Optimal Being

Short Naps Have Major Benefits for Your Mind I have a confession: I nap. Most days, after lunch, you will find me snoozing. I used to keep quiet about it. Other countries have strong napping traditions, but here in the U.S. it is often equated with laziness. In 2019 a U.S. federal agency even announced a ban on sleeping in government buildings. I'm going public about my nap habit now because, despite what bureaucrats may think, sleep scientists are increasingly clear about the power of the nap. That shift is part of the relatively recent recognition that the quality and duration of sleep are public health issues, says physiologist Marta Garaulet of the University of Murcia in Spain. For a time, research was both for and against napping. Many studies showed mood and  cognition benefits  from midday rest, yet others found links to poor health, especially in older adults. That left some experts hesitant to “prescribe” naps. More recent research, though, has clarified that differe...

Participants who smelled odors while they slept performed better on word-recall tests. Smell is probably our most underappreciated sense. “If you ask people which sense they would be most willing to give up, it would be the olfactory system,” says Michael Leon, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine. But a loss of smell has been linked to health complications such as  depression  and cognitive decline. And mounting evidence shows that olfactory training, which involves deliberately smelling strong scents on a regular basis, may help stave off that decline. Now a team of researchers led by Leon has successfully boosted cognitive performance by exposing people to smells while they sleep. Twenty participants—all older than 60 years and generally healthy—received six months of overnight olfactory enrichment, and all significantly improved their ability to recall lists of words compared with a control group. The study appeared in  Frontiers in Neuroscien...

People over 60 who inhale essential oils of eucalyptus, rosemary or lavender, for example, improve their memory at night. They can better remember what they just heard. For 6 months, neurologists at the University of California at Irvine had 20 people over 60 sleep while an aroma diffuser in their bedroom diffused essential oils for 2 hours. The researchers had the diffuser filled with a different aroma every day of the week. The researchers used essential oils from roses, oranges, eucalyptus, limes, peppermint, rosemary and lavender. During the same period, 23 over-60s in a control group fell asleep every night while a diffuser in their bedroom diffused no detectable essential oils. Before and after the 6-month experimental period, the researchers tested the mental abilities of the subjects with a battery of tests. Results Overall, the researchers found no statistically significant changes in the test results. [Table] However, there was one exception: on the Rey Auditory Verbal Le...

Stop us if you've heard this sci-fi concept before: a cocktail of specialized chemicals that rejuvenates your whole body, from your eyes to your brain, returning everything to a more youthful state. If that sounds like the  stuff of literal myth  — or a  grossly misfired directorial attempt  by the Wachowskis — you're right to be skeptical. Quacks have a lot to gain from convincing consumers to buy miracle cures, nevermind convincing billionaires to  underwrite research into them ; the reality, though, is that effective life-extension treatments have  remained elusive . That's why we were struck to see a team of scientists that includes researchers from the name-brand Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology sounding off about what they say are promising new leads, published this month  in the journal  Aging . "We identify six chemical cocktails, which, in less than a week and without compromising cellular identity, restore...

A California-based biotech company says it's successfully implanted lab-made neurons in Parkinson's patients' brains to stimulate a dopamine response — and if it works as intended, it could be a substantial advance in fighting the disease. As  MIT Technology Review  reports , the early stem cell experiment, which was meant to test whether the procedure is safe, appears to have succeeded at that goal. The trial included 12 people with Parkinson's, a debilitating progressive disease characterized by a shortage of dopamine, and was run by BlueRock Therapeutics, a subsidiary of the pharmaceutical giant Bayer. The lab-made neurons were implanted for a year before results were taken, and as researchers told attendees of the International Congress for Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorder in Copenhagen at the end of August, the implanted cells seem to have survived — and, in a particularly exciting twist, there are indications that they may be reducing the patients' sy...

We can account for the evolution of consciousness only if we crack the  philosophy, as well as the physics, of the brain. The science of consciousness has not lived up to expectations. Over the summer, the neuroscientist Christof Koch  conceded defeat  on his 25-year bet with the philosopher David Chalmers, a lost wager that the science of consciousness would be all wrapped up by now. In September, over 100 consciousness researchers signed a  public letter  condemning one of the most popular theories of consciousness—the integrated information theory—as pseudoscience. This in turn prompted strong  responses  from other researchers in the field. Despite decades of research, there’s little sign of consensus on consciousness, with several rival theories still in contention. Your consciousness is what it’s like to be you. It’s your experiences of color and sound and smell; your feelings of pain, joy, excitement or tiredness. It’s w...

Scientists are intrigued by a drug that appears to imbue mice with the benefits of exercise without actually getting physical activity — but as you'd imagine, there are caveats, so don't throw out your workout clothes just yet. As a  University of Florida press release  about the new research declares, the newly developed compound SLU-PP-332 led obese mice to lose weight by apparently convincing their bodies to go into marathon training mode, leading to a faster metabolism and more energy and endurance, and all without actually exercising. "This compound is basically telling skeletal muscle to make the same changes you see during endurance training," Thomas Burris, a UF pharmacy professor who led the research, said in the school's press release. SLU-PP-332 purports to achieve this by targeting what are known as EFF proteins that activate the body's most "energy-gobbling" tissues, such as the brain, the heart, and other muscles. ERRs are naturally rel...