Sunday, November 11, 2018
Thursday, September 27, 2018
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
5 Things to Do Daily to Keep Your Heart Healthy
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/5-things-to-do-daily-to-keep-your-heart-healthy/?utm_campaign=cc%20posts&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=091918%20heart&cvosrc=social%20network.twitter.cc%20posts&cvo_creative=091918%20heart
Contributor: A. Marc Gillinov, MD
Contributor: A. Marc Gillinov, MD
Breathe easier by following these good habits
You know that exercise and a good diet can keep your heart healthy. But what else can you do to keep your ticker going strong? Here are five key things you need to do every day to help your heart work most efficiently. Incorporate these habits into your lifestyle and your heart health will be the best it can be for you.
1. Eat healthy fats, NOT trans fats
We need fats in our diet, including saturated and polyunsaturated and unsaturated fats. One fat we don’t need is trans fat, which is known to increase your risk of developing heart disease or having a stroke over a lifetime. This is because trans fat clogs your arteries by raising your bad cholesterol levels (LDL) and lowering your good cholesterol levels (HDL). By cutting them from your diet, you improve the blood flow throughout your body. So, what are trans fats? They are industry-produced fats often used in packaged baked goods, snack foods, margarines and fried fast foods to add flavor and texture.
Tip: Read the labels on all foods. Trans fat appears on the ingredients list as partially hydrogenated oils. Look for 0 percent trans fat. Make it a point to avoid eating foods with trans fat.
2. Practice good dental hygiene, especially flossing your teeth daily
Dental health is a good indication of overall health, including your heart, because those who have periodontal (gum) disease often have the same risk factors for heart disease. Studies continue on this issue, but many have shown that bacteria in the mouth involved in the development of gum disease can move into the bloodstream and cause an elevation in C-reactive protein, a marker for inflammation in the blood vessels. These changes may in turn, increase your risk of heart disease and stroke.
Tip: Floss and brush your teeth daily to ward off gum disease. It’s more than cavities you may have to deal with if you are fighting gum disease.
3. Get enough sleep
Sleep is an essential part of keeping your heart healthy. If you don’t sleep enough, you may be at a higher risk for cardiovascular disease no matter your age or other health habits. One study looking at 3,000 adults over the age of 45 found that those who slept fewer than six hours per night were about twice as likely to have a stroke or heart attack as people who slept six to eight hours per night. Researchers believe sleeping too little causes disruptions in underlying health conditions and biological processes, including blood pressure and inflammation.
Tip: Make sleep a priority. Get 7 to 8 hours of sleep most nights. If you have sleep apnea, you should be treated as this condition is linked to heart disease and arrhythmias.
4. Don’t sit for too long at one time
In recent years, research has suggested that staying seated for long periods of time is bad for your healthno matter how much exercise you do. This is bad news for the many people who sit at sedentary jobs all day. When looking at the combined results of several observational studies that included nearly 800,000 people, researchers found that in those who sat the most, there was an associated 147 percent increase in cardiovascular events and a 90 percent increase in death caused by these events. In addition, sitting for long periods of time (especially when traveling) increases your risk of deep vein thrombosis (a blood clot).
Tip: Exerts say it’s important to move throughout the day. Park farther away from the office, take a few shorter walks throughout the day and/or use a standing work station so you can move up and down. And remember to exercise on most days.
5. Avoid secondhand smoke like the plague
Studies show that the risk of developing heart disease is about 25 to 30 percent higher for people who are exposed to secondhand smoke at home or work. According to the American Heart Association, exposure to tobacco smoke contributes to about 34,000 premature heart disease deaths and 7,300 lung cancer deaths each year. And nonsmokers who have high blood pressure or high blood cholesterol have an even greater risk of developing heart disease when they’re exposed to secondhand smoke. This is because the chemicals emitted from cigarette smoke promote the development of plaque buildup in the arteries.
Tip: Be firm with smokers that you do not want to be around environmental smoke—and keep children away from secondhand smoke.
Follow these five tips and you’ll be doing your heart a favor. You’ll feel better and be able to stay active with a heart-healthy lifestyle.
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Vaksin MR dan Fatwa MUI
https://www.facebook.com/dokterPiprim/posts/10217223903206117?__tn__=K-R
Piprim Basarah Yanuarso
Piprim Basarah Yanuarso
Banyak yang bertanya kenapa hasil uji lab vaksin MR tidak terdeteksi adanya unsur porcine (babi) tapi kok fatwa MUI tentang vaksin MR adalah haram, meskipun tetap boleh digunakan selama tidak ada alternatif lain dan memenuhi kaidah darurat syar’iyyah. Tadinya saya ngga ingin masuk ke ranah ini, tapi mungkin lebih baik dijelaskan secara umum agar tidak ada kesimpangsiuran dan menyebut saya hobinya menghalalkan yang haram.. dan senang mengutak-atik dalil ups... antivaks dikau memang kejaaam....
