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.

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Unsanitized tales…

The Importance of Being Scared: Polish Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska on Fairy Tales and the Necessity of Fear

By Maria Popova (Brain Pickings)

“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays … but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.”

“If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is credited with proclaiming, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” Intelligence, of course, is a loose grab-bag term that encompasses multiple manifestations, but the insight attributed to Einstein applies most unequivocally to the ninth of developmental psychologist Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences: existential intelligence.

Fairy tales — the proper kind, those original Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen tales I recall from my Eastern European childhood, unsanitized by censorship and unsweetened by American retellings — affirm what children intuitively know to be true but are gradually taught to forget, then to dread: that the terrible and the terrific spring from the same source, and that what grants life its beauty and magic is not the absence of terror and tumult but the grace and elegance with which we navigate the gauntlet….”

More here.

In the spirit of the Reincarnationist books, here’s something really intriguing…

This 10 Year Old Boy Remembers His Past Life As A 1930’s Hollywood Actor

Thespiritscience.net

“This is such a mind blowing story.

This isn’t the first account of a child remembering their past lives – there are thousands of recorded cases of the exact same experience from kids all over the world. This caught my eye because it was an NBC newscast which I just found amazing. Enough people in the collective consciousness are interested in past lives to get it on the news.

This 10 year old boy from Oklahoma named Ryan, was born with the memories of his past experiences. He is able to remember vivid details of his past life, which took place in 30?s Hollywood. He says he was an actor on broadway who worked for an agency, travelled the world and was married 5 times. They were actually able to open a book and have him point to a man he says he was.

His mom, acting as a support, decided to take him to a child psychologist who really seemed to know what’s going on. He approached these cases with a beautifully open mind, something many professors are afraid of doing.

His conclusion after 50 years of the university collecting 2500 different cases of children remembering past lives is: ”These cases demand an explanation, we can’t just write them off.”…

For the rest, and a video, click here.