for birds in light-polluted areas, the waking day was extended by 50 minutes on average.
Species with large eyes, relative to their body size, had the strongest response to artificial light.
“ ‘The American robin, Northern mockingbird and European goldfinch all extended their day by more than average,’ said Pease. …
“The impact of a longer day for birds was not yet clear, the researchers said. ‘We know that sleep loss is not great for humans, but birds are different,’ said Pease. ‘They have developed interesting strategies to cope with loss of sleep during migratory periods.’
“A disturbance of natural behavior patterns was of concern, Pease added, although there is evidence, in some species, that artificial lighting may increase foraging and mating time and improve the survival rate of fledglings.
“The findings are published in the journal Science.”
Sounds like this is a case of “more research is needed.” More at the Guardian, here.
I take naps pretty regularly. Not just because I am tired but because my brain needs a rest. And I’m a big believer in letting the sleeping, unconscious brain sort out things that have me going around in circles when awake. That’s why I was impressed with the presidential candidate who wanted to “sleep on it” before choosing a running mate. To me, that was really smart. Often when you “sleep on it,” vibes you have unconsciously picked up when awake become more clear to you.
Now let’s look at some research on letting your brain take rests.
Jamie Friedlander Serrano writes at the Washington Post, “Downtime is a necessary part of life. Science shows it helps us to be healthier, more focused, more productive and more creative. Yet, somehow, we often lose sight of this.
“ ‘Downtime is important for our health and our body, but also for our minds,’ says Elissa Epel, a professor in the psychiatry department at the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Francisco.
“Epel and others acknowledge that many of us feel as though we’re wasting time if we aren’t getting things done, but research points to the costs of always being ‘on’ and the importance of giving our brains a break. Our brains aren’t built to handle constant activity.
“Even the briefest moments of idle time, or pauses, are important, says Robert Poynton, author of Do Pause: You Are Not a To-Do List.
“Short pauses — whether you take a few breaths before entering a room or walk through the woods for 10 minutes — can lead to necessary self-reflection.
“ ‘I think we feel that we need to be getting on with things,’ says Poynton, who is an associate fellow at the University of Oxford in England. But ‘if we’re always getting on with things, we haven’t taken any time to decide or examine whether what we’re getting on with is the most interesting, important, fruitful, delightful, pleasurable or healthy thing.’ …
“Well-established research has shown that low-level daily stress can create such intense wear and tear on our body’s physiological systems that we see accelerated aging in our cells, says Epel, who co-wrote the book The Telomere Effect. Epel added: ‘Mindfulness-based interventions can slow biological aging by interrupting chronic stress, giving us freedom to deal with difficult situations without the wear and tear — and giving our bodies a break.’ …
“One small study published in the journal Cognition found that those who took short breaks had better focus on a task when compared with those who didn’t take a break. [And a 2022 meta-analysis published in the journal PLOS One looked at how ‘micro-breaks’ can affect well-being. The review found that breaks as short as 10 minutes can boost vigor and reduce fatigue. …
“In 2021, when many Americans were working remotely all the time, Microsoft conducted a study that followed two groups of people: The first had back-to-back Zoom meetings, and the other group took 10-minute meditation breaks between meetings. Microsoft monitored brain activity of 14 participants in the study using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
“In the first group, ‘what you see is a brain that’s filled with cortisol and adrenaline,’ says Celeste Headlee, a journalist and author of Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. ‘It’s tired, it’s stressed, it’s probably more irritable, and it’s probably less compassionate.’ The other group? ‘You can see in brilliant color what a difference [the breaks] make,’ she says. ‘Those are brains that are relaxed.’ …
“New research has begun showing the negative effects our cellphones can have on our health. Smartphone addiction (which [James Danckert, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, and co-author of Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom] says afflicts 4 to 8 percent of people) is becoming increasingly common worldwide.
“Most Americans think of downtime as something that is extra or indulgent — a treat that has to be earned only after we’ve done all of our productive tasks, says Amber Childs, a psychologist and associate professor at Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. But research would suggest the opposite: Downtime is a basic human need.”
As a longtime proponent of naps, I try to share every new angle I read about them. Today’s article is on narcolepsy, which is not something you want, but it does show how creative work may go on when you’re asleep.
Kristen French writes at Nautilus, “George Church looks like he needs a nap. I’m talking to him on Zoom, and his eyelids have grown heavy, inclining toward slumber. Or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. He assures me he is wide awake. But sleeping and waking life are often blurred for Church. One of the world’s most imaginative scientists, Church is a narcoleptic.