Sebenarnya ini bermula dari perbedaan fikih cara pandang ulama mazhab terhadap konsep istihalah atau hukum transformasi zat. Istihalah adalah transformasi zat, perubahan zat dari unsur semula menjadi unsur baru. Misalnya dari buah anggur yang halal berubah jadi wine (khamr yang memabukkan) yang hukumnya haram dan ketika wine secara alamiah berubah menjadi cuka maka hukumnya kembali halal.
Ulama mazhab Syafi’i dan sebagian ulama mazhab Hambali membatasi istihalah hanya pada 3 kondisi saja yaitu pada kulit bangkai hewan yang najis bisa berubah halal jika disamak, perubahan bangkai babi menjadi garam yang terjadi secara alamiah, dan perubahan khamr menjadi cuka secara alamiah. Di luar ketiga hal tersebut maka tidak berlaku kaidah istihalah. Artinya meski produk akhir bebas unsur haram tapi karena di awal atau pada prosesnya memanfaatkan barang haram maka hasil akhirnya tetap haram. Nah MUI menganut pendapat ini. Jadi meski uji Labkesda tidak ditemukan unsur babi dalam vaksin MR maka hukumnya tetap haram karena pada prosesnya menggunakan bahan bersumber babi. MUI ngga bilang vaksin MR haram karena mengandung babi lho ya... catat itu ya.
Sedangkan ulama mazhab Hanafi, Maliki, Zahiri (Ibn Hazm), Ibnu Taimiyah, Ibnul Qoyyim berpendapat bahwa istihalah berlaku secara umum. Mereka melihat produk akhirnya seperti apa. Benda produk istihalah dihukumi di produk akhir, kaidah yg dianut adalah Al Hukmu yaduru ma’a illatihi.. wujudan au ‘adaman.. Hukum itu mengikuti keberadaan illat atau alasan, jika ada alasan maka hukum itu ada, jika tidak ada alasan maka hukumnya pun tak ada. Dalam kasus vaksin MR jika memakai kaidah ini maka tak ada alasan menghukum haram karena produk akhir tak mengandung unsur haram.
Jadi kita bisa mengerti bahwa vaksin Rotavirus dengan dua merek yg ada : Rotateq dan Rotarix yang pada proses pembuatannya juga bersinggungan dengan bahan bersumber babi, tapi di produk akhirnya tidak lagi mengandung unsur babi, kedua vaksin ini sudah mendapatkan sertifikat halal dari IFANCA dan Halal Europe. Mengapa? Karena ulama-ulama IFANCA dan Halal Europe menganut pendapat kedua.
Clear kan bapak ibu yang baik hati dan tidak sombong...
Ini mirip dengan pilihan fikih dalam ibadah yang lain: yang satu pakai doa qunut saat shalat subuh, yang lain ngga pakai qunut. Yang satu pakai usholli yang lain ngga pakai usholli, dst.
Ini mirip dengan pilihan fikih dalam ibadah yang lain: yang satu pakai doa qunut saat shalat subuh, yang lain ngga pakai qunut. Yang satu pakai usholli yang lain ngga pakai usholli, dst.
Semua Imam mazhab sepakat bahwa daging babi, kulit, tulang, lemak, darah babi semua haram... Yang mereka berbeda adalah dalam hal istihalah ini... alias ketika terjadi transformasi atau perubahan menuju zat baru yang berbeda total dari zat semula.
Semoga penjelasan ringkas ini bisa dipahami dan kaum antivaks ngga perlu lah kalian menuduh saya dengan kejamnya seperti itu.
Kenapa saya amat peduli dengan masalah vaksinasi ini.. karena sebagai dokter anak saya amat sedih menyaksikan derita bayi-bayi cacat berat akibat sindrom Rubella Kongenital atau bayi sakit karena difteri hingga mesti dilubangi lehernya, atau bayi batuk parah hingga biru akibat Pertusis, atau bayi cacat karena radang otak pasca sakit campak, atau anak lumpuh karena polio... dan sebenarnya semua itu bisa kita cegah dengan ikhtiar vaksinasi. Yang sampai saat ini MUI pun mengakui bahwa vaksinasi tak bisa digantikan dengan cara apapun sehingga termasuk upaya darurat....
Beda ikhtilaf di kalangan ulama mazhab hal biasa aja.
Salam imunisasi...
Referensi:
Jamaludin, Mohammad & Wan, Che & Jasimah, Che & Radzi, Mohamed. (2009). TEORI ISTIHALAH MENURUT PERSPEKTIF ISLAM DAN SAINS: APLIKASI TERHADAP BEBERAPA PENGHASILAN PRODUK MAKANAN. Shariah Journal. 17. 169-194
Imunisasi MR agar virus Rubella hilang dari Indonesia
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10217227827864231&set=a.2371982095444&type=3&theater
Piprim Basarah Yanuarso
Ada lagi yang bertanya kenapa sih program imunisasi MR harus berhasil dan cakupan imunisasi MR harus tinggi > 90% agar virus Rubella hilang di Indonesia?
