domingo, 29 de mayo de 2011

Narcolepsy.

Narcolepsy is a dieses in which the victim is affected by suddenly falling asleep at any time of the day as many times as the brain orders. This disease is very dangerous because the person can be walking in the street, cooking, driving or doing anything else that might cause a sudden death due to the brain responding to their tiredness. On the video that we watched in class we saw how an elderly man named Mohamed suffered this sickness. He tries to live as normal as he can but he knows its nearly impossible, his wife needs to be with him at all times taking care of him and picking him up whenever he falls asleep. We were able to see how Mohamed fell asleep suddenly in the street. Mohamed and his wife need to live with the constant humiliation of him falling asleep in public places and people misunderstanding him and believing he is a drug addict or an alcoholic. During his daily routing Mohamed need to wear a special security hat to protect himself from getting hurt all around to house especially when he is helping his wife in the kitchen washing the dishes or something else. Having this peculiar dieses must be very uncomfortable and annoying

Goodnight & Sweet Dreams.

Why do we dream? This question has been a constant one for scientists for a long time now. Most scientists explain dreaming as our way of organizing the information we have gathered throughout our day.While we are asleep, our brain can swift through different stages of sleep. There are five different stages that we go through in order to fall asleep. The first stage can be considered as the transition period between wakefulness and sleep, and your brain produces theta waves. In the second stage, the brain starts producing rapid, rhythmic brain wave activity, our body temperature starts to decrease and heart rate begins to slow down. Stage 3 is said to be the transitional period between light sleep and a very deep sleep and our brain produces slow brain waves know as delta waves. Stage 4 is considered the deep sleep stage. Stage 5 is also know as Rapid Eye Movement (REM), in which your respiration rate and brain activity increases. Muscles become more relaxed and heavy dreaming occurs during this stage.During REM sleep, your body becomes paralyzed to avoid you from getting up and acting out your dreams. These are some people who have a disorder in which they get up and act their dreams, which is dangerous for themselves and others around.Scientists carried out an experiment and found out that deep sleep produces positive dreams whereas REM sleep produces negative dreams. About 75% of our dreams are negative and our parietal lobe is responsible four our dreaming. They say that dreams help us solve problems and survive, but there is not an exact and proved reason on why we dream.