Blog #2 for HONO1397

 Hello blog!

For today’s talk, we will be discussing what we have been going over in class as well as what we have been learning about through our assigned readings. At a glance, we began discussing the fact that sleep isn’t just a stage of being awake and then being unawake. As we are preparing to go to bed after a lengthy day, we go through various sleep stages in which our bodies’ s brain wave activity slowly begins to decrease. We measure the brain activity and base the stages off of the amplitude and frequency of these brain waves. The first stage is considered the awake stage, which is where we can find the beta waves. Amplitude is low in this stage and the frequency is high, and we’re looking at about 15-30 waves per second. The next stage we go through is stage 2 which is the alpha waves stage. 8-13 w/s and in this stage we are still slightly awake but we are now in a relaxed state. The following stage, which is the theta waves (or stage 3), is where the frequency is now relatively slow and the amplitude is medium. This stage involves what are called k-spindles or K-spikes, which are known to be large spikes in the background and are caused in response to environmental stimuli such as disturbing sounds. K complexes appear on an EEG readout and indicate that a person has fallen asleep. The final stage which we learned about is stage 4 which is the delta waves stage and where slow wave sleep occurs (SWS). SWS, also known as deep sleep, is the stage where your body is at its most restful state and usually lasts between 45-90 minutes. These four stages that we discussed helped me understand a bit more about the stages of sleep and what happens as my body is asleep as well. I also learned about sleep debt which is essentially when you rack up sleepless nights which ends up having your body sleep more on certain days (even though you don't think your body needs it) and i personally felt attacked because of the amount of sleep debt I have collected over the years and I wished not discuss it any longer because now I feel like I’ll never be able to accommodate for that lack of sleep i missed out on, and now all I think about is the epic dreams I could have had, the developmental hormones that could have been activated so I could grow an extra inch or more, and the physical strength I could have potentially acquired just by sleeping a few extra hours every night. It’s sad really…But moving right along!

Why did the hypothalamus want to join a band?

…

Because he had great circadian rhythms!

Yes, we also discussed about circadian rhythms and how they play an important role in what is called our 24 sleep cycle. So picture this: There’s this hourglass that “counts” the amount of time we’ve been awake and determines the amount of time we are asleep as well. Depending on how long we have been awake, we alter the chances of waking up and increase the longer we have been asleep. This concept is the homeostatic part of the two-process model which is referred as “process S”. This process “counts” how long we have been asleep or awake and is a predictor of sleep pressure. So in other words: the longer you stay awake, the bigger the build-up in sleep pressure. As we sleep, we reduce this sleep pressure until it becomes low enough to allow us to wake up. The amount of SWS in our sleep increases as the sleep pressure (Process S) increases. Pretty neat right? 

So yeah, that is pretty much everything we discussed these first 2 weeks! I’ll keep ya posted on what else happens so stayed tuned!