Gini penjelasannya..
Kita kan ingin mencegah lahirnya bayi-bayi cacat berat karena Sindrom Rubella Kongenital. Bayi itu lahir cacat karena si ibu ketularan virus Rubella saat dia hamil muda. Pada penelitian didapatkan data bahwa virus Rubella ini hidup subur dan berkembang biak di kelompok anak usia 9 bulan sampai 15 tahun.
Karena virus Rubella ini hanya hidup dan berkembang biak pada manusia.. maka cara pemberantasannya amat memungkinkan yaitu dengan cara semua anak kelompok itu (usia 9 bulan - 15 tahun) dibikin kebal terhadap Rubella. Jika ngga bisa semua ya setidaknya 90% mesti kebal. Lihat gambar ini ya.. jika semua orang kebal maka virus Rubella akan musnah karena ngga ada tempat untuk berbiak. Sayangnya masih ada sekelompok anak yang ngga boleh vaksinasi MR yaitu anak-anak penderita kanker, AIDS, dan kondisi kekebalan tubuh yg menurun. Lalu bagaimana melindungi anak-anak ini? Caranya dengan menjadikan lingkungan sekitar kebal terhadap Rubella. Ini bisa terjadi kalo cakupan imunisasi tinggi.
Jadi mesti kompak nih. Kalo pada galau dan cakupan imunisasi rendah maka program imunisasi MR ini akan gagal. Sudah biayanya mahal karena beli vaksin untuk seluruh anak usia itu di Indonesia, tapi virus Rubella masih akan bergentayangan di sekitar kita dan akan menulari ibu hamil muda lalu masih akan lahir bayi-bayi cacat selanjutnya, na'udzubillah min dzalik.
Biaya pengobatan bayi cacat berat karena Sindrom Rubella Kongenital amat mahal bisa berkisar 700-800 juta per anak. Kalo di Indonesia diperkirakan ada 10.000 bayi seperti ini tiap tahun maka biaya pengobatan sekitar 7 triliun rupiah. Sementara anak ini tetap akan terlambat perkembangannya karena otaknya yg mengecil. Biaya ini jauh lebih mahal dibandingkan biaya pengobatan kanker sebesar 1.6 triliun rupiah per tahun.
Jadi... Ayo dukung Imunisasi MR ini ya... Cobalah berpikir luas dan mencintai negeri ini dengan tulus. Semoga partisipasi kita dalam mencegah lahirnya bayi-bayi cacat itu dicatat sebagai ibadah kita di sisi Allah SWT.
Abaikan hasutan kaum antivaks yang amat egois dan ngga ada rasa kasih sayang dalam hatinya melihat lahirnya bayi-bayi cacat berat karena Sindrom Rubella Kongenital...
Salam takzim...
Piprim Basarah Yanuarso
Keterangan gambar:
*yang biru: anak sehat tapi belum diimunisasi
*yang merah: anak sakit dan bisa menyebarkan virus
*yang kuning anak sehat dan kebal setelah imunisasi
Gini penjelasannya..
Kita kan ingin mencegah lahirnya bayi-bayi cacat berat karena Sindrom Rubella Kongenital. Bayi itu lahir cacat karena si ibu ketularan virus Rubella saat dia hamil muda. Pada penelitian didapatkan data bahwa virus Rubella ini hidup subur dan berkembang biak di kelompok anak usia 9 bulan sampai 15 tahun.
Karena virus Rubella ini hanya hidup dan berkembang biak pada manusia.. maka cara pemberantasannya amat memungkinkan yaitu dengan cara semua anak kelompok itu (usia 9 bulan - 15 tahun) dibikin kebal terhadap Rubella. Jika ngga bisa semua ya setidaknya 90% mesti kebal. Lihat gambar ini ya.. jika semua orang kebal maka virus Rubella akan musnah karena ngga ada tempat untuk berbiak. Sayangnya masih ada sekelompok anak yang ngga boleh vaksinasi MR yaitu anak-anak penderita kanker, AIDS, dan kondisi kekebalan tubuh yg menurun. Lalu bagaimana melindungi anak-anak ini? Caranya dengan menjadikan lingkungan sekitar kebal terhadap Rubella. Ini bisa terjadi kalo cakupan imunisasi tinggi.
Jadi mesti kompak nih. Kalo pada galau dan cakupan imunisasi rendah maka program imunisasi MR ini akan gagal. Sudah biayanya mahal karena beli vaksin untuk seluruh anak usia itu di Indonesia, tapi virus Rubella masih akan bergentayangan di sekitar kita dan akan menulari ibu hamil muda lalu masih akan lahir bayi-bayi cacat selanjutnya, na'udzubillah min dzalik.