“A rare disorder, narcolepsy causes sudden attacks of sleep, and Church has fallen asleep in some unfortunate circumstances — at The World Economic Forum, just a few feet away from Microsoft founder Bill Gates, for instance. He also had to give up driving due to the risk that a bout of sleepiness will strike while he is behind the wheel. But Church, a Harvard geneticist known for his pathbreaking contributions to numerous fields — from genetics to astrobiology to biomedicine—says the benefits of his condition outweigh the inconveniences. Many of his wildest and most prescient ideas come from his narcoleptic naps.
“ ‘The fact is, I fall asleep several times a day, and so almost everything comes from there,’ Church says. His idea for a quick and simple way to ‘read’ DNA — which resulted in the first commercial genome sequence, of the human pathogen H. pylori — came from a narcoleptic nap.
“He also conceived of editing genomes with a method analogous to CRISPR, and building new genomes with off-the-shelf molecules, during narcoleptic naps. More recently, in December, a wild idea for a space probe that could reach distant stars within just 20 years, at one-fifth the speed of light, came to him after a narcoleptic nap. He proposed that these lightning-speed interstellar missions could be launched by microbes and powered by laser sails. The ideas that come to him are often the result of collisions of unexpected images in his head. ‘I try to turn science fiction into science fact,’ Church tells me.
“The relationship between sleep, dreaming, and creativity has been the subject of conjecture for hundreds of years. Reports of creative inspiration and discoveries made by artists, inventors, and scientists while dreaming suggest these states of mind are intimately bound together. The symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux was known to guard his sleep at night with a sign on his bedroom door that read ‘Do not disturb: Poet at work.’ Russian scientist Dimitri Mendeleev reportedly had a vision of the periodic table in a dream after three days of exhaustive effort (though it may have just been the perfection of an idea he had while awake). Stephen King claims he dreamt up his novel Misery during a somnolent transatlantic flight.
“Rather than leave such inspirations to chance, American inventor Thomas Edison designed a strategy for mining his dreams for material. He would doze off with a steel ball in each hand. Once his body went limp with sleep, the balls would drop to the floor with a clatter and wake him up. He could then recall details of his dreams and record any insights. …
“Scientific studies seem to validate these tales. Study participants asked to ‘incubate’ a problem in their dreams often come up with a useful solution, and both the frequency and complexity of one’s dream recall have been correlated with higher scores on creativity evaluations.
“The stage of sleep most closely associated with creative inspiration is known as REM, short for rapid eye movement. REM sleep begins about 70 minutes after a person loses consciousness and is rich with dream life. Lucid dreams, in which the dreamer knows he or she is dreaming and can sometimes direct the dream, are thought to primarily occur in REM. Waking from REM sleep has been shown to improve study subjects’ ability to solve anagrams. …
“But researchers have recently identified another state of mind that lies in the transition between waking and sleeping and may be even more fertile for creative inspiration than REM. It is called N1 or sleep onset, and it is the first of three stages in pre-REM sleep.
People with narcolepsy frequently fall into and out of N1 during daytime naps, giving them much greater access to these borderland perceptual states than normal sleepers.
“N1 is a hybrid, or ‘semilucid’ state of mind, says French neuroscientist Celia Lacaux, when individuals are just beginning to detach from the waking environment. It is a mental twilight that allows one to ‘freely watch the mind wander while maintaining a logical ability to identify creative sparks,’ says Lacaux. This shadowy frontier between waking and dreaming, to which all sleepers have access, may be the source of many of humanity’s most novel ideas, inventions, and works of art. Psychologists call it ‘hypnagogia,’ after the Greek words for ‘sleep’ (hypnos) and ‘to lead’ (agogo). The French sometimes refer to it as ‘entre chien et loup,’ literally ‘between dog and wolf.’ …
“ ‘Hypnagogiahappens to be a time period where you are much more subject to outside influence and where you’re doing much more auditory processing and where your dream recall rates are much higher,’ says Adam Haar, a dream researcher at MIT Media Lab. It is characterized by phenomenological unpredictability, distorted perception of space and time, and spontaneous, fluid idea association.
