Sleep and Dreams

* We have solid knowledge on sleep but are still looking for better treatments * How can we sleep in different habitats? Underground, deep sea, and space * Recently discovered: people in a study on space sleeping found that the individuals went lethargic and had depression issues, didn’t move much and avoided crucial exercise (important because we don’t want to send depressed people on long voyages) * Origin of the word sleep: somnus (roman god of sleep) and hypnos (greek god of sleep)= part of the confusion between sleep and hypnosis? But hypnosis has nothing to do with sleep * Hippocrates was the father of medicine, was right about some of the symptoms from sleep deprivation * Aristotle had a cycle of why we sleep * Von Haller’s idea of sleep was similar to Aristotle, with his focus on the head being responsible for sleep, but instead of cooling, it was blood pressure * They were trying to focus on something more specific * Piéron: first physiological perspective of sleep, thought that the substance would build up during the day and lead to sleep at night, that substance he called hypnotoxin * Hans Berger: discovered the EEG, very important because it showed that the brain had some sort of activity that could be recorded * Hard to record what is in the brains because of brain matter, bones, tissue etc. Another challenge is to make sense of what we are recording * Neural synchronicity: they have to activate in sync with other neurons, makes them more easily detectable and more powerful * Sleep spindles: kind of brainwaves, burst of lines when recorded, sign that the person is very much asleep * K complex: very high amplitude followed by very low amplitude, but the average amplitude is still higher than what you would usually find, gives us a good indication that the person is asleep * Kleitman: considered father of modern sleep research, thought that sleep was a very passive state * Observe a