Biaya pengobatan bayi cacat berat karena Sindrom Rubella Kongenital amat mahal bisa berkisar 700-800 juta per anak. Kalo di Indonesia diperkirakan ada 10.000 bayi seperti ini tiap tahun maka biaya pengobatan sekitar 7 triliun rupiah. Sementara anak ini tetap akan terlambat perkembangannya karena otaknya yg mengecil. Biaya ini jauh lebih mahal dibandingkan biaya pengobatan kanker sebesar 1.6 triliun rupiah per tahun.
Jadi... Ayo dukung Imunisasi MR ini ya... Cobalah berpikir luas dan mencintai negeri ini dengan tulus. Semoga partisipasi kita dalam mencegah lahirnya bayi-bayi cacat itu dicatat sebagai ibadah kita di sisi Allah SWT.
Abaikan hasutan kaum antivaks yang amat egois dan ngga ada rasa kasih sayang dalam hatinya melihat lahirnya bayi-bayi cacat berat karena Sindrom Rubella Kongenital...
Salam takzim...
Piprim Basarah Yanuarso
Keterangan gambar:
*yang biru: anak sehat tapi belum diimunisasi
*yang merah: anak sakit dan bisa menyebarkan virus
*yang kuning anak sehat dan kebal setelah imunisasi
Wednesday, April 11, 2018
Saturday, March 31, 2018
Perfectionism has become a hidden epidemic among young people
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/perfectionism-has-become-a-hidden-epidemic-among-young-people
In this new market-based society, young people are evaluated in a host of new ways.
Image: REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo
In our roles as academics, young people knock on our doors almost every day. They are typically ambitious, bright and hard-working. They have a broad network of friends, and most come from supportive families. Yet no matter how well-adjusted they can appear, we are finding that our students are increasingly likely to seek our support for mental health issues, as well as academic ones.
We are not alone in observing this trend. Student mental illness on UK campuses is at record highs. And right across the globe, young people are reporting to clinicians at unprecedented levels with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
In this new market-based society, young people are evaluated in a host of new ways.
Image: REUTERS/Marcelo del Pozo
In our roles as academics, young people knock on our doors almost every day. They are typically ambitious, bright and hard-working. They have a broad network of friends, and most come from supportive families. Yet no matter how well-adjusted they can appear, we are finding that our students are increasingly likely to seek our support for mental health issues, as well as academic ones.
We are not alone in observing this trend. Student mental illness on UK campuses is at record highs. And right across the globe, young people are reporting to clinicians at unprecedented levels with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
One possible reason for this is that across the US, Canada and the UK, today’s young people are the first generation to grow up in a society based on the principles of neoliberalism championed by the leaders of the late 20th century – Ronald Reagan, Brian Mulroney and Margaret Thatcher respectively. Over the last 50 years, communal interest and civic responsibility have been progressively eroded, replaced by a focus on self-interest and competition in a supposedly free and open market place.
In this new market-based society, young people are evaluated in a host of new ways. Social media, school and university testing and job performance assessments mean young people can be sifted, sorted and ranked by peers, teachers and employers. If young people rank poorly, the logic of our market-based society dictates that they are less deserving – that their inferiority reflects some personal weakness or flaw.
There is, then, enormous pressure on young people to demonstrate their value and outperform their peers. And there is evidence that they are struggling to cope. In particular, emerging epidemics of serious mental illnesses speak to the negative effects of this market-based society, and a culture which is fundamentally changing the way young people think about themselves and others.
The rise of perfectionism
Leading psychologists, Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett have suggested that one of the ways in which younger people are acting differently to their older peers is by showing a greater tendency toward perfectionism.
Broadly speaking, perfectionism is an irrational desire for flawlessness, combined with harsh self-criticism. But on a deeper level, what sets a perfectionist apart from someone who is simply diligent or hard-working is a single-minded need to correct their own imperfections.
Perfectionists need to be told that they have achieved the best possible outcomes, whether that’s through scores and metrics, or other peoples’ approval. When this need is not met, they experience psychological turmoil, because they equate mistakes and failure to inner weakness and unworthiness.
We recently published a study in the Psychological Bulletin, which shows that levels of perfectionism have risen significantly among young people since 1989. We think that this may, at least in part, be a symptom of the way that young people are attempting to feel safe, connect with others and find self-worth within market-based, neoliberal societies.
Irrational ideals of the perfect self have become desirable – even necessary – in a world where performance, status and image define a person’s usefulness and value. You don’t need to look far to find examples; corporations and their marketers offer all manner of cosmetic and material solutions for the flawed consumer. Meanwhile, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat provide platforms to exchange curations of the perfect version of oneself and lifestyle with others.
Image: Linkedin
This is a culture which preys on insecurities and amplifies imperfection, impelling young people to focus on their personal deficiencies. As a result, some young people brood chronically about how they should behave, how they should look, or what they should own. Essentially, agitating to perfect themselves and their lives.
It’s no wonder that there’s substantial evidence indicating that perfectionism is associated with (among other things) depression, anorexia nervosa, suicide ideation and early death.
