It is not clear whether Mary A Carskadon was aware that she was hacking her way into an adolescent mystery when she analysed melatonin levels in teenagers’ saliva at different times of the day. Melatonin is a sleep-promoting hormone. The Brown University professor and her team were in line for a surprise: their discovery hints at daytime somnambulism: high- schoolers (possibly in many metros of the world) are almost sleep walkers in the morning hours.
Many must have felt that high school was a bit of a haze, because those days belonged to a time in your life when one’s sleep patterns could real go crazy. At daybreak, teenagers may be tempted to linger in the bed for hours, at the risk of being accused of laziness or bad behaviour. Where was all that baffling ability and energy they had shown, playing video games, watching TV and talking on the cell phone until late hours the night before?
The answer perhaps is in the night-hawkish behaviour itself. Now, it is the presence of melatonin, the so-dubbed “darkness hormone”, that sets the countdown to our forty winks. The inherent information is based on our exposure to light. In teenagers, unlike in others, the levels of melatonin don?t start to rise in between 10 and 11 pm. The process is delayed up to 1 am and, once started, it continues until about 8 am. This delayed release of the hormone could be attributed to the late-night artificial lights they are exposed to while watching a TV or computer screen.
But at the same time, it is quite possible that the hormonal upheaval of puberty could be ?pushing the melatonin release back?. This means to say that it is their bodies that keep teenagers awake until easily past midnight. You just can?t blame them for their erratic sleeping behaviour. So, is it biology or behaviour? Either way, high school students have the need of more sleep than adults and children, but they are often sleep deprived. This can trigger quite an ensemble of typical teenage blues.
Carkadon compares the importance of understanding sleep requirement to knowing our nutritional needs: “Children learn from kindergarten on about the food pyramid…but no one is teaching them the life pyramid that has sleep at the base”. In some American schools, classes start late so that teenagers can have the needy extra time in bed. Those who support the practice insist it would decrease students’ moodiness, procrastination, shortened attention spans, and caffeine-dependency while improving afternoon performance.
SNEAK PREVIEW
WHO DISCOVERED AMERICA?
Columbus? Nope! It was Zheng He, says Chinese map collector Liu Gang. His evidence is an old map. Dated to 1763, it?s actually a copy of one made in 1418. That dateline coincides with Zheng He?s famous voyages from 1405 to 1432. It also squares with a theory by Gavin Menzies, a British naval commander. His best-selling book (‘1421: The Year China Discovered The World’) has it that previously undiscovered world maps drawn up by Zheng He’s admirals were copied by European map makers and were extensively used during the voyages of great Western explorers, including Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco Da Gama and James Cook.
MAKING THE BLOOD LAUGH
Watching a comedy film is equivalent to a bout of aerobic exercise or starting a course of cholesterol-busting statin drugs. It boosts the flow of blood to the heart ?- especially through the artery that runs from the shoulder down to the elbow. While Negative feelings are already known to impair nitric oxide pathways that help blood vessels to dilate, a chuckle may stimulate selected hormones to have the opposite effect. Positive emotions such as mirthful laughter may have a beneficial effect on the cells that line the walls of the blood circulation system.
QUIZ No.216
1. Who were the first to use drinking straws, and that to drink beer?
– The Philistines
– The Phoenicians
– The Freemasons
– The Sumerians
1. The Sumerians.
2. In ‘The Wonderful O’, a story by James Thurber, the letter “o” is …
– Used as zero
– Short for Oracle
– Banned by pirates
– Used only in ‘God’
2. Banned by pirates
3. SQUIDs can measure extremely tiny magnetic fields. It is mentioned in a sci-fi work by …
– William Gibson
– Neal Stephenson
– Gene Roddenberry
– Hugo Gernsback
3. William Gibson (in ‘Johnny Mnemonic’, later made into a movie)
4. Who am I, if I use a Smith chart in my profession?
– Dye maker
– Food chemist
– Electrical engineer
– Diamond expert
4. Electrical engineer
5. Chris Lamprecht is considered to be the first person to be banned from …
– The Internet
– The Wall Street
– The UN Assembly
– The Olympics
5. The Internet