ok. i realised that there's so mant things i wanna write about..... so i'll start with th sleeping thing first, then on to LISTENING, then on to relationships. i know its not exactly related and all, but i keep getting inspired today. haha. so its a long kinda post:P

SLEEP- Emotions Run Amok in Sleep-Deprived Brains

Without sleep, the emotional centers of our brains dramatically overreact to bad experiences, research now reveals.

"When we're sleep deprived , it's really as if the brain is reverting to more primitive behavior, regressing in terms of the control humans normally have over their emotions," researcher Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience.

Anyone who has ever gone without a good night's sleep is aware that doing so can make a person emotionally irrational. While past studies have revealed that sleep loss can impair the immune system and brain processes such as learning and memory, there has been surprisingly little research into why sleep deprivation affects emotions, Walker said.

Walker and his colleagues had 26 healthy volunteers either get normal sleep or get sleep deprived, making them stay awake for roughly 35 hours. On the following day, the researchers scanned brain activity in volunteers using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they viewed 100 images. These started off as emotionally neutral, such as photos of spoons or baskets, but they became increasingly negative in tone over time—for instance, pictures of attacking sharks or vipers.

"While we predicted that the emotional centers of the brain would overreact after sleep deprivation, we didn't predict they'd overreact as much as they did," Walker said. "They became more than 60 percent more reactive to negative emotional stimuli. That's a whopping increase—the emotional parts of the brain just seem to run amok."

The researchers pinpointed this hyperactive response to a shutdown of the prefrontal lobe, a brain region that normally keeps emotions under control. This structure is relatively new in human evolution, "and so it may not yet have adapted ways to cope with certain biological extremes," Walker speculated. "Human beings are one of the few species that really deprive themselves of sleep. It's a real oddity in nature."

In modern life, people often deprive themselves of sleep "almost on a daily basis," Walker said. "Alarm bells should be ringing about that behavior—no pun intended."

Future research can focus on which components help restore emotional stability—"whether it's dreaming REM sleep or slow-wave, non-dreaming forms of sleep," Walker said.

Many psychiatric disorders, "particularly ones involving emotions, seem to be linked with abnormal sleep," he added. "Traditionally people mostly thought the psychiatric disorders were contributing to the sleep abnormalities, but of course it could be the other way around. If we can find out which parts of sleep are most key to emotional stability, we already have a good range of drugs that can push and pull at these kinds of sleep and maybe help treat certain kinds of psychiatric conditions."

more details? http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20071022/sc_livescience/
emotionsrunamokinsleepdeprivedbrains

yep. see how true that is for most of us?!? its really odd isnt it? we complain of not having enough sleep and are super envious of others having enough..... and we're actually a real oddity!! haha. i guess we are just not willing to sacrifice our commitments and tv and books to let our brain rest, telling ourselves that its ok, we have the rest of our lives to sleep and we just have to study tonight. in the end, this never ending cycle goes on and we dun get enough sleep!

no wonder all instructors are super cranky on day 2 and 3 of camp, cause they at night not enough sleep! ha! campers beware!!:P lol

LISTENING - are we really listening or hearing??

hearing is when we do not really process the noise passing through our eardrums, its like white noise, distracting and meaningless.

listening is the exact opposite. when we listen, we do know what the person is talking about and can give answers which shows that we thought it through.

research studies have shown that ppl only listen 10% of the time. this really explains our results huh?:) its time we start listening. just like today during the bridging gaps meeting... SOME PPL WERE OBVIOUSLY just staring into space and not LISTENING. i doubt they're actually HEARING even. its really infuriating. for manwei to be explaining up there and ppl just openly ignoring her. and those are the higher authority ones. grrrr.....

o ya. and guys listen less than gals. dun believe? talk to a guy, and for 1 in three times, they go huh? except for some minority:D there's alwaes exception.

last but not LEAST, RELATIONSHIPS!

today, in class, me, manwei, vathsala and bryant (yes, its him) talked about it. for 2 periods. boy, what a revealation man! suddenly i know much more about my friends. sheesh. i m not saying. but let's just say that i promise to keep HER secret and she promised to keep mine. onli mi, her, zwan and the stars know what we said that night under the starry skies.

but we talked about love at great length and we realised that we dunno what is it!! AMAZING OR WHAT? as in the BGR kinda love la. then we realised: ppl stead cause they like each other, but do they love each other??? how do u know? ppl say love to be so obvious but why is it that i nvr really saw it?!? or is it we? confusing yeah?:) aiya. but me and vath agree about sth... until Os are over. right or not? not up for us to say. not now at least.

okies. i shall stop here and leave u to ponder. few will do so cause i know not many ppl actually READ ppl's posts. if u did, leave a tag bout what u think!:P aha. let's see who r the readers and who are the visitors!