We feel a deep sense of sympathy with our students’ struggles. For the first time on record, young people are expected to be materially less well-off in adulthood than their parents. And it’s not just their material well-being that’s at stake – their mental and physical well-being is threatened by this hidden epidemic of perfectionism.
It’s time for organisations such as schools and universities, as well as the politicians and civil servants who help to shape the way these organisations operate, to take steps to safeguard the welfare of young people. They must resist marketised forms of competition, at the expense of young people’s mental health.
They should teach the importance of compassion over competition. If they do not, the rise of perfectionism – and its association with serious mental illness – is likely to continue unabated.
Monday, March 26, 2018
Why do we dream? Matthew Walker explores the theories in this exclusive essay
https://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/why-do-we-dream-matthew-walker-explores-the-theories-behind-nocturnal-fantasias-a3799396.html
MATTHEW WALKER
In an exclusive essay, neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker explores the mystery of sleep and dreams
Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons.
First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—some- thing psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking psychological treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones.
Having cast off the non-scientific theory of Sigmund Freud, neuroscience research has since demonstrated that dreaming is not just a byproduct of REM sleep, but serves critical functions for our wellbeing. Can we even take conscious control over our dreams? Scientific evidence suggests the answer is indeed, yes. That fact alone leads to the possibility of self-selecting what experiences (and benefits) we harness from our nocturnal fantasias each and every night?
Creative Inspiration
We often hear stories of people who’ve had remarkable dream-inspired creativity. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song, “Yesterday,” came to him in a dream. Keith Richards had a similar dream experience that gifted to him the iconic opening guitar chords of the song, Satisfaction. Or take Mendeleev’s the dream-derived construction of the table of the periodic elements.
It’s been shown that deep non-REM sleep strengthens individual memories. But recent work in my sleep centre, and work of other scientists, has now shown that REM-sleep dreaming is when those memories can be fused and blended together in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge and then extract what overarching rules and commonalties, creating a mindset that can help us divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems.
How do we know dreaming and not just sleep is important to this process? In one study, we tested this by waking up participants during the night—during both non-REM sleep and dreaming sleep—and gave them very short tests: solving anagram puzzles, where you try to unscramble letters to form a word [i.e. OSEOG = GOOSE]. We monitored the participants during sleep, woke up them up at different points of the night to perform the test. When woken during non-REM sleep, they were not particularly creative—they could solve very few puzzles. But, when we woke up participants during REM sleep, they were able to solve 15-35 percent more puzzles than when they were awake. Not only that, participants woken while dreaming reported that the solution just “popped” into their heads, as if it were effortless.
In another study, I and my colleagues taught participants a series of relational facts—such as, A>B, B>C, C>D, and so on—and tested their understanding by asking them questions, for example: Is B>D or not? Afterwards, we compared their performance on this test before and after a full night’s sleep, and also after they’d had a 60-90-minute nap that included REM sleep. Those who’d slept or had a long nap performed much better on this test than when they were awake, as if they’d put together disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in their sleep.
Peace at last: neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker
Some may consider this trivial, but it is one of the key operations differentiating your brain from your computer. It also underlies the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). The latter seems to be the work of REM-sleep dreaming.
Dreaming improves creative problem solving, too. In one study, participants learned to navigate a virtual maze, with the goal of finding an exit as quickly as possible. They did this using trial and error, aided by the placement of unique objects at certain locations in the maze, such as a football or a Christmas tree. After this learning session, the research participants were split into two groups, with half taking a subsequent afternoon nap, while the other half watched a video for 90 minutes. Nappers were occasionally awoken to ask about the content of their dreams. At equivalent times, those watching a video were also asked about thoughts going through their minds. Afterwards, all participants went back into the virtual maze again.
Those individuals who napped were significantly better at it than those who didn’t, as expected. But, the nappers who reported dreaming about the maze were 10 times better at the task than those who napped and didn’t dream about the maze. Interestingly, when looking at the content of these dreams, it was clear that the participants didn’t dream a precise replay of the learning experience while awake. Instead, they were cherry picking salient fragments of the learning experience and attempting to place them within the catalog of preexisting knowledge.
Therefore, sleep was not the engine of creativity. Rather, it was dreaming of salient features of the experience that enhanced problem solving. Little wonder, then, that you have never been told to “stay awake on a problem.” Instead, you are instructed to “sleep on it.” Interestingly, this phrase, or something close to it, exists in most languages (from French “dormir sur un problem,” to Swahili “kulala juu ya tatizo”), indicating that the problem-solving benefit of dream sleep is universal, common across the globe.
Overnight therapy
It’s said that time heals all wounds; but research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM sleep, and dreams themselves, appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, episodes experienced during the day. In this way, dreaming provides a form of emotional first aid, offering psychological resolution when you awake each morning.
REM sleep is the only time when our brain shuts off the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline (the body’s equivalent of which is adrenaline). At the same time, emotional and memory related centers of the brain are reactivated as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress-related neurochemical, which allows us to re-process painful and even traumatic memories in a safer, calmer neural environment.
