A question regarding sleep is, whether sleep induced by a benzodiazepine counted as restorative sleep?
Researchers hate to admit it, but they don’t know enough about sleep to answer this question.
Their best guess, several experts said, is that sleep is sleep.
John Weyl Winkelman, a sleep disorders expert at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said if a patient asked him whether medicated sleep was restorative, “I’d say: ‘You tell me.'”
There is quite a bit of evidence about the negative health consequences of
insomnia, but researchers don’t know precisely what it is in the brain and body that is “restored” by sleep to aid optimal function.
And it is unlikely that any specific stage of sleep is uniquely restorative, said Daniel J Buysse, a sleep medicine expert and professor at the University of Pittsburgh. More sleep, less interrupted sleep, and sleep at the right time of night are all likely to be important, he said.
There are two types of sleep: rapid eye movement (REM), when people dream, and non-REM, which has light, medium and deep portions. Sleeping pills mainly increase the amount of medium-depth non-REM sleep, Daniel said.
Medications can help people fall asleep faster and reduce nighttime wakefulness, he said, and those changes are usually considered to contribute to restorative sleep. But different people respond differently.
“Do you feel more rested, more alert, more able to concentrate, less irritable on medication versus off?” Daniel said. “If all those things are true then I would say it’s more restorative. If a hypnotic drug leaves you feeling hung over or more anxious, if it causes you to order five hickory smoked turkeys on the Internet without remembering, then it’s probably not good.”
Karen Weintraub
Giving directions? Start with a landmark
There are many ways to give directions, but some formats are more effective than others, according to a new study. The report, which appears in Frontiers in Psychology, finds that order matters: Identifying a hidden person in a picture is generally easier when a landmark is mentioned first.
The study was done in two parts. In the first, the researchers asked volunteers to focus on a human figure hidden in a cluttered image taken from a “Where’s Waldo?” children’s book. The volunteers then had to describe how to find that figure quickly. Most began by describing a prominent feature in the background of the image, providing directions to the figure from there.
“Almost always, people were likely to use a landmark as part of their directions,” said Micha Elsner, a linguist at Ohio State University and one of the study’s authors. “And if the landmark was larger than the target object, they were more likely to put it first.”
Only when the target was comparatively easy to find did the volunteers mention it first, Micha said. In the second part of the study, the researchers asked 31 participants to listen to directions about the location of human figures on a “Where’s Waldo?” page.
Generally, when participants heard a highly visible landmark mentioned first and the target second, they needed less time to find the object or figure than those who heard the description in the reverse order.