A few Times articles...
Nov. 9th, 2005 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
The can't-miss article on the Sign in the Chicago Coffee Shop about Behaving Properly.
At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops
By JODI WILGOREN
CHICAGO, Nov. 8 - Bridget Dehl shushed her 21-month-old son, Gavin, then clapped a hand over his mouth to squelch his tiny screams amid the Sunday brunch bustle. When Gavin kept yelping "yeah, yeah, yeah," Ms. Dehl whisked him from his highchair and out the door.
Right past the sign warning the cafe's customers that "children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven," and right into a nasty spat roiling the stroller set in Chicago's changing Andersonville neighborhood.
The owner of A Taste of Heaven, Dan McCauley, said he posted the sign - at child level, with playful handprints - in the hope of quieting his tin-ceilinged cafe, where toddlers have been known to sprawl between tables and hurl themselves at display cases for sport.
But many neighborhood mothers took umbrage at the implied criticism of how they handle their children. Soon, whispers of a boycott passed among the playgroups in this North Side neighborhood, once an outpost of avant-garde artists and hip gay couples but now a hot real estate market for young professional families shunning the suburbs.
"I love people who don't have children who tell you how to parent," said Alison Miller, 35, a psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. "I'd love for him to be responsible for three children for the next year and see if he can control the volume of their voices every minute of the day."
Mr. McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a very strong sense of entitlement." In an open letter he handed out at the bakery, he warned of an "epidemic" of antisocial behavior.
"Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground," Mr. McCauley said in an interview. "If you send out positive energy, positive energy returns to you. If you send out energy that says I'm the only one that matters, it's going to be a pretty chaotic world."
And so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them.
An online petition urging child-free sections in North Carolina restaurants drew hundreds of signers, including Janelle Funk, who wrote, "Whenever a hostess asks me 'smoking or non-smoking?' I respond, 'No kids!' "
At Mendo Bistro in Fort Bragg, Calif., the owners declare "Well-behaved children and parents welcome" to try to stop unmonitored youngsters from tap-dancing on the 100-year-old wood floors.
Menus at Zumbro Cafe in Minneapolis say: "We love children, especially when they're tucked into chairs and behaving," which Barbara Daenzer said she read as an invitation to cease her weekly breakfast visits after her son was born.
Even at the Full Moon in Cambridge, Mass., a cafe created for families, with a train table, a dollhouse and a plastic kitchen in a carpeted play area, there are rules about inside voices and a "No lifeguard on duty" sign to remind parents to take responsibility.
"You run the risk when you start monitoring behavior," said the Full Moon's owner, Sarah Wheaton. "You can say no cellphones to people, but you can't say your father speaks too loudly, he has to keep his voice down. And you can't really say your toddler is too loud when she's eating."
Here in Chicago, parents have denounced Toast, a popular Lincoln Park breakfast spot, as unwelcoming since a note about using inside voices appeared on the menu six months ago. The owner of John's Place, which resembles a kindergarten class at recess in early evening, established a separate "family friendly" room a year ago, only to face parental threats of lawsuits.
Many of the Andersonville mothers who are boycotting Mr. McCauley's bakery also skip story time at Women and Children First, a feminist bookstore, because of the rules: children can be kicked out for standing, talking or sipping drinks. When a retail clerk at the bookstore asked a woman to stop breast-feeding last spring, "the neighborhood set him straight real fast," said Mary Ann Smith, the area's alderwoman.
After a dozen years at one site, Mr. McCauley moved A Taste of Heaven six blocks away in May 2004, to a busy corner on Clark Street. But there, he said, teachers and writers seeking afternoon refuge were drowned out not just by children running amok but also by oblivious cellphone chatterers.
Children were climbing the cafe's poles. A couple were blithely reading the newspaper while their daughter lay on the floor blocking the line for coffee. When the family whose children were running across the room to throw themselves against the display cases left after his admonishment, Mr. McCauley recalled, the restaurant erupted in applause.
So he put up the sign. Then things really got ugly.
"The looks I would get when I went in there made me so nervous that I would try to buy the food as fast as I could and get out," said Laura Brauer, 40, who has stopped visiting A Taste of Heaven with her two children. "I think that the mothers who allow their kids to run around and scream, that's wrong, but kids scream and there is nothing you can do about it. What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?"
