Friday, January 23, 2004

Better sleeping technology III

Just as I was talking about it, here is another study (some more details here)performed on college students on the need for a period to "sleep on it." We all knew it affected learning for the young and the health of the old. I did not realize my brain was shrinking as a result of jet-lag/sleeping pattern disturbances though. On a related note, the process of memorization is intriguing. I have observed that most people flying on the kc-135 did not remember much of their experience. This is why the french caravelle and the Weightless Wonder IV and V had LED parabola counts in them: People in the plane would not realize how many more parabolas were left. Most people flying in these birds generally do not realize they are flying 2 to 3 hours. The short term memory is deeply affected. So one has to wonder how weird it must be for astronauts to sleep. In most cases, they don't as they are too excited. Maybe some technology other than cheaper mattresses will come out of NASA's investigation of their astronauts sleep patterns especially in light of the new Moon-Mars initiative. Anyway, if anyone could point me to it, I am trying to find this study that showed that a good night sleep or a rather "boring" time between being exposed to facts and trasnfering them in the long term memory part of the brain was found to be about 6 hours....

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