Gone Quiet

Finishing up Carter's The Bloody Chamber, love her somber and dark, jubilant (?), endings. I guess you can say she has a different view of fairy tales.

Going to finish up Alexie's book that I started in May (I started and finished another book by him). No matter how possibly bored or used to Alexie I think I am...he surprises me and inspires me every single time.

After those, I have to get my ass on The Idiot, that's going to be a doozy.

Hot-potatoing Neuroscience/cognitive (developmental psychology) and...whatever is out there.

My feverish desire for writing has died though the documents are still opened.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20090616/hl_time/08599190456100

The gist of this article about dreams and sleep.

Participants who had reached REM sleep (when dreaming most frequently occurs) during their nap were better able to identify expressions of positive emotions like happiness in other people, compared with participants who did not achieve REM sleep or did not nap at all. Those volunteers were more sensitive to negative expressions, including anger and fear.

REM sleep appears to not only improve our ability to identify positive emotions in others; it may also round out the sharp angles of our own emotional experiences. Walker suggests that one function of REM sleep - dreaming, in particular - is to allow the brain to sift through that day's events, process any negative emotion attached to them, then strip it away from the memories. He likens the process to applying a "nocturnal soothing balm." REM sleep, he says, "tries to ameliorate the sharp emotional chips and dents that life gives you along the way."

"It's not that you've forgotten. You haven't," he says. "It's a memory of an emotional episode, but it's no longer emotional itself."

That palliative safety-valve quality of sleep may be hampered when we fail to reach REM sleep or when REM sleep is disrupted, Walker says. "If you don't let go of the emotion, what results is a constant state of anxiety," he says.

Past studies have also established a link between chronic sleep disruption and suicide. Sleep complaints, which include nightmares, insomnia and other sleep disturbances, are listed in the current Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's inventory of suicide-prevention warning signs. Yet what distinguishes Bernert's research is that when nightmares and insomnia were evaluated separately, nightmares were independently predictive of suicidal behavior. "It may be that nightmares present a unique risk for suicidal symptoms, which may have to do with the way we process emotion within dreams," Bernert says.

Read it punk ass bitches!