Ms. Miller said that one day when her son, then 4 months old, was fussing, a staff member rolled her eyes and announced for all to hear, "We've got a screamer!"
Kim Cavitt recalled having coffee and a cookie one afternoon with her boisterous 2-year-old when "someone came over and said you just need to keep her quiet or you need to leave."
"We left, and we haven't been back since," Ms. Cavitt said. "You go to a coffee shop or a bakery for a rest, to relax, and that you would have to worry the whole time about your child doing something that children do - really what they're saying is they don't welcome children, they want the child to behave like an adult."
Why suffer such scorn, the mothers said, when clerks at the Swedish Bakery, a neighborhood institution, offer children - calm or crying - free cookies? Why confront such criticism when the recently opened Sweet Occasions, a five-minute walk down Clark Street, designed the restroom aisle to accommodate double strollers and offers a child-size ice cream cone for $1.50? (At A Taste of Heaven, the smallest is $3.75.)
"It's his business; he has the right to put whatever sign he wants on the door," Ms. Miller said. "And people have the right to respond to that sign however they want."
Mr. McCauley said he had received kudos from several restaurant owners in the area, though none had followed his lead. He has certainly lost customers because of the sign, but some parents say the offense is outweighed by their addiction to the scones, and others embrace the effort at etiquette.
"The litmus test for me is if they have highchairs or not," said Ms. Dehl, the woman who scooped her screaming son from his seat during brunch, as she waited out his restlessness on a sidewalk bench. "The fact that they had one highchair, and the fact that he's the only child in the restaurant is an indication that it's an adult place, and if he's going to do his toddler thing, we should take him out and let him run around."
Mr. McCauley said he would rather go out of business than back down. He likens this one small step toward good manners to his personal effort to decrease pollution by hiring only people who live close enough to walk to work.
"I can't change the situation in Iraq, I can't change the situation in New Orleans," he said. "But I can change this little corner of the world."
An article on sleeping
Down for the Count
By CARL ZIMMER
In a laboratory at Indiana State University, a dozen green iguanas sprawl tranquilly in terrariums. They while away the hours basking under their heat lamps, and at night they close both eyes - or sometimes just one. They lead comfortable lives pretty much indistinguishable from any ordinary pet iguana, except for one notable exception: the bundles of brain-wave recording wires that trail from their heads.
A team of scientists at Indiana State would like to know what happens in the brains of the iguanas when the lights go out. Do they sleep as we do? Do they shut the whole brain down, for example, or can they keep one half awake?
These scientists in Terre Haute hope the iguanas will also help shed some light on an even more fundamental question: why sleep even exists.
"Sleep has attracted a tremendous amount of attention in science, but we really don't know what sleep is," said Steven Lima, a biologist at Indiana State.
Dr. Lima belongs to a small but growing group of scientists who are pushing sleep research deep into the animal kingdom. They suspect that most animal species need to sleep, suggesting that human slumber has an evolutionary history reaching back over half a billion years.
Today animals sleep in many different ways: brown bats for 20 hours a day, for example, and giraffes for less than 2. To understand why people sleep the way they do, scientists need an explanation powerful enough to encompass the millions of other species that sleep as well.
"One of the reasons we don't understand sleep is that we haven't taken this evolutionary perspective on it," Dr. Lima said.
Sleep was once considered unique to vertebrates, but in recent years scientists have found that invertebrates likes honeybees and crayfish sleep, as well. The most extensive work has been carried out on fruit flies. "They rest for 10 hours a night, and if you keep them awake longer, they need to sleep more," said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin.
The parallels between fruit flies and humans extend even to their neurons. The two species produce, during part of the night, low-frequency electrical activity known as slow-wave sleep. "The flies surprised us with how close they were in many ways," Dr. Tononi said.
Discovering sleep in vertebrates and invertebrates alike has led scientists to conclude that it emerged very early in animal evolution - perhaps 600 million years ago. "What we're doing in sleeping is a very old evolutionary phenomenon," Dr. Lima said.
Scientists have offered a number of ideas about the primordial function of sleep. Dr. Tononi believes that it originally evolved as a way to allow neurons to recover from a hard day of learning. "When you're awake you learn all the time, whether you know it or not," he said.
Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. "That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy," Dr. Tononi said. "That's where sleep would kick in."
