Sleep

Your eyes do not see the world the same way at midnight that they do at noon, and neither does your brain. A new preprint from researchers at the University of Manchester shows that the brain’s internal circadian clock actively rewires how the visual system communicates with itself, tuning the neural code for day and […]

You are drifting off. Your breathing slows. Your eyes stop moving. And inside your brain cells, a molecular timer begins to tick down. That timer is not a metaphor. It is a real biochemical signal, measurable in real time, and it has been captured for the first time by researchers at Washington University in St. […]

Millions of Americans reach for diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl, ZzzQuil, and a dozen generic “PM” pain relievers, whenever they cannot fall asleep. It is the most widely used over-the-counter sleep aid in the country, cheap, readily available, and seemingly harmless. But a new preclinical study published as a preprint on bioRxiv this week […]

You close your eyes. Hours later, you surface from a world that felt real: a childhood home you have not seen in decades, a conversation with someone long gone, a staircase that leads nowhere. Why that scene? Why that night? A landmark study published in Communications Psychology offers the most detailed answer yet. Dreams are […]

A single electrode placed at the C3 location on the scalp during a routine sleep study may be enough to distinguish untreated schizophrenia from healthy controls, according to a retrospective pilot study from Kurume University in Japan. In 7 antipsychotic-naive patients and 7 matched controls, fast spindle frequency and detection time at C3 achieved an […]

For decades, a puzzling disconnect has frustrated both patients and clinicians: people with chronic insomnia often describe their sleep as fragmented, shallow, and unrefreshing, yet their overnight sleep studies can come back completely normal. The standard polysomnography (PSG) report shows normal sleep latency, normal sleep efficiency, normal time spent in each stage — nothing to […]

For two decades, Americans have been sleeping more. An analysis of over 239,000 time diaries from the American Time Use Survey shows that average nightly sleep rose from 8 hours and 30 minutes in 2003 to 8 hours and 55 minutes in 2024, a gain of roughly 25 minutes over the 21-year period. But beneath […]

Every nutritional recommendation a person hears from low carb to high carb, complex carb to simple carb, carries a buried assumption: that the amount and type of carbohydrate in the diet measurably influences whether someone develops metabolic syndrome over time. But what if that assumption has never been as solid as the headlines suggest? A […]

A team from National Taiwan University Hospital has shown that a machine-held ultrasound device can flag moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea in people who have no idea they have it. In a prospective study of 1,101 adults attending a routine health check-up, the scan identified cases of sleep apnea in individuals with normal body […]

Doctors routinely tell older patients to exercise for better sleep. It is intuitive advice: physical activity burns energy, reduces stress, and improves cardiovascular fitness, all of which should translate into deeper, more restorative rest. But a new study from Taiwan suggests the relationship is not quite that simple. The study, published July 25 in the […]