Supporting evidence comes from one study in my sleep center in young adult participants watched a set of emotion-inducing images while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, they were shown the same emotional images; but for half the participants, the twelve hours were in the same day, while for the other half the twelve hours were separated by an evening of sleep—a full hours.
Those who slept in between the two sessions reported a significant decrease in how emotional they felt in response to seeing those images again. Their MRI scans agreed—there was a palliative decrease in reactivity in the amygdala—the emotional center of the brain that can create painful feelings. In addition, there was a reengagement of the rational prefrontal cortex of the brain after sleep that provides a dampening brake on emotional reactivity. In contrast, those who remained awake across the day showed no such dissolving of emotional reactivity over time.
This evidence itself doesn’t say anything about the role of dream sleep. But, we had recorded the sleep of each participant during the intervening night between the two test sessions. We discovered that a specific kind of electrical brain activity that reflects a drop in stress-related chemistry during the dream state determined the success of overnight therapy from one individual to the next.
These studies, and those of many others, led to the suggestion that dream sleep has the potential to help people recover from especially difficult traumatic experiences, since the emotional content of dreams is paired with a decrease in brain noradrenaline.
Support for this idea came from research by the psychiatrist, Murray Raskind. He studied war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), who often suffer debilitating nightmares. When given the drug Prazosin—a medication that lowers blood pressure and also acts as a blocker of the brain stress chemical, noradrenaline— the soldiers had more REM sleep, fewer nightmares and while awake, fewer PTSD symptoms, than those given a placebo. Newer studies suggest this effect can be shown in children and adolescents with nightmares, as well; though the research on this is still in its infancy.
Scientific evidence therefore fits the prophetic wisdom of Charlotte Brontë’s, who stated that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow”. Said more optimistically, the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep.
Controlling your dreams
Lucid dreaming occurs at the moment when you become aware that you are dreaming. However, the term is more colloquially used to describe gaining volitional control of what an individual is dreaming, and the ability to manipulate that experience, such as deciding to fly, or perhaps even the functions of it, such as problem solving.
The concept of lucid dreaming was once considered a sham. Scientists debated its very existence. You can understand the skepticism. First, the assertion of conscious control over a normally non-volitional process injects a heavy dose of ludicrous into the already preposterous experience we call dreaming. Second, how can you objectively prove a subjective claim, especially when the individual is fast asleep during the act?
Several years ago, a truly ingenious experiment removed all such doubt. Scientists placed lucid dreamers inside an MRI scanner. While awake, these participants first clench their left and then right hand, over and over. Researches took snapshots of brain activity, allowing them to define the precise brain areas controlling each hand of each individual.
The participants were allowed to fall asleep in the MRI scanner, entering REM sleep where they could dream. During REM sleep, however, all voluntary muscles are paralyzed, preventing the dreamer from acting out ongoing mental experience. Yet the muscles that control the eyes are spared from this paralysis, and give this stage of sleep its frenetic name. Lucid dreamers were able to take advantage of this ocular freedom, communicating with the researchers through eye movements.
Pre-defined eye movements would therefore inform the researchers of the nature of the lucid dream (e.g., the participant made three deliberate leftward eye movements when they gained lucid dream control, two rightward eye movements before clenching their right hand, etc.). Non-lucid dreamers find it difficult to believe that such deliberate eye movements are possible while someone is asleep, but watch a lucid dreamer do it a number of times, and it is impossible to deny.
When participants signaled the beginning of the lucid dream state, the scientists began taking MRI pictures of brain activity. Soon after, the sleeping participants signaled their intent to dream about moving their left hand, then their right hand, alternating over and over again, just as they did when awake. Their hands were not physically moving—they could not, due to the REM-sleep paralysis. But they were moving in the dream.
At least, that was the subjective claim from the participants upon awakening. The results of the MRI scans objectively proved they were not lying. The same regions of the brain that were active during physical right and left voluntary hand movements observed while the individuals were awake similarly lit up in corresponding ways during times when the lucid participants signaled that they were clenching their hands while dreaming!
There could be no question. Scientists had gained objective, brain-based proof that lucid dreamers can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming. Other studies using similar eye-movement communication designs have further shown that individuals can deliberately bring themselves to timed orgasm during lucid dreaming, an outcome that, especially in males, can be objectively verified using physical measures by (brave) scientists.
It remains unclear whether lucid dreaming is beneficial or detrimental, since well over 80 percent of the general public are not natural lucid dreamers. If gaining voluntary dream control were so useful, surely Mother Nature would have imbued the masses with such a skill.
However, this argument makes the erroneous assumption—that we have stopped evolving. Is it possible that lucid dreamers represent the next iteration in Homo sapiens evolution? Will these individuals be preferentially selected for in the future on the basis of this unusual dreaming ability—one that may allow them to turn the creative problem-solving spotlight of dreaming on the waking challenges faced by themselves or the human race, and advantageously harness its power more deliberately?