“A relationship between hypnagogia and creativity makes intuitive sense. One major theory of creativity posits that it results when our minds make connections between distantly related concepts stored in our memories. This is a process that is thought to occur naturally during sleeping and dreaming: New memories mingle in novel and abstract ways with older ones as a means of consolidating them, laying down tracks in our brains for later recollection. Neuroscientist Karl Friston, who studies consciousness, proposes that this mashing together of old and new is a process that helps to minimize redundancy and complexity in our memory system, and prepares us to navigate a fuller range of possible scenarios in our waking lives.”
When I wrote about people having trouble falling asleep, here, it was September 2020. It seemed like a more stressful time than January 2021, despite today’s increasing numbers of Covid cases. Readers who had their own reasons for stress in September, weighed in with their techniques for getting to sleep. Today, I offer a new one.
David Patrick Stearns remarks at the Philadelphia Inquirer that musicians work hard to keep audiences awake, but “not in the new Bowerbird concert series Liminal States, seven streamed events slotted at 10 or 11 p.m. that aim to put listeners into a sort-of slumber somewhere between sleeping and waking. The series is co-produced with West Philly’s Rotunda, Bowerbird’s home venue.
“ ‘Everybody is so traumatized and beat up that if a concert involves another state of awareness, that’s a very attractive prospect,’ said pianist Marilyn Nonken, who [opened] with Morton Feldman’s spare, meditative, 90-minute Triadic Memories.
‘It’s not a piece so much as it’s an environment, a sanctuary, where you can go and stay a while. … where your brain waves change.’
“If the other Liminal musicians have anything in common it’s a concept of sound that proceeds without a predictable end in sight.
“The hard-to-categorize indy artists include Jeff Zeigler (Jan. 31), next on the schedule after Nonken, an engineer and producer whose own music falls in the ambient zone. Philadelphia-born Laraaji (Feb. 14), the series’ third performer, is described as often as a mystic as he is a percussionist who creates shimmering, luminous sound environments.
“Laura Baird (Feb. 25) arises more from the folk tradition but crosses over into the electronic zone. Tatsuya Nakatani (March 10) has a gong orchestra, with instruments gently bowed more often than they’re struck. If there’s such a thing as an experimental harpist, it’s Mary Lattimore (March 25), whose ambient collaborations with Zeigler have her harp giving definition to his washes of sound.
“Relatively traditional — at least on the surface — is Variant 6, a Philadelphia-based vocal sextet that ends the series on May 6, and typically sings a range from Monteverdi to newly written vocal works. …
“Bowerbird artistic director Dustin Hurt is encouraging live performances — a particularly atmospheric possibility for Nakatani’s gongs, since the East Coast streaming time will be around dusk in the New Mexico desert where the artist lives. Some artists will be pre-recorded, though nocturnally, in the late-night slot that their streaming will occupy. …
“ ‘This idea has been around, inside my mind, for a long time,’ said Hurt, who has enjoyed liminal states when listening to Feldman while lying on the floor (an option not available at most in-person concerts).
” ‘The music levitates very slowly, so that when you wake up, you wonder “Was I asleep for 10 minutes or an hour?” ‘
“Variant 6 member Elisa Sutherland said working remotely, and given the lag time that can come with conference technology, ‘there’s potential for a powerful, somewhat spooky experience.’
“Liminal States concerts are pay-what-you-wish, with a suggested donation of $25. Information: bowerbird.org.“
Did you ever wonder why you have to work so hard at exercise when for millennia, humans did OK with whatever movement was part of their normal day? Some folks say we’ve been overdoing things.
At National Public Radio (NPR), Terry Gross interviewed Daniel Lieberman, a professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard, about his new book on exercise. The interview relieved me of some preconceptions, but I didn’t see anything about getting the heart beat up.
“For much of history, human beings needed to be physically active every day in order to hunt or gather food — or to avoid becoming food themselves. … a professor in the department of human evolutionary biology at Harvard [says] that the notion of ‘getting exercise’ — movement just for movement’s sake — is a relatively new phenomenon in human history. …
“Lieberman says, ‘When I go to these [remote African tribal] villages, I’m the only person who gets up in the morning and goes for a run. And often they laugh at me.’…
“Lieberman has spent a lot of time with indigenous hunter-gatherers in Africa and Latin America, cataloging how much time they spend walking, running, lifting, carrying and sitting. He writes about his findings, as well as the importance of exercise and the myths surrounding it in his new book, Exercised.
