Why do we usually sleep at night? What happens when we don’t sleep? Expert insights into this essential part of our lives

 

Sleep is as essential to our health as food and water. It is important to a number of brain functions, including how nerve cells communicate with each other. We sleep for a third of our lives and there are many restorative processes going on during sleep that are needed to stay healthy.

Why do we usually sleep at night? What happens when we don’t sleep? On World Sleep Day, Nadine Dreyer asks a group of experts to tell us more about this essential part of our lives.

Why do we need sleep and why do we sleep better at night?

We sleep for a third of our lives, yet it is only when we cannot sleep or when we experience poor quality sleep that we really start noticing it.

During sleep, our muscle activity drops, our breathing slows down, and our heart rate and blood pressure decrease. At the same time our brain actively clears toxins, which cause neurodegenerative diseases.

It also consolidates memories, wiping out “useless” ones during deep sleep, known as slow wave sleep.

All this allows us to start afresh the following day.

Our lives are organised around our sleep-wake schedule. As we’re a diurnal species, our master clock in the brain, which maintains many of our 24-hour rhythms, schedules our period of activity with daylight, and our period of rest with the night.

In some other animals, like rodents, evolutionary pressure has pushed those species to become nocturnal, which allows them to scurry and feed outside the view of their diurnal (daytime) or crepuscular (twilight) predators.

Not sleeping at the right time has been associated with poor health. Some of the side-effects are poorer cognitive performance, lower energy and worse mental health.

There’s also a higher risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and a higher risk of developing high blood pressure and diabetes.

After a poor night’s sleep, we try to get on with our lives but research has shown this is not so easy. During the COVID-19 pandemic and the strictest lockdown, South Africans rated their sleep quality as poorer, with more insomnia symptoms. These were were both in turn associated with worse levels of depression and anxiety.

What happens when we don’t sleep?

Sleep is a state of vulnerability where a “rest and digest” state dominates over the “fight and flight” state when we are awake.

Our early sleep “scans” the environment before allowing us to dive into deeper stages of sleep.

When a rupture in this consolidated bout of sleep happens, we will start complaining “I haven’t slept enough” or “I slept really badly last night”.

Such ruptures include those induced by specific sleep disorders like sleep apnoea or insomnia.

Sleep apnoea leads to unconscious sleep interruptions due to upper airways obstruction and can lead to hypertension and increased risk of diabetes.

Research in rural Mpumalanga province in South Africa found one out of three older adults had moderate to severe sleep apnoea and this was associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Yet there is no treatment in the public health system for this common sleep disorder.

Certain situations disrupt sleep: parents tending to their young children, doctors being awake while on call, loud generator noises during night-time electricity cuts, mosquitoes, or worse, gunshots or sounds of violence waking us up from our slumber, signalling danger.

Sleep health inequity in South Africa is also driven by socioeconomic status.

A recent study on sleep in men and women living in the urban township of Khayelitsha in South Africa’s Western Cape province showed that poor sleep quality was associated with fear of falling asleep in a violent environment. Sleep was disturbed by strange noises, fear of attacks and dreams about past traumatic experiences.

Electronic devices make it difficult to sleep. Why?

Even though our biology is meant to make us sleep at night, several societal, technological changes have progressively decreased our sleep opportunity.

Our sleep timing is controlled by our master circadian clock. This clock is exquisitely sensitive to light, so exposure to bright light and blue light such as that emitted from electronic devices such as smartphones shifts our bedtime to a later time.

In our recently published study of adolescent sleep in Nigeria, adolescents in urban areas slept less and sleep quality was worse.

Sleep duration was shorter, due to bedtimes being later but waking times in the morning similar to those of adolescents in rural areas. The use of electronic devices at night by urban Nigerian adolescents was associated with shorter sleep duration.

This is one example of a growing body of research that highlights the negative consequences of nocturnal tech use on sleep, even in African societies.

What are key habits to help people sleep better?

The most important habit is to take sleep as seriously as a healthy diet and regular exercise.

We advise the following:

• Keep regular wake times and bedtimes. This helps us sleep at the best time with respect to our master clock’s rhythm. This in turn helps ensure a consolidated bout of sleep.

• Aim for an average of 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night.

• Avoid watching screens one hour before normal bedtime. If this is unavoidable, choose the lowest brightness and add the orange night screen setting. Rather read a book under a bedside light.

• Get outdoor light during the day to strengthen the master clock’s circadian (near 24-hour) rhythm.