He argues that slow waves weaken synapses through the night. "If everything gets weaker, you still keep your memories, but overall the strength goes down," he said. "The next morning you gain in terms of energy and performance."
Dr. Tononi and his University of Wisconsin colleague, Dr. Chiara Cirelli, present this hypothesis in a paper to be published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews. Dr. Tononi believes it can be tested in the future, as scientists document sleep in other animal species. "It would be a very basic thing that would apply to any brain that can change," he said.
It has been almost 600 million years since human ancestors diverged from those of flies. As those ancestors evolved, their sleep evolved as well. Human sleep, for example, features not only slow-wave sleep, but bouts of sleep when the eyes make rapid movements and when we dream. Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, as it is known, generally comes later in the night, after periods of intense slow-wave sleep.
Other mammals also experience a mix of REM and non-REM sleep, as do birds. Sleep researchers would like to know whether this pattern existed in the common ancestors of birds and mammals, reptilian animals that lived 310 million years ago. It is also possible that birds and mammals independently evolved this sleep pattern, just as birds and bats independently evolved wings.
Answering that question may help scientists understand why REM sleep exists. Scientists have long debated its function, suggesting that it may play important roles in memory or learning. In the Oct. 27 issue of Nature, Jerome Siegel, a sleep expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that REM does not play a vital physiological role like slow-wave sleep. He points out that brain injuries and even medications like antidepressants can drastically reduce REM without any apparent ill effect.
"People who don't have REM sleep are remarkably normal," Dr. Siegel said. "There's no evidence for any intellectual or emotional problems."
So why do mammals and birds have REM sleep at all? "The best answer I can come up with is that it's there to prepare you for waking," Dr. Siegel said. "When the important work of sleep is done, REM sleep just makes you as alert as you can be while you're asleep."
One advantage to being alert but immobile is that you may be better able to escape a predator. Dr. Lima and his colleagues argue in the October issue of Animal Behavior that sleep may have been profoundly shaped during evolution by the constant threat of predators. From this perspective, it is strange that animals would spend hours each day in such a vulnerable state. "It's so stinking dangerous to be shut down like that," Dr. Lima said.
It is possible to imagine an alternative way to let the brain recover: only put small parts of the brain to sleep at a time. But Dr. Lima and his colleagues present a mathematical model suggesting that shutting down the whole brain at once may actually be safer.
"You may be better off just shutting down and sleeping all at once, and do it quickly," Dr. Lima said. "Even though you're fairly vulnerable while you're asleep, your overall vulnerability in a 24-hour period may be lower."
Birds appear to be able to defend against predators with a variation on this strategy. When they feel safe, they sleep with their entire brains shut down, as humans do. But when they sense threats, they keep half their brains awake.
Dr. Lima and his colleagues have demonstrated this strategy in action with several bird species, including ducks. "All we did was put our ducks in a row, quite literally," said Niels Rattenborg, a colleague of Dr. Lima's, now at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. "The ducks on the interior slept more with both eyes closed, and the ducks on the edge slept with one eye open. And they used the eye that was facing away from the other birds."
To give each side of the brain enough rest, the ducks at the ends of the row would stand up from time to time, turn around and sit down again. This allowed them to switch eyes and let the waking half of the brain go to sleep.
The Indiana State team is now studying iguanas to see if they sleep with half their brains, as well. Previous studies have shown that lizards keep one eye closed for long periods of time, but it has not been clear if they have also been half asleep. Monitoring iguana brains with electrodes may give the scientists an answer.
If reptiles and birds turn out to sleep this way, it may be evidence that it is an ancient strategy. It is even possible that the earliest mammals also slept with half a brain. "It's possible that early on in mammal evolution they may have lost it for some reason," Dr. Rattenborg speculated. "It may have conflicted with other functions."
On the other hand, some species of whales and seals sometimes swim with one eye closed while the corresponding hemisphere of the brain produces slow waves. Scientists are still debating whether they are actually asleep in this state. If they are, that suggests that the ancestors of marine mammals reinvented half-brain sleeping. It may have re-emerged as an adaptation to life in the ocean, an environment where predators can come out of nowhere.
While humans and other land mammals may not be able to shut down half the brain, they may be able to cope with predators by adjusting their sleep schedules. Some studies on rats suggest that predators cause the animals to cut back on slow-wave sleep. People often react to stress in the same way.
