Hot MedFax

How's this for crazy? Chances are, you don't remember what you just retweeted . Now we're not talking about the normal memory lapses -- where you put the keys, your glasses and your toddler (just kidding).  But newswise.com reports that retweeting or otherwise sharing information creates a “cognitive overload” that interferes with learning and retaining what you’ve just seen.  I can totally relate. "Most people don’t post original ideas any more. You just share what you read with your friends,” says Qi Wang, professor of human development in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University. “But they don’t realize that sharing has a downside. It may interfere with other things we do.” Wang and colleagues in China conducted experiments showing that “retweeting” interfered with learning and memory, both online and off. At computers in a laboratory setting, two groups were presented with a series of messages from Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twi...

We all know when we've had a little too much to drink.  Maybe you feel slightly high, or very happy.  Some people cry.  But there's a new way to be drunk, and, believe it or not, it happens when you're asleep and you suddenly wake up.  It's called sleep drunkenness and is characterized by confusion, or inappropriate behavior during or after arousal from sleep.  Most people experience no symptoms. It affects 15% of the general American population -- that's one in seven people -- with half the people studied saying it happened more than once.  Almost 90% had a sleep disorder or a mental health disorder or were taking psychotropic drugs, according to biosciencetechnology.com.   “The high prevalence is surprising,” said Dr. Stuart Quan, a professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School and physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, who wasn’t involved in a different study, newsweek.com reports. This state of “confusional arousal...

Football may not really be your game (I probably sound unAmerican but mine's tennis) but a certain Midwestern college's football team found out last fall just how important  sleep  is after their coach decided to start helping them sleep better.  They also won the big game. The coach swears there's a connection.  The team is Northwestern and Pat Fitzgerald, the coach,  has placed an unusual emphasis on his players’ sleeping behavior as a way to improve their performance, according to The New York Times. In the past, he has changed the times of practices and instituted team naps, but since the beginning of August, in collaboration with the university’s school of engineering, Fitzgerald has had his team undergo a sleep assessment, Steven Braid reports. The idea was to assess the players’ sleep patterns and then suggest ways they can have more and sounder sleep. The players began wearing movement sensor armbands during training camp, except when they are practicing...