” ‘If you actually look at what our ancestors do, they walk about 5 miles a day, which turns out to be, for most people, about 10,000 steps,’ Lieberman says.
“Lieberman notes that many people are moving less than they did before the pandemic. He says if 10,000 steps feels out of reach, it’s OK to shoot for less — just so long as you’re focused on movement. Even fidgeting can keep your muscles engaged.
‘The more we study physical activity, the more we realize that it doesn’t really matter what you do. You don’t have to do incredible strength training. … It’s all good in different ways.’
Prof. Daniel Lieberman
Interview Highlights On the demonizing of sitting as “the new smoking” “When I walk into a village in a remote part of the world where people don’t have chairs or a hunter-gatherer camp, people are always sitting. … Some friends and colleagues of mine actually put some accelerometers on some hunter-gatherers and found that they sit on average about 10 hours a day. …
“It’s not unnatural or strange or weird to sit a lot, but it is problematic if, of course, that’s all you do. As I started to explore the literature more, I was fascinated because most of the data that associates sitting a lot with poor health outcomes turns out to be leisure-time sitting. …Then the numbers get a little bit scary.
On the importance of “interrupted sitting” “Just getting up every once in a while, every 10 minutes or so — just to go to the bathroom or pet your dog or make yourself a cup of tea — even though you’re not spending a lot of energy, you’re turning on your muscles. … It uses up fats in your bloodstream and sugars in your bloodstream, and it produces molecules that turn down inflammation. So the evidence is that interrupted sitting is really the best way to sit. In hunter-gatherer camps, people are getting up every few minutes, to take care of the fire or take care of a kid or something like that. …
“A seat back essentially makes sitting even more passive than just sitting on a bench or a stool because you lean against the seat back and you’re using even fewer muscles, even less effort to stabilize your upper body. And the result is that we end up having very weak backs. So there are a lot of muscles that we use in our backs to hold up our upper body, and those muscles, if we don’t use them, just like every other muscle in your body, they atrophy. And weak muscles then make us more prone to back pain. …
On the idea that running is bad for your knees “There’s this kind of general idea out there that running is like driving your car too much, [but] study after study has shown that in terms of ‘wear’ — by which we really mean arthritis, degeneration of the cartilage in your joints — that people who run more are not more likely to get arthritis in their knees. … That said, it’s also true that the most common site of injury for runners is their knees. But a lot of those injuries, I think, are preventable by learning to run properly. …
On becoming frail with age “One of the most important points about physical activity is that as we age, it becomes not less but more important to be physically active. Muscle atrophy is the perfect example. … We have plenty of evidence that older individuals in America are less physically active and they do fewer activities that involve strength. And one of the really sort of serious negative consequences of that is that our muscles dwindle, they atrophy. … That’s the bad news.
“But the good news is that it doesn’t take a huge amount of physical activity to kind of reverse that, turn it around. Think about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She was celebrated for her vim and vigor, which meant that a lot of that came from the fact that she kept working out and as she got older, she went to the gym several times a week. Now, she didn’t do crazy. … She did a few rounds of weight training every week and that helped keep her marvelously active and vigorous up until her late 80s. “
Lots more advice at NPR, including how much sleep we actually need, here.
I better stand up now. I’ve been sitting more than 10 minutes.
I was passing the wetlands in Blackstone Park this morning when I stopped for a while to get a better look at a water bird. Was it a heron? What heron is brown? Maybe it was a bittern.
When the bird flew into a tree, I returned to the walking path. That’s when I noticed a young man with a fancy camera parked along the river. I asked him if he was looking for birds.
“No,” he said, “but I can show you what I’m doing if you are interested.”
He told me that he makes videos to encourage young people to get up early and not waste their lives sleeping. He said he wants them to enjoy this beautiful world. He calls himself Looney Lu. He showed me his most recent video, which states that old people sleep all he time but young people shouldn’t. 🙂
Looney Lu’s been taking videos every day since his birthday, but by the time he edits them, he says, they get posted more like every other day.
I was quite taken with his enthusiasm and his early-bird philosophy. I checked out his site and decided to share his first YouTube video. Personally, I’m not offended by the colorful language, but that’s a kind of warning to folks who might be.
I hope you think Looney Lu’s high-energy talk about setting goals is as much fun as I do.
Photo: Joe Suarez for NPR Las Cruces High School has one napping pod, which students use for 20 minutes when they are tired, stressed or angry.