"Some of the changes we observe in people who are experiencing stress may be some of the same mechanisms in response to predators," Dr. Rattenborg said. "There are no lions sneaking up on them, but the daily stresses of our lives may activate this primordial response."
Dr. Tononi believes that studying animals may ultimately help doctors find more effective ways to treat such sleep disorders. "There are no good guidelines about what is satisfactory sleep, because there is no idea of what it does," he said. "Is seven hours of very light sleep O.K.? Or is deep sleep very important, or REM?"
He added: "It might really be that you can do with less sleep as long as it's doing its job. That's why it's crucial to know what its job is."
That's it. I really only posted this for the first one.
Y'know, to get back to that, people often tell me that Ana behaves well. I don't see that - indeed, compared to how well she behaves with her dad, her behaviour with me is almost bratty! (Not really, but she does behave beautifully for her dad.) Even without the comparison, I still don't see it - I see her behaviour as perfectly appropriate for a child her age. Maybe I really *do* just have higher standards than most people. Which is sad. If she were to act up in public, I guarantee, whoever is with her leaves. I've even threatened to get off busses if she didn't quiet down and stop yelling. (Fortunately, she did, because I really didn't want to have to walk to the boat carrying a screaming or sullen toddler.) I don't even accept that sort of behaviour in child-centered places like the children's museum, so you can be certain nobody accepts it in places like a coffee shop. And our reward for being stringent with her behaviour is that we can take her out, even up to her bedtime, to actual, adult restaurants and eat a nice meal. See how that works? Everybody's happy!
At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops
By JODI WILGOREN
CHICAGO, Nov. 8 - Bridget Dehl shushed her 21-month-old son, Gavin, then clapped a hand over his mouth to squelch his tiny screams amid the Sunday brunch bustle. When Gavin kept yelping "yeah, yeah, yeah," Ms. Dehl whisked him from his highchair and out the door.
Right past the sign warning the cafe's customers that "children of all ages have to behave and use their indoor voices when coming to A Taste of Heaven," and right into a nasty spat roiling the stroller set in Chicago's changing Andersonville neighborhood.
The owner of A Taste of Heaven, Dan McCauley, said he posted the sign - at child level, with playful handprints - in the hope of quieting his tin-ceilinged cafe, where toddlers have been known to sprawl between tables and hurl themselves at display cases for sport.
But many neighborhood mothers took umbrage at the implied criticism of how they handle their children. Soon, whispers of a boycott passed among the playgroups in this North Side neighborhood, once an outpost of avant-garde artists and hip gay couples but now a hot real estate market for young professional families shunning the suburbs.
"I love people who don't have children who tell you how to parent," said Alison Miller, 35, a psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. "I'd love for him to be responsible for three children for the next year and see if he can control the volume of their voices every minute of the day."
Mr. McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were "former cheerleaders and beauty queens" who "have a very strong sense of entitlement." In an open letter he handed out at the bakery, he warned of an "epidemic" of antisocial behavior.
"Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground," Mr. McCauley said in an interview. "If you send out positive energy, positive energy returns to you. If you send out energy that says I'm the only one that matters, it's going to be a pretty chaotic world."
And so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them.
An online petition urging child-free sections in North Carolina restaurants drew hundreds of signers, including Janelle Funk, who wrote, "Whenever a hostess asks me 'smoking or non-smoking?' I respond, 'No kids!' "
At Mendo Bistro in Fort Bragg, Calif., the owners declare "Well-behaved children and parents welcome" to try to stop unmonitored youngsters from tap-dancing on the 100-year-old wood floors.
Menus at Zumbro Cafe in Minneapolis say: "We love children, especially when they're tucked into chairs and behaving," which Barbara Daenzer said she read as an invitation to cease her weekly breakfast visits after her son was born.
Even at the Full Moon in Cambridge, Mass., a cafe created for families, with a train table, a dollhouse and a plastic kitchen in a carpeted play area, there are rules about inside voices and a "No lifeguard on duty" sign to remind parents to take responsibility.
"You run the risk when you start monitoring behavior," said the Full Moon's owner, Sarah Wheaton. "You can say no cellphones to people, but you can't say your father speaks too loudly, he has to keep his voice down. And you can't really say your toddler is too loud when she's eating."
