Talk:Sleep

Semi-protected edit request on 25 March 2016

Please remove the picture thumb|Sleep is associated with a state of muscle relaxation and reduced perception of environmental stimuli., as no information can be drawn from a photo, or a graphical impression, of a person 'sleeping' in becoming informed about the topic 'sleep'. Rwroot (talk) 17:34, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template. Images depicting animals sleeping seem useful to me... EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 22:32, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 25 March 2016

Add reference to http://sleep-in-arts.eu/Risorse/Cap01EN.pdf, under the section 'Sleep in Art' and remove the following pictures under the same: File:Auf dem Ofen 1895.jpg|Zwei schlafende Mädchen auf der Ofenbank, Albert Anker, 1895 File:William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) - Lullaby (1875).jpg|Lullaby, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1875 File:Flaming June, by Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896).jpg|Flaming June by Frederic Lord Leighton, ~1895 File:Carel Fabritius - De poort bewaker (1654).jpg|The Sentry by Carel Fabritius, 1654 File:Paul Klimsch Schlafender Jaguar.jpg|Sleeping Jaguar, Paul Klimsch File:Chrapek, the Sleepy one... (3734650615).jpg|Shrapek (Snorer), Wrocław's dwarfs File:Museo del Prado - Goya - Caprichos - No. 43 - El sueño de la razon produce monstruos.jpg|The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Goya, 1799 as they appear to be arbitrarily choosen and would therefore contribute no structured organisation to the section. Also please remove the following pictures: thumb|People napping on a train [[:File:WLA metmuseum Bronze statue of Eros sleeping 7.jpg|thumb|right|Bronze statue of Eros sleeping, 3rd century BC–early 1st century AD]] [[:File:Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. 037.jpg|thumb|The Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1567.]] [[:File:Japanese Macaques sleeping.JPG|thumb|Sleeping Japanese macaques.]], as they provide no usefull information in becoming informed about the topic 'sleep'. Rwroot (talk) 18:36, 25 March 2016 (UTC)

Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit semi-protected}} template. EvergreenFir (talk) Please {{re}} 22:33, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

External links modified

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Rheum

Can I suggest someone with an account adds a link to Rheum in 'See also'? I've already added it to the (not semi-protected) Human eye, which is the other place I looked before searching on "Eye crust." (The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 10:00, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

 Done --Hordaland (talk) 19:30, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

link in intro for 'industrialized altered sleep' doesn't mention industrialized altered sleep at all

The reference after the sentence in the introduction, "Industrialization and artificial light have substantially altered human sleep habits in the last 100 years", doesn't mention industrialization or artificial light and consequent altered human sleep habits at all. Maybe the reference should be moved to previous sentences? UnderEducatedGeezer (talk) 18:49, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

You are right. I've removed it. I didn't add "citation needed", as industrialization's effects are covered and sourced further down the page. The source was not a particularly valuable one. --Hordaland (talk) 20:50, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Bodily functions during sleep

Hello!

I am not an expert on sleep but have more than a passing interest in the subject. I think it might help improve the article if a section is inserted about the bodily functions during sleep. For example the heart rate, muscle contraction rate, blood flow rates, and how the internal organs behave during sleep. This is just a thought.

Cheers.

Bluesky10 (talk) 10:49, 16 February 2017 (UTC)

Streamlining the article: recent changes and next steps

Hi User:Mathnerd314159, User:Zefr, and anyone else active on this article. I appreciate recent efforts which have been made to streamline the article. At the same time I am concerned that we should not skimp on the Physiology section, which should be the essential section in an article concerning a process which is fundamentally biological. As you know, physiology is more than neuroscience, and I think that such paragraphs as the following really belong on the main page about Sleep:

Especially during non-REM sleep, the brain uses significantly less energy during sleep than it does in waking. In areas with reduced activity, the brain restores its supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the molecule used for short-term storage and transport of energy. (Since in quiet waking the brain is responsible for 20% of the body's energy use, this reduction has an independently noticeable impact on overall energy consumption.) During slow-wave sleep, humans secrete bursts of growth hormone. All sleep, even during the day, is associated with secretion of prolactin.

Also, the article structure has gotten a little weird, with "Awakening", which used to be a subset of "Stages", now serving as the über-header which encloses Circadian Rhythm.

I propose to improve the section on physiology of sleep—ideally using some new sources which expand on physiological phenomena throughout the organism—and to trim and restructure some less essential parts of the article. The Circadian rhythm for example is a closely related but distinct process which is explained pretty well on its own page. "Nap", and maybe "Genetics" as it is presently written, can be subsumed under "Distribution".

Actually the following section, "Sleep homeostasis, deprivation and optimization", is also a bit redundant with "Distribution" and could perhaps be merged.

Meanwhile the sections on memory processing and dreaming could probably be trimmed. Maybe there should be a larger "Functions" section.

"Effect of food and drugs on sleep" could be its own article — what do people think about this?

Do the basics of this plan sound OK?