In my family, we are big believers in naps. Long naps, short naps, any kind of nap. I don’t take a nap every day, but when I’m feeling exhausted for any reason, I find that 15 or 20 minutes of sleep really refreshes me.
Interestingly, 20 minutes is what teachers prescribe for students at Las Cruces High School in New Mexico.
Patti Neighmond reports at National Public Radio, “Studies have shown teenagers actually need between nine and 10 hours of sleep a night. But the vast majority (69 percent) aren’t getting it.
“Enter ‘napping pods.’ They’re essentially egg-shaped lounge chairs that recline, with a circular lid that can be pulled over the chest to shield against light.
“It just sort of envelops you in a really nice darkness, with soft lighting behind you,” says [18-year-old Hannah] Vanderkooy, a frequent user of the pods. She says she typically gets only four to five hours of sleep a night.” She’s a senior and working hard to get good grades and maybe college scholarships.
“There’s soft music playing in the pod and ‘you just feel extremely relaxed,’ she says. …
“A nap can’t substitute for a good night’s sleep, but it certainly can help, says Dr. Nitun Verma, a sleep specialist and spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
“A short nap for a teenager ‘can give a boost to memory and attention during the day, and it can increase school performance,’ he says, adding that in a perfect world, schools would roll back their start times. …
“Several public schools in New Mexico are trying to tackle the problem by providing napping pods for their students.
” ‘We know lack of sleep changes mood and makes you more anxious,’ says family nurse practitioner Linda Summers, who is an associate professor at New Mexico State University’s school of nursing in Las Cruces.
“Summers also works with the nearby Las Cruces High School health center, and has seen firsthand the effects of sleep deprivation on students there. So she decided to apply for a federal health grant to buy the pods, which, at the time, cost $14,000 each. They were installed in four high schools.
“And while the Las Cruces school napping pods were bought to remedy sleep deprivation, Summers says, ‘it also turns out to be good for anger and stress.’
“Even if kids don’t fall asleep, but simply ‘zone out,’ she says, they emerge saying they feel ‘refreshed and calm.’ ” More here.
Summers has conducted a study that has been accepted by a peer-reviewed journal, so expect to hear more on this topic anon.
Two women in San Francisco felt compassion for homeless people who have nowhere to go during the day. So they arranged with a local Catholic church to welcome them.
Patricia Leigh Brown wrote the story for the Christian Science Monitor series called “People Making a Difference: Ordinary People Taking Action for Extraordinary Change.”
“Tina Christopher’s day begins at 5:45 a.m. as she cleans the sidewalk in front of St. Boniface Catholic Church in the Tenderloin, the once-colorful vice district in San Francisco now better known as a province of the poor, the desperate, the addicted, and the down and out. …
” ‘All right my beautiful brothers and sisters!’ Ms. Christopher says in her always-chipper voice. ‘Good morning! Time to get up! Wakey wakey!’ Then she unlocks the church’s heavy iron gate.
“Soon, St. Boniface’s 74 backmost pews will cradle some 150 homeless people seeking ‘sacred sleep,’ the sound of snoring permeating the incense-filled room. Beneath the saints painted on the church’s glittering dome, they stretch out for nine hours of vital slumber, resting their heads on ad hoc sweatshirt and T-shirt pillows or sometimes their folded hands. For a brief moment, their faces, beatific and babylike in sleep, do not betray the nights of fearful wandering and the way concrete seeps into a person’s bones and stays there.
“Christopher is the program director of The Gubbio Project, a pioneering effort, believed to be the country’s first. … Cofounded in 2004 by the Rev. Louis Vitale, a well-known peace and human rights advocate, the program provides a place for homeless people to sleep during the daylight hours, when most shelters are closed.
The project is named after Gubbio, the Italian town where, the story goes, residents befriended a wolf after realizing the animal wasn’t dangerous, just hungry.
“The project’s guiding lights are two women who are devoted to the dignity of the people they call ‘guests.’ Laura Slattery, Gubbio’s executive director and public voice, is a West Point graduate-turned-social justice activist who wears jeans and hiking boots and exudes a sense of calm resolve, even in a crisis. Christopher is the exuberant all-hands-on-deck ground commander who knows the name of every guest and whose finely tuned antennae swiftly intuit their needs and issues. …
“At St. Boniface, Christopher writes daily notices on the whiteboard:
“Shower bus 8:30-2
“We have Blankets!
“Tomorrow – some socks.