Before trying to answer these lofty, even preposterous, questions, could I suggest we first take a night to sleep on it.
Matthew Walker is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the university’s Center for Human Sleep Science.
MATTHEW WALKER
In an exclusive essay, neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker explores the mystery of sleep and dreams
Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons.
First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—some- thing psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking psychological treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones.
Having cast off the non-scientific theory of Sigmund Freud, neuroscience research has since demonstrated that dreaming is not just a byproduct of REM sleep, but serves critical functions for our wellbeing. Can we even take conscious control over our dreams? Scientific evidence suggests the answer is indeed, yes. That fact alone leads to the possibility of self-selecting what experiences (and benefits) we harness from our nocturnal fantasias each and every night?
Creative Inspiration
We often hear stories of people who’ve had remarkable dream-inspired creativity. Think of Paul McCartney’s story of how his hit song, “Yesterday,” came to him in a dream. Keith Richards had a similar dream experience that gifted to him the iconic opening guitar chords of the song, Satisfaction. Or take Mendeleev’s the dream-derived construction of the table of the periodic elements.
It’s been shown that deep non-REM sleep strengthens individual memories. But recent work in my sleep centre, and work of other scientists, has now shown that REM-sleep dreaming is when those memories can be fused and blended together in abstract and highly novel ways. During the dreaming state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge and then extract what overarching rules and commonalties, creating a mindset that can help us divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems.
How do we know dreaming and not just sleep is important to this process? In one study, we tested this by waking up participants during the night—during both non-REM sleep and dreaming sleep—and gave them very short tests: solving anagram puzzles, where you try to unscramble letters to form a word [i.e. OSEOG = GOOSE]. We monitored the participants during sleep, woke up them up at different points of the night to perform the test. When woken during non-REM sleep, they were not particularly creative—they could solve very few puzzles. But, when we woke up participants during REM sleep, they were able to solve 15-35 percent more puzzles than when they were awake. Not only that, participants woken while dreaming reported that the solution just “popped” into their heads, as if it were effortless.
In another study, I and my colleagues taught participants a series of relational facts—such as, A>B, B>C, C>D, and so on—and tested their understanding by asking them questions, for example: Is B>D or not? Afterwards, we compared their performance on this test before and after a full night’s sleep, and also after they’d had a 60-90-minute nap that included REM sleep. Those who’d slept or had a long nap performed much better on this test than when they were awake, as if they’d put together disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle in their sleep.
Peace at last: neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker
Some may consider this trivial, but it is one of the key operations differentiating your brain from your computer. It also underlies the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). The latter seems to be the work of REM-sleep dreaming.
Dreaming improves creative problem solving, too. In one study, participants learned to navigate a virtual maze, with the goal of finding an exit as quickly as possible. They did this using trial and error, aided by the placement of unique objects at certain locations in the maze, such as a football or a Christmas tree. After this learning session, the research participants were split into two groups, with half taking a subsequent afternoon nap, while the other half watched a video for 90 minutes. Nappers were occasionally awoken to ask about the content of their dreams. At equivalent times, those watching a video were also asked about thoughts going through their minds. Afterwards, all participants went back into the virtual maze again.
Those individuals who napped were significantly better at it than those who didn’t, as expected. But, the nappers who reported dreaming about the maze were 10 times better at the task than those who napped and didn’t dream about the maze. Interestingly, when looking at the content of these dreams, it was clear that the participants didn’t dream a precise replay of the learning experience while awake. Instead, they were cherry picking salient fragments of the learning experience and attempting to place them within the catalog of preexisting knowledge.
Therefore, sleep was not the engine of creativity. Rather, it was dreaming of salient features of the experience that enhanced problem solving. Little wonder, then, that you have never been told to “stay awake on a problem.” Instead, you are instructed to “sleep on it.” Interestingly, this phrase, or something close to it, exists in most languages (from French “dormir sur un problem,” to Swahili “kulala juu ya tatizo”), indicating that the problem-solving benefit of dream sleep is universal, common across the globe.
Overnight therapy
It’s said that time heals all wounds; but research suggests that time spent in dream sleep is what heals. REM sleep, and dreams themselves, appears to take the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, episodes experienced during the day. In this way, dreaming provides a form of emotional first aid, offering psychological resolution when you awake each morning.
REM sleep is the only time when our brain shuts off the anxiety-triggering molecule noradrenaline (the body’s equivalent of which is adrenaline). At the same time, emotional and memory related centers of the brain are reactivated as we dream. This means that emotional memory reactivation is occurring in a brain free of a key stress-related neurochemical, which allows us to re-process painful and even traumatic memories in a safer, calmer neural environment.
Supporting evidence comes from one study in my sleep center in young adult participants watched a set of emotion-inducing images while inside an MRI scanner. Twelve hours later, they were shown the same emotional images; but for half the participants, the twelve hours were in the same day, while for the other half the twelve hours were separated by an evening of sleep—a full hours.