Cheers, groupuscule (talk) 04:16, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Some topics I want to explore/add:

• The history of sleep research,[1]; book has great reviews[2][3].
• Meditation is a substitute for sleep,[4] and on a biological level they're hard to distinguish,[5] as meditation practitioners will go into the various stages of biologically-defined "sleep" during their meditation.[6]
• UK is the most sleep-deprived nation[7]
• Philosophical debates on the natures of consciousness during sleep[8]
• Economic correlations of sleep[9].

I'm not really sure where they'd go in the current article. And your plan for the article isn't very enlightening in that regard. The basic principle seems to be WP:UNDUE but that just kind of punts the problem to figuring out what the mainstream academic view is. Fortunately enough though, I'm in graduate school, thus technically an academic, so it's only my view that counts. (right? isn't that how that policy works?)

You mention you want to add back the quote on prolactin. Online, the only reliable sources prolactin is mentioned in the context of sleep are medical textbooks[10] and "popular science" blogs.[11] A 2008 review on prolactin and REM sleep finds "a paucity of evidence".[12] There's continuing research on the subject [13] [14], and it deserves mention, despite WP:MEDRS, but I don't think the main top-level article on sleep is the place to go into such detail. There's a similar quote in Prolactin: "Prolactin levels peak during REM sleep and in the early morning", which seems more like the proper starting point for any detailed discussion.

Particularly since there's a news article on the interactions between hormones and sleep, it's quite true that hormones deserve a few words in a subsection somewhere sleep-related. So that's why I stuck it in the neuroscience article; if someone really needs that much detail, they can find it. I'm not quite sure what purpose you want to serve by putting it back in the main article. I can point however to the purpose that would not be served. There are some crazy sleep-deprived people,[15] the "Polyphasic Sleep Society" [16], who seem to have some kind of religious attraction to prolactin. Whereas the Wikipedia article says that prolactin is "a protein influential in over 300 processes in vertebrates, best known for enabling female mammals to produce milk", this blog post author says prolactin is "a hormone producing a feeling of calm and well-being" (of course with no citation). These Polyphasic Sleep crackpots have caused me and no doubt hundreds or thousands of others uncountable sleep-deprived nights of pain and suffering, and by putting the relationship between prolactin and sleep in the darkest, most obscure corner of Wikipedia I can find, while keeping the polyphasic sleep article describing the ineffectiveness of polyphasic sleep front and center, I can give them the encyclopedic equivalent of the finger, and ideally also spare others from such suffering.

Generally, the article seems to suffer from WP:RECENTISM, a lot of research findings and not much perspective. Typically history is the easiest way to get perspective. The notion of waking up has been around a lot longer than the circadian rhythm, hence why I made it a header. Same for naps and dreams, they've been around for centuries & have their own articles, but should get a header too, as the "see also" section doesn't allow for discussion. The rest of the stuff (physiology, quality, distribution, memory, disorders, nutrition, etc.) all fall under the general heading of "sleep research", a much more recent phenomenon. I was thinking Neuroscience of sleep might turn into a sleep research article, as it starts out right ("The study of sleep from a neuroscience perspective grew to prominence from the second half of the twentieth century.") but it's already pretty full at 48k, and I want to make that page even harder to find, so maybe making a "sleep research" page in the middle (so link trail to prolactin is sleep -> sleep research -> neuroscience of sleep#relationship between hormones and sleep discussion) is a good idea. The main Sleep article can focus on lightweight topics like philosophy, history, and economics, the Sleep research article can focus on all matters of reliable science, and all the untested theories can get dumped into the Neuroscience article (where they belong; neuroscience is barely one step removed from pseudoscience ☺).

So, to answer your questions: (1) yes, there needs to be a new article (2) no, your basics are all wrong, go back and check your axioms. --Mathnerd314159 (talk) 19:51, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

Well, I see where you're coming from and I'm sorry to hear you are having trouble with sleep partisans. I had no idea prolactin was so controversial! (To be very picky, however, the statement you linked about "paucity of evidence" is about whether prolactin regulates sleep—not whether the body secretes it during sleep.) I like your idea of distinguishing longstanding perspectives on sleep from modern sleep research and I agree that many parts of the current article could be forked off. Still, I am hoping there is a place for physiological essentials (systemic, not just neurological: circulation, respiration, etc.) People have been studying these phenomena for decades if not centuries and I think it would be reasonable to include the most solid findings. The book chapter you linked (Brandenberger, Simon & Follenius) looks like a great source (not least because it distinguishes the effects of sleep from the effects of circadian rhythm). Also, it seems like we agree that some parts of the present article are too big and stray too far from the heart of our topic. groupuscule (talk) 21:18, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

I agree that the article needs work (and am sorry that I won't have time to participate the next few months). I just want to be a bit "difficult" right now and disagree whole-heartedly with the following sentence above: "The notion of waking up has been around a lot longer than the circadian rhythm." No, while the word 'circadian' is only a good half-a-century old, the phenomenon has existed as long as there has been life on the planet!