• Do some form of physical activity once a day. This helps build sleep pressure and also strengthens the master clock’s rhythms.

• Avoid alcohol before bedtime as this is associated with disrupted sleep.

• Avoid caffeine and stimulants after noon.

• Try to sleep in a quiet, cool and dark or dimly lit environment.

For more information please visit the South African Society for Sleep and Health.

Karine Scheuermaier, Associate Professor in Physiology, Chair of Science Committee, South African Society for Sleep and Health, Member of the World Sleep Society, University of the Witwatersrand; Alison Bentley, Honorary Lecturer in Family Medicine, University of the Witwatersrand; Dale Rae, Director of Sleep Science and associate professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Cape Town; Francesco Xavier Gomez-Olive Casas, Research Manager at MRC/Wits Agincourt Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand; Gosia Lipinska, Associate Professor, University of Cape Town; Jonathan Davy, Senior lecturer, Rhodes University; Joshua Davimes, Senior Lecturer in Anatomical Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand; Nomathemba Chandiwana, Principal Scientist at Ezintsha,, University of the Witwatersrand, and Oluwatosin Olorunmoteni, Neurodevelopmental Paediatrician, Obafemi Awolowo University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

From ancient Jewish texts to androids to AI, a just-right sequence of numbers or letters turns matter into meaning

 

The power of putting basic elements in just the right order is key to both Jewish mysticism and computer coding. WhataWin/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction collection “I, Robot” tells the story of androids created at U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men, Inc. The androids range from “Robbie,” who is nonvocal, to “Stephen Byerley,” who may or may not be a robot – he is so humanlike that people can’t tell.

Yet each model is made of the same elementary components: the binary code of ones and zeros. The differences in behavior between the simplest robot and the most advanced one, nigh indistinguishable from a human being, is simply the sequence of these two digits.

All computer languages are ultimately rendered in ones and zeros, even artificial intelligence programs – today’s equivalent of “Stephen Byerley.” But though this technology is relatively new, the concept it’s hinged on is not.

The idea that rearranging elemental units just so can produce powerful, even seemingly magical results appears all around us. It manifests in everything from technology and science to religion and art – a pattern I focus on in my work about how literature intersects with science, technology, engineering and math.

Some of the examples of this pattern that I find most fascinating are also the most ancient: They come from Kabbalah, a form of Jewish mysticism that first appeared in print in the 12th century C.E.

Building blocks of creation

Integral to Kabbalah is the notion that Hebrew letters are the building blocks of the cosmos. According to mystical interpretations of the creation story in the Book of Genesis, God brought the world into being by creating the alphabet, then assembled the earth and sky by recombining letters.

“God is portrayed as an architect and the Torah a blueprint in the creation of the world,” Jewish studies scholar Howard Schwartz writes in his book “Tree of Souls.” “The way the letters of the alphabet emerge and combine has an uncanny resemblance to the combining and recombining of strings of DNA.”

The letter aleph, often believed to symbolize the oneness of God. Ben Burton/BRBurton23/Pixabay

The “Sefer Yetzirah,” or “Book of Creation,” which Torah scholar Aryeh Kaplan called “the oldest and most mysterious of all Kabbalistic texts,” describes the Hebrew letters as having great power. In Rabbi Kaplan’s translation of and commentary on verse 2.2, God “engraved” the letters “out of nothingness,” then “permuted” them into different combinations and “weighed” them.

“Each letter represents a different type of information,” Kaplan wrote. “Through the various manipulations of the letters, God created all things.”

From mud to man

In Jewish storytelling, Hebrew letters’ sacred power can be manipulated into combinations that animate inanimate matter. Such is the case of one of the earliest humanoid robots or “androids” in literature: the golem, a manlike creature made of clay.

A scene from the German movie ‘The Golem: How He Came into the World,’ released in 1920.

While there are numerous versions of this Jewish legend, the notion that letters animate the golem is common to them all. The mass of molded earth becomes lifelike when its maker intones secret combinations of letters. Engraved on the golem’s forehead is the Hebrew word for truth, “אמת,” comprised of the first, middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet – which Jewish tradition interprets to mean that truth is all-encompassing.

The golem sometimes helps the Jewish community, or sometimes wreaks havoc, depending on the story. But the golem also represents something bigger: With mystical knowledge, man imitates God’s act of creation.