Here in Chicago, parents have denounced Toast, a popular Lincoln Park breakfast spot, as unwelcoming since a note about using inside voices appeared on the menu six months ago. The owner of John's Place, which resembles a kindergarten class at recess in early evening, established a separate "family friendly" room a year ago, only to face parental threats of lawsuits.
Many of the Andersonville mothers who are boycotting Mr. McCauley's bakery also skip story time at Women and Children First, a feminist bookstore, because of the rules: children can be kicked out for standing, talking or sipping drinks. When a retail clerk at the bookstore asked a woman to stop breast-feeding last spring, "the neighborhood set him straight real fast," said Mary Ann Smith, the area's alderwoman.
After a dozen years at one site, Mr. McCauley moved A Taste of Heaven six blocks away in May 2004, to a busy corner on Clark Street. But there, he said, teachers and writers seeking afternoon refuge were drowned out not just by children running amok but also by oblivious cellphone chatterers.
Children were climbing the cafe's poles. A couple were blithely reading the newspaper while their daughter lay on the floor blocking the line for coffee. When the family whose children were running across the room to throw themselves against the display cases left after his admonishment, Mr. McCauley recalled, the restaurant erupted in applause.
So he put up the sign. Then things really got ugly.
"The looks I would get when I went in there made me so nervous that I would try to buy the food as fast as I could and get out," said Laura Brauer, 40, who has stopped visiting A Taste of Heaven with her two children. "I think that the mothers who allow their kids to run around and scream, that's wrong, but kids scream and there is nothing you can do about it. What are we supposed to do, not enjoy ourselves at a cafe?"
Ms. Miller said that one day when her son, then 4 months old, was fussing, a staff member rolled her eyes and announced for all to hear, "We've got a screamer!"
Kim Cavitt recalled having coffee and a cookie one afternoon with her boisterous 2-year-old when "someone came over and said you just need to keep her quiet or you need to leave."
"We left, and we haven't been back since," Ms. Cavitt said. "You go to a coffee shop or a bakery for a rest, to relax, and that you would have to worry the whole time about your child doing something that children do - really what they're saying is they don't welcome children, they want the child to behave like an adult."
Why suffer such scorn, the mothers said, when clerks at the Swedish Bakery, a neighborhood institution, offer children - calm or crying - free cookies? Why confront such criticism when the recently opened Sweet Occasions, a five-minute walk down Clark Street, designed the restroom aisle to accommodate double strollers and offers a child-size ice cream cone for $1.50? (At A Taste of Heaven, the smallest is $3.75.)
"It's his business; he has the right to put whatever sign he wants on the door," Ms. Miller said. "And people have the right to respond to that sign however they want."
Mr. McCauley said he had received kudos from several restaurant owners in the area, though none had followed his lead. He has certainly lost customers because of the sign, but some parents say the offense is outweighed by their addiction to the scones, and others embrace the effort at etiquette.
"The litmus test for me is if they have highchairs or not," said Ms. Dehl, the woman who scooped her screaming son from his seat during brunch, as she waited out his restlessness on a sidewalk bench. "The fact that they had one highchair, and the fact that he's the only child in the restaurant is an indication that it's an adult place, and if he's going to do his toddler thing, we should take him out and let him run around."
Mr. McCauley said he would rather go out of business than back down. He likens this one small step toward good manners to his personal effort to decrease pollution by hiring only people who live close enough to walk to work.
"I can't change the situation in Iraq, I can't change the situation in New Orleans," he said. "But I can change this little corner of the world."
An article on sleeping
Down for the Count
By CARL ZIMMER
In a laboratory at Indiana State University, a dozen green iguanas sprawl tranquilly in terrariums. They while away the hours basking under their heat lamps, and at night they close both eyes - or sometimes just one. They lead comfortable lives pretty much indistinguishable from any ordinary pet iguana, except for one notable exception: the bundles of brain-wave recording wires that trail from their heads.
A team of scientists at Indiana State would like to know what happens in the brains of the iguanas when the lights go out. Do they sleep as we do? Do they shut the whole brain down, for example, or can they keep one half awake?
These scientists in Terre Haute hope the iguanas will also help shed some light on an even more fundamental question: why sleep even exists.
"Sleep has attracted a tremendous amount of attention in science, but we really don't know what sleep is," said Steven Lima, a biologist at Indiana State.