“She is in constant motion, eyeglasses perched atop her head, dispensing cough drops, rubber bands, tampons, shaving cream, and other necessities from a converted confessional. She makes it a point to ask guests whether they’d prefer a pink toothbrush or a blue one, a black blanket or a brown one. ‘Even the simplest things are important to people who don’t have choices,’ she explains.
“Socks and other staples come from volunteers like Roberta Snyder, who has established relationships with housekeepers at nearby hotels and provides soaps, shampoos, and other items …
“[Slattery] thinks of The Gubbio Project as ‘the ministry of presence,’ one that dispels some popular myths about homeless people along the way. Quite a number of donations to Gubbio’s $350,000 annual budget, for instance, are made by guests. ‘Last week it was $42,’ Slattery says. ‘The week before it was 24. Flips the idea of panhandling on its head, right?’ ”
Click here to read about the women’s routes to their unusual calling — one through addiction, one through West Point.
Photo: Melanie Stetson Freeman/Christian Science Monitor Tina Christopher (l.) and Laura Slattery run The Gubbio Project, which gives people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco a place to go during the day.
This time, no less a personage than Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post is weighing in on the importance of catching 40 winks if you need them. She has written a book called The Sleep Revolution, in which she predicts that most offices will have nap rooms in the not-too-distant future.
“Huffington’s mission: to eliminate the stigma long associated with sleeping at work. … In the HuffPost newsroom, ‘having a nap in the middle of the afternoon is actually a performance-enhancing tool,’ she said. …
“Experts like Sara Mednick, a researcher at the University of California, recommend a short nap in the middle of the day because you won’t feel groggy when waking up.
“Other companies like Google, Zappos and Ben & Jerry’s are getting on board with the napping trend. All now have built nap rooms in their offices. …
“Sleep is ‘the gateway through which a life of well-being must travel,’ Huffington recently wrote. It allows people to be more productive, lead healthier lives and connect more deeply to themselves, she added.
“Huffington will soon embark on a college tour, where she plans to visit 50 schools with leading sleep experts.” More here.
Sy Montgomery had a lovely story in the Boston Globe about studies investigating animals’ dreams. I zeroed in on the beautiful little zebra finch.
“What do birds dream about?” Montgomery asks.
“Singing.
“University of Chicago professor Daniel Margoliash conducted experiments on zebra finches. Like all birds, zebra finches aren’t born knowing their songs; they learn them, and young birds spend much of their days learning and rehearsing the song of their species. …
“The researcher was able to determine the individual notes based on the firing pattern of the neurons. While the birds were asleep, their neurons fired in the same order — as if they were singing in their dreams.”
At American Scientist, Michael Szpir titles a related article “To Sleep, Perchance to Sing.”
“It turns out that single neurons in the forebrain song system of the sleeping birds display a pattern of activity that’s only seen in the waking bird when it sings. [Amish S.] Dave and Margoliash think that this neuronal activity is part of the learning process — the birds are rehearsing in their sleep by dreaming about singing.
“Since the awake male zebra finch will sing when a female is presented, it seems natural to ask whether the male finch has an image in mind when he sings in his sleep. Margoliash won’t speculate, but if human males are any indication we might imagine they dream of fetching female finches. It’s either that or bird seed.
The Globe travel section had some fun recently with unusual sleeping structures offered to travelers. This goes beyond accommodations on stilts in the South Seas.
Diane Bair and Pamela Wright report, “Cradled in a ‘human nest’ made of twigs and branches, on a hillside above the Pacific Ocean, we drifted off to dreamland to the sounds of barking sea lions and crashing waves, a relaxation mix tape made by Mother Nature herself.
“This is camping? Nope. It’s a kind of ‘glamping,’ a.k.a. glamorous camping. While the human nest isn’t wildly luxurious, it’s certainly unique, one of the hallmarks of the glamping experience. ‘Yurts, treehouses, domes, eco-pods, barns, bell tents, cabins, and safari tents — whatever you choose, it’s going to be original,’ says Katie Stearns of Glamping Hub, an online site with 1,200 listings. In addition, ‘you have an incredibly unique access to nature,’ Stearns says.”
Click here to see photos of an Oregon tree-house for grownups, glass igloos in Finland, and lots of other imaginative places to bed down around the world.
Photo: Boston Globe “Dreamcatcher” bubble, part of a colony of five bubbles set in a Provencal pine forest near Marseille
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