To deanimate the creature, its maker must remove the first letter written on its forehead: א, or aleph, which represents the oneness of God. That leaves מת, the Hebrew word for “dead” – reflecting the Jewish tradition that there is no truth without God.

A sculpture of the golem made up of carvings of Jewish letters, by artist Joshua Abarbanel and displayed in the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

‘Coding’ everywhere you look

Like the golem, robots, androids and even AI are powered with recombinations of elemental units. Instead of Hebrew letters, the units are ones and zeros. In both instances, the specific permutation makes all the difference – and all these creations have inspired speculative stories about what happens when familiar building blocks are rearranged.

The creature in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” arises as an assortment of body parts. Novelist Margaret Atwood’s “Crakers” are humans 2.0, bioengineered from reshuffled genes. In science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s novella “Seventy-Two Letters,” which draws from golem legends, dolls move according to the sequence of letters on a parchment placed in their backs.

Such patterns are not just the stuff of fiction, nor are they limited to computer science. Permutative “coding” is all around. Music notes are arranged to form a melody; gene sequences are combined to form an organism. In all living things – owls, geckos, people, roses – the instructions encased in DNA comprise recombinations of the same four nucleobase pairs.

The biological difference between a complex human and a simple bacterium is the order in which the nucleobase pairs are arranged. Hugo de Vries, a biologist working at the turn of the 20th century, observed that “the whole organic world is the result of innumerable different combinations and permutations of relatively few factors.”

Each rung on the DNA ‘ladder’ is made up of pairs of four base nucleotides: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and thymine (T). Martin Steinthaler/Moment via Getty Images

Power of sequence

Not all combinations “work” – neither in science nor in storytelling. In “On the Nature of Things,” a famous poem about philosophy and physics, the first-century Roman writer Titus Lucretius Carus cautions that “we must not think that all particles can be linked together in all ways, for you would see monsters created everywhere, forms coming to being half man, half beast …”

Fantastical imaginings aside, the core idea stands: Not all permutations yield viable results. To put it in terms of modern biology, genes with certain combinations of the four nucleobase pairs would not lead to a functioning organism.

Writer Jorge Luis Borges explored similar ideas in “The Library of Babel,” a short story about a library-like universe filled with books that contain every possible permutation of 25 characters. Most amount to nonsense – strings of letters that bear no meaning.

What sets apart something that works from something that doesn’t is sequence. The difference between the behavior of a simple robot like Asimov’s “Robbie” and the behavior of AI so complex that it seems sentient boils down to the sequence of ones and zeros that instruct it – not altogether dissimilar from the way a single letter is the difference between animation and deanimation, or creation and destruction, in Jewish folklore.

The potential consequences of AI’s novel permutation have caused fear and uncertainty. Yet perhaps there is some comfort in the notion that, as the Bible says, אֵין כָּל חָדָשׁ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמֶשׁ: There’s nothing new under the sun.

Rocio Benabentos, Mark Finlayson and Mendel Hendel contributed feedback for this article.

Rhona Trauvitch, Associate Teaching Professor of English, Florida International University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Scorsese’s gods of the streets: From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ to ‘Silence,’ faith is rarely far off in his films

 

Even in films where religion isn’t front and center, Martin Scorsese’s attention to ritual and devotion comes through. Apple TV+

A widely circulated still from the set of Martin Scorsese’s latest film, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” shows the director sitting in a church pew. Next to him is Lily Gladstone, who plays the role of Mollie Kyle, an Osage woman whose family is targeted as part of a broader conspiracy by white Americans to steal the tribe’s wealth, to the point of marrying and killing its members.

In the photograph, Scorsese appears to hold rosary beads, a common devotional object for many Catholics. Mollie is Catholic, so the rosary makes sense as a prop. But as a scholar of religion and film, I’m struck by how it calls to mind the director’s own complex Catholicism and its imprint on his decades of filmmaking.

Scorsese stands in a long line of Catholic American filmmakers, stretching back to the 1930s and 1940s – one that includes Irish Americans John Ford and Leo McCarey, and Italian immigrant Frank Capra. At a time when Catholicism still seemed foreign to many Americans, those directors helped normalize the faith, making it seem like part of a shared American story.

Yet in his films, Scorsese has taken a much more personal approach to exploring Catholic faith and experience. He doesn’t feel the need to defend the religion or burnish its image. His movies are steeped in Catholic sensibilities, but embrace painful questions that often accompany belief: what it means to hold on to religious commitment in a world where God can seem absent.