Dr. Lima belongs to a small but growing group of scientists who are pushing sleep research deep into the animal kingdom. They suspect that most animal species need to sleep, suggesting that human slumber has an evolutionary history reaching back over half a billion years.
Today animals sleep in many different ways: brown bats for 20 hours a day, for example, and giraffes for less than 2. To understand why people sleep the way they do, scientists need an explanation powerful enough to encompass the millions of other species that sleep as well.
"One of the reasons we don't understand sleep is that we haven't taken this evolutionary perspective on it," Dr. Lima said.
Sleep was once considered unique to vertebrates, but in recent years scientists have found that invertebrates likes honeybees and crayfish sleep, as well. The most extensive work has been carried out on fruit flies. "They rest for 10 hours a night, and if you keep them awake longer, they need to sleep more," said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin.
The parallels between fruit flies and humans extend even to their neurons. The two species produce, during part of the night, low-frequency electrical activity known as slow-wave sleep. "The flies surprised us with how close they were in many ways," Dr. Tononi said.
Discovering sleep in vertebrates and invertebrates alike has led scientists to conclude that it emerged very early in animal evolution - perhaps 600 million years ago. "What we're doing in sleeping is a very old evolutionary phenomenon," Dr. Lima said.
Scientists have offered a number of ideas about the primordial function of sleep. Dr. Tononi believes that it originally evolved as a way to allow neurons to recover from a hard day of learning. "When you're awake you learn all the time, whether you know it or not," he said.
Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. "That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy," Dr. Tononi said. "That's where sleep would kick in."
He argues that slow waves weaken synapses through the night. "If everything gets weaker, you still keep your memories, but overall the strength goes down," he said. "The next morning you gain in terms of energy and performance."
Dr. Tononi and his University of Wisconsin colleague, Dr. Chiara Cirelli, present this hypothesis in a paper to be published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews. Dr. Tononi believes it can be tested in the future, as scientists document sleep in other animal species. "It would be a very basic thing that would apply to any brain that can change," he said.
It has been almost 600 million years since human ancestors diverged from those of flies. As those ancestors evolved, their sleep evolved as well. Human sleep, for example, features not only slow-wave sleep, but bouts of sleep when the eyes make rapid movements and when we dream. Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, as it is known, generally comes later in the night, after periods of intense slow-wave sleep.
Other mammals also experience a mix of REM and non-REM sleep, as do birds. Sleep researchers would like to know whether this pattern existed in the common ancestors of birds and mammals, reptilian animals that lived 310 million years ago. It is also possible that birds and mammals independently evolved this sleep pattern, just as birds and bats independently evolved wings.
Answering that question may help scientists understand why REM sleep exists. Scientists have long debated its function, suggesting that it may play important roles in memory or learning. In the Oct. 27 issue of Nature, Jerome Siegel, a sleep expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that REM does not play a vital physiological role like slow-wave sleep. He points out that brain injuries and even medications like antidepressants can drastically reduce REM without any apparent ill effect.
"People who don't have REM sleep are remarkably normal," Dr. Siegel said. "There's no evidence for any intellectual or emotional problems."
So why do mammals and birds have REM sleep at all? "The best answer I can come up with is that it's there to prepare you for waking," Dr. Siegel said. "When the important work of sleep is done, REM sleep just makes you as alert as you can be while you're asleep."
One advantage to being alert but immobile is that you may be better able to escape a predator. Dr. Lima and his colleagues argue in the October issue of Animal Behavior that sleep may have been profoundly shaped during evolution by the constant threat of predators. From this perspective, it is strange that animals would spend hours each day in such a vulnerable state. "It's so stinking dangerous to be shut down like that," Dr. Lima said.
It is possible to imagine an alternative way to let the brain recover: only put small parts of the brain to sleep at a time. But Dr. Lima and his colleagues present a mathematical model suggesting that shutting down the whole brain at once may actually be safer.
"You may be better off just shutting down and sleeping all at once, and do it quickly," Dr. Lima said. "Even though you're fairly vulnerable while you're asleep, your overall vulnerability in a 24-hour period may be lower."
Birds appear to be able to defend against predators with a variation on this strategy. When they feel safe, they sleep with their entire brains shut down, as humans do. But when they sense threats, they keep half their brains awake.
