M.J. Rose

It’s no wonder we never got any rest at those sleepovers when we were kids…

Half Your Brain Stands Guard When Sleeping In A New Place

Heard on All Things Considered

When you sleep in unfamiliar surroundings, only half your brain is getting a good night’s rest.

“The left side seems to be more awake than the right side,” says Yuka Sasaki, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University.

The finding, reported Thursday in the journal Current Biology, helps explain why people tend to feel tired after sleeping in a new place. And it suggests people have something in common with birds and sea mammals, which frequently put half their brain to sleep while the other half remains on guard.

Sleep researchers discovered the “first-night effect” decades ago, when they began studying people in sleep labs. The first night in a lab, a person’s sleep is usually so bad that researchers simply toss out any data they collect…”

Read the rest here.

Listen below:

Beautiful old film footage…Enjoy!

From The Public Domain Review,

Raja Harishchandra (1913)

“Directed and produced by Dadasaheb Phalke, the “father of Indian Cinema”, this 40-minute-long silent film is the very first full-length Indian feature — the beginning of Bollywood. The narrative of the film is based on the eponymous legend recounted in the Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. The story centres around the hero Harishchandra, a noble king, who, to honour his promise to the sage Vishwamitra, sacrifices his kingdom, his wife, and eventually also his children. By the end, however, having pleased the Gods with his actions, Harishchandra’s former glory is restored…

Unfortunately, Raja Harishchandra only exists now in fragments (1475 feet of it), which you can see above, with both Hindi and English intertitles…”

For more on this, click here.

The Menehune. Are they the stuff of myth, or were they the original settlers of Hawaii? What is the evidence?…

From Ancient Origins,

The Menhune of Hawaii – Ancient Race or Fictional Fairytale?

“In Hawaiian mythology, the Menehune are said to be an ancient race of people small in stature, who lived in Hawaii before settlers arrived from Polynesia. Many scholars attribute ancient structures found on the Hawaiian Islands to the Menehune. However, others have argued that the legends of the Menehune are a post-European contact mythology and that no such race existed.

The mythology of the Menehune is as old as the beginnings of Polynesian history. When the first Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, they found dams, fish-ponds, roads, and even temples, all said to have been built by the Menehune who were superb craftspeople. Some of these structures still exist, and the highly-skilled craftsmanship is evident.  According to legend, each Menehune was a master of a certain craft and had one special function they accomplished with great precision and expertise. They would set out at dusk to build something in one night, and if this was not achieved, it would be abandoned.

Some scholars, such as folklorist Katharine Luomala, theorize that the Menehune were the first settlers of Hawaii, descendants of the Marquesas islanders who were believed to have first occupied the Hawaiian Islands from around 0 to 350 AD….”

For the rest, click here to go to Ancient Origins.