Sleep Deprivation-- What Is The Impact On An Elderly, Obese Trumpanzee?

-by Helen Klein

Yesterday the Independent ran an important story that U.S. newspapers should have picked up on long ago, exploring whether Trump’s sleep deprivation impairs his diplomacy and noting that a sleep expert warns his unhealthy sleep habits-- something he frequently brags about-- "could have serious consequences."

Dr. Neil Stanley, a British sleep expert, has been involved in sleep research for 34 years. "There are plenty of flash points in the world for somebody who is not acting as empathically or diplomatically as you hoped," he explained mildly.

Trump wears his chronic sleep deprivation as a badge of honor. The [so-called] President has routinely relished in boasting he is above a proper night’s sleep.

In the most recent instance, the mogul-turned-politico declared he only gets around four or five hours of sleep a night. Speaking to Fox News interviewer Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump said he works “long hours, right up to 12 o’clock, 1 o’clock in the morning” and then generally wakes up at 5 a.m.

But while President Trump might see this as something to be proud of, Dr. Stanley… has other ideas. On the contrary, Dr. Stanley thinks Mr. Trump’s lack of sleep could have some very serious potential consequences for America and the wider world. Unsurprisingly, he is wary of the idea of Mr. Trump making snap presidential decisions when he has only had a few snatched hours sleep here and there.

It goes without saying that getting a handful of hours of sleep per night has profound consequences on people. To put it simply, sleep deprivation has a harmful impact on functions associated with the frontal lobe of the brain, such as alertness, attention, decision-making and cognitive processes.

“We know from research in business leadership that if you are sleep deprived, your inability to focus, concentrate, make decisions and a lack of empathy can make it more likely you make rash decisions not based on all of the information and express them in an undiplomatic way,” Dr. Stanley explains.

He says being underslept is the equivalent to being over the drink driving limit. According to Dr Stanley, if you have been awake for around 16 hours, it can impair your ability more than being over the drink driving limit. While being awake for 24 hours is the equivalent of being twice over the limit.

“If you are over the drink driving limit, you probably should not be taking important decisions,” he tells The Independent. “If he is sleep deprived, he is running the country while too impaired to drive a motor vehicle.”

Dr Stanley thinks some of Mr Trump’s recent blunders are indicative of someone who is sleep-deprived-- especially those regarding international diplomacy. The two examples he cites are Mr Trump’s alleged decision to put the phone down on Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and his phone call with Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen in December which broke nearly four decades of US policy and upset China.

“He does seem to be an impetuous man,” he says. “He does seem to say what he thinks whereas perhaps someone who was well rested would temper his language or his way of dealing with things.”

Dr Stanley explains that whether you cut yourself chopping a cucumber or press the nuclear codes, they are both examples of your reaction to a situation being exacerbated by a lack of sleep.

“It would be better if the leader of the free world was rested and functioning at his best,” he suggests. “You would know that whatever he was doing, he was doing advisably, even if you don’t agree with it, at least you know he’s not making mistakes. We would all rest easily.”

There's also a chance that Trump has "a good sleeper gene." In his 2004 book Think Like a Billionaire, he wrote: "Don’t sleep any more than you have to, I usually sleep about four hours per night" and be said basically the same thing at a campaign event in Springfield, Illinois in November 2015: "I’m not a big sleeper. I like three hours, four hours, I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on." That would explain the deranged and obsessive tweeting-- replete with rage and misspelling-- between midnight and dawn. One or two percent of the population needs less than 8 hours of sleep per night and Trump could be one of those. Or maybe it's the severe Adderall addiction. Stanley worries that sleep deficit has a fundamental impact on emotions. "Research on couples," he explained, "has shown you’re more liable to have an argument and you’re less likely to make up afterwards. You show less empathy." Sounds like anyone you know?

Sleep deprivation is the condition of not having enough sleep. Individuals vary in their need for sleep. It is suggested that adults 65 and older receive 7-8 hours sleep. Some signs of sleep deprivation can be:

• Increased impulsivity-- fewer behavioral inhibitions
• Decreased performance and alertness
• Impaired memory-- sleep helps clear toxic chemicals from the brain
• Trouble with decision-making-- such as reaction speed, absorbing information, higher level cognitive processing and problem solving

• Reduced motor skills-- such as tripping or being klutzy; less focus on body movements and where you are going; alot of processing goes on when you walk up and down the stairs
• Less control over emotions-- over-reactive to emotional stimuli
• Stress in relationships-- moodiness, conflicts
• Less quality of life-- less ability to participate in activities requiring sustained attention
• Less healthy looking skin-- hormonal balance affected
• Trouble seeing-- eye fatigue; eyes do not work as well together; difficulty reading
• Tendency to get sick-- lowered immune system
• Hunger-- your brain may try to get the energy it needs from sleep from food

• Weight gain-- your metabolism may slow down without enough sleep
• Risk of health factors-- such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and depression
• Drowsy while driving
• Occupational hazards

"Occupational hazards," considering his occupation (and temperament) is probably the scariest of all-- at least for the rest of us.

To sleep not, perchance to view a slide show . . .

by Ken

Unable to sleep, New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff tells us in his most recent blogpost ("To Sleep, Perchance (Very Good Chance) to Wake"), he turned to Ian Parker's article "The Big Sleep" in the magazine, about efforts by our friends the drug-makers to produce a superior new nocturnal knockout concoction.

