Sunday 1 September 2013

Curing Insomnia

Before Stephen King began writing twice as many words as his books needed, he wrote a book called 'Insomina' about a man who begins to see things that are invisible to others as his sleep deprived brain plays tricks on him.  
As a long term sufferer of insomnia, i have yet to see little bald doctors cutting peoples life forces or anything like that but i do seem to sometimes spend part of my day in a 'fog' where it takes a few moments for my brain to connect, a feeling i describe as like the wheels of a car spinning before it gets traction and sets off.
It is all down to a lack of sleep and i am happy that researchers at the University of California, San Diego  have found that by scanning the brains of insomniacs, they discovered differences in brain function compared with people who get a full night's sleep which impairs reaction time and memory.
One of the researchers, Prof Sean Drummond, said: "We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off 'mind-wandering' brain regions irrelevant to the task.
"This data helps us understand that people with insomnia not only have trouble sleeping at night, but their brains are not functioning as efficiently during the day."
This would explain a lot, especially the difficulty i have remembering names or somehow getting names mixed up which is quite a recent development.
Maybe a scientist somewhere could answer me why even when i am dog tired it still takes me ages to fall asleep but strangely i have no trouble dropping off while sitting on the sofa watching television.
Is the television occupying some part of my brain which the boffins say is not switched off which allows the part that tells the brain to shut down to take over in which case rather than describe all manner of sleeping  pills and sleep enhancing techniques or even drinking hot milk and avoiding cheese, is the solution just as simple as putting a TV in your bedroom?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

regions of the brain are turned off huh? lucy, i'm not going to take the bait...

q

Anonymous said...

isn't it late in the UK? you should be asleep

q

Lucy said...

I'm dragging the tv into the bedroom

Lucy said...

According to Prof Sean Drummond, they are: 'We found that insomnia subjects did not properly turn on brain regions critical to a working memory task and did not turn off 'mind-wandering' brain regions irrelevant to the task'.

Regions turned on and off the prof said