From altar boy to auteur

Scorsese has often spoken of his Catholic background. Born in New York City’s Little Italy, he went to Catholic schools and served as an altar boy at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, which appeared in his early masterpiece “Mean Streets.” Scorsese even began seminary training, but he quickly realized the priesthood was not for him.

Yet the church proved influential. Scorsese has described St. Patrick’s as a spiritual alternative to the violence in the streets around his neighborhood. A priest introduced the young Scorsese to classical music and books that widened his cultural horizons.

Organist Jared Lamenzo performs at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral on June 21, 2019. Kris Connor/Getty Images for NAMM

A similar tension runs through many of his films: Catholic devotion, mystery and ritual interwoven with ruthless crime. Indeed, the struggle with faith amid brutality is a theme Scorsese returns to over and over, asking what religion might have to offer the world as it actually exists, with all its cruelties, greed and despair.

Presence and absence

That struggle can be described as one between “presence” and “absence,” to use the terms of religious studies scholar Robert A. Orsi.

Religious presence refers to all the ways people experience their gods’ existence in the world and in their lives. For Catholics, for example, the Eucharist is not just a symbol of Christ; the consecrated bread and wine in Communion actually become Jesus’ flesh and blood, according to Catholic teaching.

Orsi describes religious absence, on the other hand, as the experience of doubt and spiritual struggle about a god not felt directly on Earth.

Both presence and absence shape Scorsese’s rendering of religion. God’s absence takes the form of violence and greed in his films. But some characters also carry their gods with them in the world. This is most dramatically seen in “Silence,” released in 2016, which was based on the novel by Japanese Catholic writer Shusaku Endo.

“Silence” is the story of two Jesuit missionaries who travel to 17th century Japan in search of their mentor, another Jesuit who is believed to have renounced the faith during a wave of violent persecutions. One of them, Father Rodrigues, profoundly questions his own faith after witnessing the torture of Japanese Christians.

‘Silence’ dramatically explores faith, doubt and suffering.

Why, he wonders, does God allow such suffering? Eventually he himself will renounce his faith in order to save the lives of those to whom he ministers.

The silence of God is the film’s major preoccupation, yet it is filled with devotional imagery. At the climax of the film, Rodrigues tramples on an image of Christ in order to end the torture of other Christians. But just at that moment, he experiences the presence of his God.

The very final scene depicts his burial, years after the film’s main events – a small crucifix clasped in his hand.

Penance ‘in the streets’

This preoccupation with Catholicism stretches back to Scorsese’s 1973 breakthrough film, “Mean Streets.” Harvey Keitel plays a young Italian American man, Charlie, who grapples with his faith in the unforgiving world of New York’s Lower East Side.

Presence, as Orsi points out, is often as much a burden as a solace. Indeed, part of the emotional power in “Mean Streets” lies in Charlie’s own impatience toward Catholic practices and rules. He wants the freedom to be Catholic in his own way.

“You don’t make up for your sins in the church,” he insists in the opening voice-over. “You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit, and you know it.”

Martin Scorsese at the corner of Hester and Baxter streets in 1973, one of the locations he used in his New York film ‘Mean Streets.’ Jack Manning/New York Times Co./Getty Images

Over the years, Scorsese’s own ambitions have led him far beyond the streets of Little Italy. A number of his films have little to do with religion. Yet movies such as “Casino,” “The Aviator” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” elaborate the same basic question as “Mean Streets”: What is important in a world that so often feels dominated by absence, money and violence? Through a long career, Scorsese has framed both the sacred and profane as compelling but competing forces of human desire.

Shortly before the release of “Silence,” Scorsese visited St. Patrick’s during an interview with The New York Times. “I never left,” he said. “In my mind, I am here every day.”

One might take him at his word. Even in his most recent movie, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a Catholic sensibility sneaks through in numerous ways. Characters attend Mass at parish churches and bury their dead on consecrated Catholic ground.

Further, the film’s attention to Osage religious practices demonstrates Scorsese’s sensitivity to the power of ritual and devotion. The movie opens with the burial of a ceremonial pipe, highlighting how objects can assume sacred significance. As Mollie’s mother dies, she has a vision of the elders.

But the questions that haunt Scorsese hang over moments that hardly feel religious, too.