"I'm pretty sure I got a lot out of Parker's account," Bob tells us, "though unfortunately I can remember very little of it due to Ambien-induced amnesia."

I'll leave you to check out Bob's account of Ian's account (and for that matter Ian's account itself), and jump to the "non-pharmocological" prescription for non-sleepers offered by "Dr. Bob" ("licensed Cartoonologist"). It is -- as if you hadn't guessed -- an "insomnia-cartoon slide show."

"It won't help you sleep," Bob says, "but it will lighten any dark night of the soul."

I've plucked out some of my favorites, starting with the Eric Lewis gem above and proceeding now with one of Bob's own creations.

"No, I don't need an alarm clock --
anxiety is my alarm clock."

"I couldn't sleep."

"I can't sleep. I think I'll get up
and solve all my problems."

"It's only insomnia if there's nothing good on."

#

From the DWT Science Desk: Just because you think you're awake doesn't mean all of your brain really is

Well, whose brains did you expect them to test? Right-wingers'? The researchers needed brains that function somewhat like human ones.

"Such tired neurons in an awake brain may be responsible for the attention lapses, poor judgment, mistake-proneness and irritability that we experience when we haven't had enough sleep, yet don’t feel particularly sleepy. Strikingly, in the sleep-deprived brain, subsets of neurons go offline in one cortex area but not in another -- or even in one part of an area and not in another."

-- U. of Wisconsin neuroscientist-psychiatrist Giulio Tononi

by Ken

"Tired neurons caught nodding off in sleep-deprived rats" is the headline on the release issued yesterday by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, one of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH), the source of the above quote from the audaciously adorable Dr. Tononi. The subhead is: "Performance decline belies seeming wakefulness -- NIH-funded study."

(Dr. Tononi and his colleagues report their findings in the April 28 issue of Nature, of which only an asbtract is available free online. Curious how much it would cost to buy the article, I clicked on the link, only to discover that I would have to register for a free account to get any further information. For laughs I tried to register, but got only gibberish for the choices of required information like Affiliation/Employer, Job Title, and Industry. Could their e-form really tell that I'm not really a serious-type person?)

Now I don't suppose the mental defectives of the Right, whose lives are consecrated to never understanding anything, would understand why the NIH would be funding such a study. Hey, who gives a rat's behind about rat's brains, after all? But then, they could hardly have done the study using, say, right-wingers' brains. They need brains that function somewhat like human ones. (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that right-wingers are especially touchy regarding research into compromised brain function.)

For the benefit of people who actually have some interest in understanding human beings and the world around us, and not least our brains, which are our only means of understanding that world around us, here's how the NIMH release encapsules the study findings:

A new study in rats is shedding light on how sleep-deprived lifestyles might impair functioning without people realizing it. The more rats are sleep-deprived, the more some of their neurons take catnaps -- with consequent declines in task performance. Even though the animals are awake and active, brainwave measures reveal that scattered groups of neurons in the thinking part of their brain, or cortex, are briefly falling asleep, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered.

This should make it all clear, I think. (You can click on it to enlarge it a bit, if you think that'll help.)

It should hardly come as a surprise that sleep deprivation is a bad thing, a very bad thing. Scientists have been trying to drum that into us for ages now, warning that a lot more than just those of us with diagnosed sleep disorders are suffering varying degrees of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation seems to have become a normal state in our go-go-go modern world. What's new here, as far as I can tell, is some appreciation -- at least in the rat brain -- of the brain mechanism whereby parts of it may go sleepytime when the contraption as a whole is officially "awake."

"Previous studies had hinted at such local snoozing with prolonged wakefulness," the NIMH release says. "Yet little was known about how underlying neuronal activity might be changing."

To learn more, the researchers tracked electrical activity at multiple sites in the cortex as they kept rats awake for several hours. They put novel objects into their cages — colorful balls, boxes, tubes and odorous nesting material from other rats. The sleepier the rats got, more subsets of cortex neurons switched off, seemingly randomly, in various localities. These tired neurons' electrical profiles resembled those of neurons throughout the cortex during NREM or slow wave sleep.

And yet, going by their EEGs and their behavior, the little dickenses were awake. This "neuronal tiredness," the report insists, is not to be confused with "more overt microsleep – 3-15-second lapses with eyes closing and sleep-like EEG — that is sometimes experienced with prolonged wakefulness." The researchers consider it "more analogous to local lapses seen in some forms of epilepsy." And "having tired neurons did interfere with task performance":

If neurons switched off in the motor cortex within a split second before a rat tried to reach for a sugar pellet, it decreased its likelihood of success by 37.5 percent. And the overall number of such misses increased significantly with prolonged wakefulness. This suggests that tired neurons, and accompanying increases in slow wave activity, might help to account for the impaired performance of sleep-deprived people who may seem behaviorally and subjectively awake.

The researchers are speculating that "tired neurons might nod off as part of an energy-saving or restorative process for overloaded neuronal connections."

It seems to me that there are potentially large implications for the knowledge that "being awake" doesn't necessarily mean what we've normally taken it to mean, and the hope is that with increased understanding will come some notion of how to deal with it.

Already an alarm has sounded for NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel:

Research suggests that sleep deprivation during adolescence may have adverse emotional and cognitive consequences that could affect brain development. The broader line of studies to which this belongs, are, in part, considering changes in sleep patterns of the developing brain as a potential index to the health of neural connections that can begin to go awry during the critical transition from childhood to the teen years.

#