One of the highest stakes moments of my life was the time in graduate school when I was (badly) playing Donkey Kong at Pinball Pete’s Arcade, and a very, very good Donkey Kong player came over to watch me play in silence. I’d just spent six dollars worth in quarters dying repeatedly on the first […]
The first thing I want to say about naps is that I’m almost always for them. Naps can help you recover from sleep deprivation. Naps are good. But let’s talk about that almost always. When might you want to avoid napping? Well, maybe you’re trying to shift your personal time zone and are at a […]
The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda In keeping with the theme of new beginnings, this January we introduced a book of the month. Join us as we work our way through books that highlight the importance of circadian and sleep health 😴 Up first: The Circadian Code by Satchin Panda of the Salk Institute for […]
We sat down to talk with Dr. Goldstein on what she sees as the future of wearables in the sleep clinic. Enjoy! Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today! Could you take a minute to introduce yourself and say a little about what your job is? Cathy Goldstein, MD. I’m a […]
As today is the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere (and the longest in the Southern Hemisphere), it seems appropriate to talk about how the seasons change our bodies’ rhythms. Many things change with the seasons, but the main seasonal variation that I will consider here is the variation in day length. […]
Why do you go to sleep when you do? Sure, there’s a big part of it that’s physical: You go to sleep because you’re sleepy. But you might also stay awake, even when you’re on the verge of collapsing from fatigue because you have work to get done. Or because your neighbor is practicing a […]
Meme #1 Here we see Squidward staying up and reading instead of going to sleep. Squidward himself might smugly point out that he’s reading a book, not looking at a light-emitting screen, and use that as an excuse to feel superior. If so, he would be tragically mistaken. There are clearly lights on in the […]
Here’s a fun fact: You probably get way less light exposure during a normal work day than you would if you were out camping. “Sure,” you say. “That’s no surprise. At home, I have walls around me to block the sun. If I’m camping, I presumably have fewer walls.” “You don’t understand,” I say, leaning […]
Rods, cones, and…ipRGCs? For almost a century and a half, it was thought that the mammalian retina had just two types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. That assumption was not proven to be false until studies in the late 1990s proved the existence of a third kind of mammalian photoreceptor that differed greatly from rods […]
I recently got some blackout curtains for my bedroom. This was pretty long overdue: about thirty feet from my bedroom window is a cheerfully bright, energy-efficient street lamp, which—while great when I’m taking the dog out for a nighttime stroll—is the photic equivalent of somebody standing in my azaleas and playing “Seventy-Six Trombones” while I’m […]