Dr. Lima and his colleagues have demonstrated this strategy in action with several bird species, including ducks. "All we did was put our ducks in a row, quite literally," said Niels Rattenborg, a colleague of Dr. Lima's, now at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. "The ducks on the interior slept more with both eyes closed, and the ducks on the edge slept with one eye open. And they used the eye that was facing away from the other birds."
To give each side of the brain enough rest, the ducks at the ends of the row would stand up from time to time, turn around and sit down again. This allowed them to switch eyes and let the waking half of the brain go to sleep.
The Indiana State team is now studying iguanas to see if they sleep with half their brains, as well. Previous studies have shown that lizards keep one eye closed for long periods of time, but it has not been clear if they have also been half asleep. Monitoring iguana brains with electrodes may give the scientists an answer.
If reptiles and birds turn out to sleep this way, it may be evidence that it is an ancient strategy. It is even possible that the earliest mammals also slept with half a brain. "It's possible that early on in mammal evolution they may have lost it for some reason," Dr. Rattenborg speculated. "It may have conflicted with other functions."
On the other hand, some species of whales and seals sometimes swim with one eye closed while the corresponding hemisphere of the brain produces slow waves. Scientists are still debating whether they are actually asleep in this state. If they are, that suggests that the ancestors of marine mammals reinvented half-brain sleeping. It may have re-emerged as an adaptation to life in the ocean, an environment where predators can come out of nowhere.
While humans and other land mammals may not be able to shut down half the brain, they may be able to cope with predators by adjusting their sleep schedules. Some studies on rats suggest that predators cause the animals to cut back on slow-wave sleep. People often react to stress in the same way.
"Some of the changes we observe in people who are experiencing stress may be some of the same mechanisms in response to predators," Dr. Rattenborg said. "There are no lions sneaking up on them, but the daily stresses of our lives may activate this primordial response."
Dr. Tononi believes that studying animals may ultimately help doctors find more effective ways to treat such sleep disorders. "There are no good guidelines about what is satisfactory sleep, because there is no idea of what it does," he said. "Is seven hours of very light sleep O.K.? Or is deep sleep very important, or REM?"
He added: "It might really be that you can do with less sleep as long as it's doing its job. That's why it's crucial to know what its job is."
That's it. I really only posted this for the first one.
Y'know, to get back to that, people often tell me that Ana behaves well. I don't see that - indeed, compared to how well she behaves with her dad, her behaviour with me is almost bratty! (Not really, but she does behave beautifully for her dad.) Even without the comparison, I still don't see it - I see her behaviour as perfectly appropriate for a child her age. Maybe I really *do* just have higher standards than most people. Which is sad. If she were to act up in public, I guarantee, whoever is with her leaves. I've even threatened to get off busses if she didn't quiet down and stop yelling. (Fortunately, she did, because I really didn't want to have to walk to the boat carrying a screaming or sullen toddler.) I don't even accept that sort of behaviour in child-centered places like the children's museum, so you can be certain nobody accepts it in places like a coffee shop. And our reward for being stringent with her behaviour is that we can take her out, even up to her bedtime, to actual, adult restaurants and eat a nice meal. See how that works? Everybody's happy!
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Date: 2005-11-10 01:33 am (UTC)And in fact I like when other kids behave, when other kids are bad it makes it that much harder to keep mine in line.
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Date: 2005-11-10 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 01:58 am (UTC)That about sums the first article up, doesn't it?
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Date: 2005-11-10 07:01 am (UTC)Teach the kids some manners or find a way to leave them in a place where they can "be kids" until they are old enough to understand the concept (if you're willing to TEACH them, that is)...it's called respect for others as well as responsible parenting. Imagine the same situation if one were to bring a much-beloved but very vocal and active pet dog to the place....
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Date: 2005-11-10 02:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 01:33 am (UTC)And in fact I like when other kids behave, when other kids are bad it makes it that much harder to keep mine in line.
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Date: 2005-11-10 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 01:58 am (UTC)That about sums the first article up, doesn't it?
no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 07:01 am (UTC)Teach the kids some manners or find a way to leave them in a place where they can "be kids" until they are old enough to understand the concept (if you're willing to TEACH them, that is)...it's called respect for others as well as responsible parenting. Imagine the same situation if one were to bring a much-beloved but very vocal and active pet dog to the place....
no subject
Date: 2005-11-10 02:02 am (UTC)