Glad to see some (otherwise) serious discussion here. Good luck with the work! --Hordaland (talk) 21:58, 12 May 2017 (UTC)

A possibly helpful page where Professor Russell G. Foster (University of Oxford) and Professor Joseph S. Takahashi (University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center) are interviewed about the research areas sleep and circadian rhythms and their discovery of each other: http://www.fens.org/News-Activities/Featured-Articles/The-Brain-Conference-2015/ -- Hordaland (talk) 14:04, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Thanks. In my opinion, at present we are giving too much space to (the physiological processes associated with) circadian rhythm and too little to the physiology of sleep itself—especially since there is a separate page with good coverage of circadian rhythm and not a page covering the physiology of sleep. However in deference to Mathnerd and in the interest of constructing something better, rather than restore the section describing either of the phases individually, I would like to construct something new. (Probably we do need a section each on "NREM" and "REM"; probably not a section each on NREM1, NREM2, etc.) As I mentioned above it's especially useful to have sources which discuss experimental control of circadian rhythm in sleep research.

Reading the site you linked makes me think that the sleep/health connection could get more play, including some issues related to sleep deprivation, which, although it has its own article, could be highlighted a little more here. groupuscule (talk) 14:26, 15 May 2017 (UTC)

Hi, I regrouped a little bit into bigger headings. I'm not wedded to these and I hope other people will give their comments. The goal is to get like info with like and maybe organize things a little more logically for the reader. A couple thoughts along the way:

• Sleep cycle currently redirects to circadian rhythm, which is more or less wrong. The standard referent of "sleep cycle" is the ultradian rhythm during sleep, lasting about an hour and a half, and including both NREMS and REMS. I hate to say it, but Sleep cycle should probably be its own article. Maybe it could be covered in at Neuroscience of sleep, I don't know.
• I don't know the best name for the section on "homeostatic" sleep / sleep debt / "Process S". Using "homeostatic" may be confusing because we are elsewhere discussing the suspension of homeostasis during REM, in a more direct meaning of the term (thermoregulation, blood pressure and oxygenation, etc.) "Homeostatic" sleep regulation in the sense of this section has to do with a single neurochemical process moving in one direction or another. "Sleep debt" isn't perfect because it focuses on only one part of the issue. (As defined here, "sleep debt" refers only to the process in more or less extreme disequilibrium.) "Process S" sounds jargony but at the same time it's precise since it was made up for this purpose. (And then there's the question of whether to call the circadian process "Process C" for parallelism and added scientism.)
• "Quality" is now grouped in with Timing (as this is half the definition given) but this could change. It could be its own top-level category, or somewhere else. It could probably be expanded or combined with other material that's now missing.
• The Timing section is big but I think it's preferred to group things accurately rather than have a bunch of unclassified top-level headers which actually deal with different aspects of the same issue.
• I removed the section called "Ontogenesis" because it's a hypothesis about REM sleep only — and one of many — and covered at the page on REM. At the same time, the regrouping has revealed (to me anyway) that there is a shortage of material on the functions of sleep. (OK I just checked and see this was recently moved to Neuroscience of sleep. Honestly, I don't see how material on wound healing belongs there and I recommend that much of the section on function be moved back.)

OK I hope everybody is having a good spring (or, I suppose, fall) and getting as much sleep as they want. Regards, groupuscule (talk) 18:11, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

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Can you teach infants a faux language?

In the section "Children" this passage occurs:

"Sleep also influences language development. To test this, researchers taught infants a faux language and observed their recollection of the rules for that language.[64] Infants who slept within four hours of learning the language could remember the language rules better, while infants who stayed awake longer did not recall those rules as well."

Can this be an accurate report of the research? As I understand it, in the last of the stages of language acquisition, between the ages of 3 and 4 children can form simple, syntactically proper and complete sentences—and though they acquire the rules for proper syntactical forms, the adults around them can't be said to have taught the babies those rules. Are we then to understand that researchers can take babies before they have acquired the ability to utter syntactically proper and complete sentences in their mother tongue and, supposing that the babies' parents refuse to grant researchers very long custody of their children, in the space of twelve hours or so manage to teach the babies the rules of a faux language, a basic vocabulary, engage in conversations with them to determine by their responses whether the babies understand the rules, then have the babies sleep, and after waking them up, try to conduct a conversation again? Am I being thrown off because of the term infant which, however elastic in application to children of different ages, still connotes a child so young that it can't even walk, let alone talk? I don't think the report here can be helpful if it raises such basic questions; it needs revision and perhaps a link to a page on language acquisition where the experiments can be described in satisfactory detail.Wordwright (talk) 22:35, 29 August 2017 (UTC)

The two studies referenced in that section state that the "infants" are 15 months old and 12 & 18 months old. We could clarify the first study by including the 15 month age. The second includes some age figures already. Hope this helps. - Ryk72 ^'c.s.n.s.' 02:59, 30 August 2017 (UTC)

Tense problem under Process C subsection

Currently reads "Process C counteracts the homeostatic drive for sleep during the day (in diurnal animals) and to augment it at night." Should be "and augments it at night." Orbitalsquabbles (talk) 15:11, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Ugh, that's not even called a tense problem, I'm going back to bed Orbitalsquabbles (talk) 15:12, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

 Done. Thanks. - Ryk72 ^'c.s.n.s.' 15:17, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

Sleep is good for health. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 107.142.176.79 (talk) 23:39, 28 March 2018 (UTC)