Sleepy Brain - Is it really bad to lose a night's Sleep?
Sleepy brain prone to sudden shutdowns study
Tue May 20, 6:53 PM ET
Being deprived of sleep even for one night makes the brain unstable and prone to sudden shutdowns akin to a power failure -- brief lapses that hover between sleep and wakefulness, researchers said on Tuesday.
"It's as though it is both asleep and awake and they are switching between each other very rapidly," said David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, whose study appears in the Journal of Neuroscience.
"Imagine you are sitting in a room watching a movie with the lights on. In a stable brain, the lights stay on all the time. In a sleepy brain, the lights suddenly go off," Dinges said in a telephone interview.
The findings suggest that people who are sleep-deprived alternate between periods of near-normal brain function and dramatic lapses in attention and visual processing.
Two million American children have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. It's so common now that one child in a classroom of 25 or 30 will have the disorder. But parents often struggle a long time to figure out exactly what's going on in their child's head. Is he tired? Is she confused? Is he just acting up? Does she need help?
Dr. Fernando Miranda, a neurologist at the Bright Minds Institute in San Francisco, says diagnosing children with behavioral disorders like ADHD and autism without looking at their brains is like trying to diagnose heart problems without actually looking at the heart. Click here to read a story about Miranda's autism research.
Some stations have already aired the show but others are upcoming in the next week or two. Daniel Amen, MD is a ground-breaking, passionate psychiatrist who uses SPECT scans to diagnose and treat many disorders from ADD to depression to Alzheimer's. He is the author of over 30 professional papers, and 22 books, including the NY
Times bestseller, Change Your Brain, Change Your Life, Healing ADD,
Healing Anxiety and Depression, Preventing Alzheimer’s, and Wired for Success (2009)
SchwabLearning.org Acquired by GreatSchools.net
In a letter to subscribers, Helen and Charles Schwab announced in 2007 they will be shutting down their websites SchwabLearning.org and SparkTop.org in order to focus their philanthropic efforts on supporting other foundations rather than managing a very extensive website. At the end of February 2008, GreatSchools.net announced they were acquiring Schwab Learning's site. All content from the Schwab site will be maintained through Great Schools. Both web addresses link to the Great Schools site. Boonzee note: This looks to be an efficient use of resources for both organizations.
MedicalNewsToday.com on Sept 6, 2007 summarized a superb study published in the esteemed journal The Lancet (thelancet.com) validating theories and signficant anecdotal evidence that artificial food color and additives (AFCA) affects the behavior of children with or without ADHD.
A previous study confirmed AFCA affect on behavior but was based on parental reports. The significance of this study by Jim Stevenson, University of Southampton, UK and team is that it "looked at the effects of additives on changes in children's behavior in a community-based, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, crossover trial" and utilized computerized testing and researcher observation to evaluate effect.
