September 15, 2005
Bullets: sleepwalking, sleepy interns, and geriatric distractibility
More bullets!
- Apparently there’s a myth that says that you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker because they might have a heart attack if you do. This sounds a little ridiculous to me simply because heart attacks don’t just magically happen, they usually have an underlying cause, and being woken isn’t enough of a stressor to be one of them. (When was the last time you heard of a person dropping dead from being badly startled?) Research confirms this. For some reason, I think you’re more likely to have a heart attack after being woken by a shrieking cell phone more than anything else: night time somnambulation included. Maybe it’s just me, though.
- Medical interns (med students) are tired a lot, often because they’re putting in lots of hours without really doing anything useful, whether its learning or helping. Yaz says the hours he puts in in a hospital are a good time to learn in a relatively risk-free environment. Who’s right? I guess it depends on who you ask and what kind of person they are. How many of your fellow students feel the same way you do about this, Yaz?
- Elderly people’s mental faculties are generally not what they were when they were younger, but research shows that it’s not because they’re becoming less intelligent, it’s because they’re more distracted. But this can be reversed. I would also say that their effective cognitive ability decreases also because they doubt themselves. Ever watched an elderly person operate a piece of technology? You can generally show them 100 times, but they’re still ask the same questions: I think it has to do with lack of confidence. I’d like to see some research on the effect of repetitive hand-holding.
Aside from my next post (which will be my last for the day), I’m going to try to keep current on the science news going on, opting instead to forgo posting something if I can’t get to it within 24 hours of its announcement. Unless it’s a press release about new research or something like that.
| 5:24 pm |
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