Those who slept in between the two sessions reported a significant decrease in how emotional they felt in response to seeing those images again. Their MRI scans agreed—there was a palliative decrease in reactivity in the amygdala—the emotional center of the brain that can create painful feelings. In addition, there was a reengagement of the rational prefrontal cortex of the brain after sleep that provides a dampening brake on emotional reactivity. In contrast, those who remained awake across the day showed no such dissolving of emotional reactivity over time.
This evidence itself doesn’t say anything about the role of dream sleep. But, we had recorded the sleep of each participant during the intervening night between the two test sessions. We discovered that a specific kind of electrical brain activity that reflects a drop in stress-related chemistry during the dream state determined the success of overnight therapy from one individual to the next.
These studies, and those of many others, led to the suggestion that dream sleep has the potential to help people recover from especially difficult traumatic experiences, since the emotional content of dreams is paired with a decrease in brain noradrenaline.
Support for this idea came from research by the psychiatrist, Murray Raskind. He studied war veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), who often suffer debilitating nightmares. When given the drug Prazosin—a medication that lowers blood pressure and also acts as a blocker of the brain stress chemical, noradrenaline— the soldiers had more REM sleep, fewer nightmares and while awake, fewer PTSD symptoms, than those given a placebo. Newer studies suggest this effect can be shown in children and adolescents with nightmares, as well; though the research on this is still in its infancy.
Scientific evidence therefore fits the prophetic wisdom of Charlotte Brontë’s, who stated that “a ruffled mind makes a restless pillow”. Said more optimistically, the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night of sleep.
Controlling your dreams
Lucid dreaming occurs at the moment when you become aware that you are dreaming. However, the term is more colloquially used to describe gaining volitional control of what an individual is dreaming, and the ability to manipulate that experience, such as deciding to fly, or perhaps even the functions of it, such as problem solving.
The concept of lucid dreaming was once considered a sham. Scientists debated its very existence. You can understand the skepticism. First, the assertion of conscious control over a normally non-volitional process injects a heavy dose of ludicrous into the already preposterous experience we call dreaming. Second, how can you objectively prove a subjective claim, especially when the individual is fast asleep during the act?
Several years ago, a truly ingenious experiment removed all such doubt. Scientists placed lucid dreamers inside an MRI scanner. While awake, these participants first clench their left and then right hand, over and over. Researches took snapshots of brain activity, allowing them to define the precise brain areas controlling each hand of each individual.
The participants were allowed to fall asleep in the MRI scanner, entering REM sleep where they could dream. During REM sleep, however, all voluntary muscles are paralyzed, preventing the dreamer from acting out ongoing mental experience. Yet the muscles that control the eyes are spared from this paralysis, and give this stage of sleep its frenetic name. Lucid dreamers were able to take advantage of this ocular freedom, communicating with the researchers through eye movements.
Pre-defined eye movements would therefore inform the researchers of the nature of the lucid dream (e.g., the participant made three deliberate leftward eye movements when they gained lucid dream control, two rightward eye movements before clenching their right hand, etc.). Non-lucid dreamers find it difficult to believe that such deliberate eye movements are possible while someone is asleep, but watch a lucid dreamer do it a number of times, and it is impossible to deny.
When participants signaled the beginning of the lucid dream state, the scientists began taking MRI pictures of brain activity. Soon after, the sleeping participants signaled their intent to dream about moving their left hand, then their right hand, alternating over and over again, just as they did when awake. Their hands were not physically moving—they could not, due to the REM-sleep paralysis. But they were moving in the dream.
At least, that was the subjective claim from the participants upon awakening. The results of the MRI scans objectively proved they were not lying. The same regions of the brain that were active during physical right and left voluntary hand movements observed while the individuals were awake similarly lit up in corresponding ways during times when the lucid participants signaled that they were clenching their hands while dreaming!
There could be no question. Scientists had gained objective, brain-based proof that lucid dreamers can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming. Other studies using similar eye-movement communication designs have further shown that individuals can deliberately bring themselves to timed orgasm during lucid dreaming, an outcome that, especially in males, can be objectively verified using physical measures by (brave) scientists.
It remains unclear whether lucid dreaming is beneficial or detrimental, since well over 80 percent of the general public are not natural lucid dreamers. If gaining voluntary dream control were so useful, surely Mother Nature would have imbued the masses with such a skill.
However, this argument makes the erroneous assumption—that we have stopped evolving. Is it possible that lucid dreamers represent the next iteration in Homo sapiens evolution? Will these individuals be preferentially selected for in the future on the basis of this unusual dreaming ability—one that may allow them to turn the creative problem-solving spotlight of dreaming on the waking challenges faced by themselves or the human race, and advantageously harness its power more deliberately?
Before trying to answer these lofty, even preposterous, questions, could I suggest we first take a night to sleep on it.
Matthew Walker is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley and the director of the university’s Center for Human Sleep Science.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)