Toward the end of the film, when Mollie asks her duplicitous husband, Ernest, to come clean, his refusal to fully confess the harm he did to her and her family epitomizes the depths of his ethical emptiness. Her silence as she gets up and leaves, with an FBI agent standing quietly in the corner, offers a more powerful moral indictment than any legal sentence. The refusal to pay for one’s sins at home and in the streets has rarely looked so damning.

Anthony Smith, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Dayton

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Merriam-Webster’s word of the year – authentic – reflects growing concerns over AI’s ability to deceive and dehumanize

 

According to the publisher’s editor-at-large, 2023 represented ‘a kind of crisis of authenticity.’ lambada/E+ via Getty Images Roger J. Kreuz, University of Memphis

When Merriam-Webster announced that its word of the year for 2023 was “authentic,” it did so with over a month to go in the calendar year.

Even then, the dictionary publisher was late to the game.

In a lexicographic form of Christmas creep, Collins English Dictionary announced its 2023 word of the year, “AI,” on Oct. 31. Cambridge University Press followed suit on Nov. 15 with “hallucinate,” a word used to refer to incorrect or misleading information provided by generative AI programs.

At any rate, terms related to artificial intelligence appear to rule the roost, with “authentic” also falling under that umbrella.

AI and the authenticity crisis

For the past 20 years, Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in the U.S., has chosen a word of the year – a term that encapsulates, in one form or another, the zeitgeist of that past year. In 2020, the word was “pandemic.” The next year’s winner? “Vaccine.”

“Authentic” is, at first glance, a little less obvious.

According to the publisher’s editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski, 2023 represented “a kind of crisis of authenticity.” He added that the choice was also informed by the number of online users who looked up the word’s meaning throughout the year.

A 1906 print ad for Webster’s International Dictionary advertised itself an an authoritative clearinghouse for all things English – an authentic, reliable source. Jay Paull/Getty Images

The word “authentic,” in the sense of something that is accurate or authoritative, has its roots in French and Latin. The Oxford English Dictionary has identified its usage in English as early as the late 14th century.

And yet the concept – particularly as it applies to human creations and human behavior – is slippery.

Is a photograph made from film more authentic than one made from a digital camera? Does an authentic scotch have to be made at a small-batch distillery in Scotland? When socializing, are you being authentic – or just plain rude – when you skirt niceties and small talk? Does being your authentic self mean pursuing something that feels natural, even at the expense of cultural or legal constraints?

The more you think about it, the more it seems like an ever-elusive ideal – one further complicated by advances in artificial intelligence.

How much human touch?

Intelligence of the artificial variety – as in nonhuman, inauthentic, computer-generated intelligence – was the technology story of the past year.

At the end of 2022, OpenAI publicly released ChatGPT 3.5, a chatbot derived from so-called large language models. It was widely seen as a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, but its rapid adoption led to questions about the accuracy of its answers.

The chatbot also became popular among students, which compelled teachers to grapple with how to ensure their assignments weren’t being completed by ChatGPT.

Issues of authenticity have arisen in other areas as well. In November 2023, a track described as the “last Beatles song” was released. “Now and Then” is a compilation of music originally written and performed by John Lennon in the 1970s, with additional music recorded by the other band members in the 1990s. A machine learning algorithm was recently employed to separate Lennon’s vocals from his piano accompaniment, and this allowed a final version to be released.

But is it an authentic “Beatles” song? Not everyone is convinced.

Advances in technology have also allowed the manipulation of audio and video recordings. Referred to as “deepfakes,” such transformations can make it appear that a celebrity or a politician said something that they did not – a troubling prospect as the U.S. heads into what is sure to be a contentious 2024 election season.

Writing for The Conversation in May 2023, education scholar Victor R. Lee explored the AI-fueled authenticity crisis.

Our judgments of authenticity are knee-jerk, he explained, honed over years of experience. Sure, occasionally we’re fooled, but our antennae are generally reliable. Generative AI short-circuits this cognitive framework.

“That’s because back when it took a lot of time to produce original new content, there was a general assumption … that it only could have been made by skilled individuals putting in a lot of effort and acting with the best of intentions,” he wrote.

“These are not safe assumptions anymore,” he added. “If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, everyone will need to consider that it may not have actually hatched from an egg.”

Though there seems to be a general understanding that human minds and human hands must play some role in creating something authentic or being authentic, authenticity has always been a difficult concept to define.

So it’s somewhat fitting that as our collective handle on reality has become ever more tenuous, an elusive word for an abstract ideal is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year.

Roger J. Kreuz, Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.