Question by nachelleBeBot: Can a women get breast cancer by wearing a bra to sleep?
I’ve heard this from before, a lot of people think that wearing a bra to sleep causes breast cancer. Other people say if a woman doesn’t wear a bra to sleep her breast will sag D:
serious answers please!
Best answer:
Answer by Sofia C
i think people are taking the p*ss out of you
What do you think? Answer below!
If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.
Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings. The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter — a common practice at college during midterms and finals — decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation.
“Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap,” said Matthew Walker, an assistant professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and the lead investigator of these studies.
In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. At noon, all the participants were subjected to a rigorous learning task intended to tax the hippocampus, a region of the brain that helps store fact-based memories. Both groups performed at comparable levels.
At 2 p.m., the nap group took a 90-minute siesta while the no-nap group stayed awake. Later that day, at 6 p.m., participants performed a new round of learning exercises. Those who remained awake throughout the day became worse at learning. In contrast, those who napped did markedly better and actually improved in their capacity to learn.
These findings reinforce the researchers’ hypothesis that sleep is needed to clear the brain’s short-term memory storage and make room for new information, said Walker, who presented his preliminary findings on Sunday, Feb. 21, at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, Calif.
Since 2007, Walker and other sleep researchers have established that fact-based memories are temporarily stored in the hippocampus before being sent to the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which may have more storage space.
“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder,” Walker said.
In the latest study, Walker and his team have broken new ground in discovering that this memory-refreshing process occurs when nappers are engaged in a specific stage of sleep. Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in the brain, indicated that this refreshing of memory capacity is related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which takes place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Previously, the purpose of this stage was unclear, but the new results offer evidence as to why humans spend at least half their sleeping hours in Stage 2, non-REM, Walker said.
“I can’t imagine Mother Nature would have us spend 50 percent of the night going from one sleep stage to another for no reason,” Walker said. “Sleep is sophisticated. It acts locally to give us what we need.”
Walker and his team will go on to investigate whether the reduction of sleep experienced by people as they get older is related to the documented decrease in our ability to learn as we age. Finding that link may be helpful in understanding such neurodegenerative conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, Walker said.
In addition to Walker, co-investigators of these new findings are UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow Bryce A. Mander and psychology undergraduate Sangeetha Santhanam.
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This will soon be a better and more fitting image.
So, you’ve doubled your weight over the past five years, you own a record-shattering collection of greasy pizza boxes and broken aspirations, and you’re beginning to consider installing a toilet bowl in the place of your computer chair? You have come to the right place. In a lucid dream, you can do almost anything. You can leap over skyscrapers, practice public speaking in front of audiences of billions, and even try holding a female’s hand, no sedatives required!
In order to even begin to get control over your dreams, there are a few preliminary tasks you must complete. But don’t give up. The benefits of learning to lucid dream are remarkable, and they’re all named Yvonne Strahovski.
The Tasks:
The first step is mentioned in another Cracked article (5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness), but here’s a quick long and wordy rundown.
1. Keep a dream journal.
“What?” you screech in disgust, taking your treasured three-month-old hot pocket wrapper out of your pants and throwing it on the floor. “I’m not keeping a diary, least of all one entailing my dreams! What if my wife/kids/new-parole-officer found it? I’d be done for!”
Calm down! A dream journal is not a diary, but a tool. Much like sports cars, chainsaws, and your extensive collection of Icelandic sex mannequins, a dream journal’s job is to make certain tasks easier. In this case, dream journals help in recognizing common patterns in your dreams, and in improving dream recall. Most people remember flashes of their dreams right after waking up, but an hour or so later, their nightly excursions are forgotten forever. Apparently, it’s easier to recall your dreams if you do not move after waking up, because of your motor neurons do not fire as readily and whatnot.
Important tip: Do not use your dream journal as an excuse to tell co-workers about “that weird/bizarre/scary dream you had last night.” This will make them want to hit you in the esophagus. Moving on.
2. Reality Testing.
Your dreams are not unique, and that is a wonderful thing. There are common triggers in everyone’s sleep-time adventures that will alert them of their dreaming state. This is important, since, in a dream, you can think that nothing’s out-of-the-ordinary even when a man with three heads and a giraffe shaped dong passes you on the street. This is where reality testing comes in handy. Reality checking is making a habit of checking whether or not you’re dreaming, while you’re awake. Since you’re the same person with the same habits during your everyday life and your dreams, you will inevitably end up reality testing while you’re asleep. This can tip you off that you’re asleep, so you can have all the dream-sex you could ever want! A few of the more common reality tests include:
Digital Clocks: In dreams, digital clocks make no fucking sense. There are letters in the place of numbers, numerical characters that do not even exist, and more varied clockfuckery. Therefore, a common and effective test is to look at a digital clock and memorize the time, then look away for a second, and then look back at the clock. Did the time go up by one whole second? That obviously means nothing, how could you even begin to think that a single second has any implications at all? But, if the time is significantly different, or if the numbers are now blurry letters, that’s a good indication that you’re dreaming.
Unfortunately, no discovered reality tests involve adorable puppies. Yet.
Looking into a Mirror: This one is similar to the above example. Look into the mirror, let out your cringe of disgust, and then look away for a few seconds before glancing into the glassy surface once again. Has your reflection shed two hundred pounds of flab, and gained that much and more in confidence? You’re probably asleep.
Flipping a Light Switch: Dream electricians are generally pissed off and feeling lazy, so light levels rarely change suddenly in dreams as a result of flipping a switch. So, every few minutes in your office building, flick the lights off and on. Your co-workers will appreciate your mission to better yourself, and will not mind the inevitable seizures and/or constipation that will follow. If light switches aren’t having much of an effect on your room’s lighting, and you’ve confirmed that you have new light bulbs, you may be dreaming.
Wake Initiated Lucid Dreams:
This is an alternate method of lucid dreaming. Instead of figuring out that you’re dreaming from reality testing within the dream itself, you can attempt to directly transfer, while being completely conscious and aware, straight to the dream state. This is not any easier than the above methods. The traditional execution of this method entails swallowing the heart of a bleating virgin goat at the stroke of midnight. Only then, the ancients proclaimed, would you gain power over the unknown dream realm. Considering your affinity for pepperoni hot pockets, that probably would not be all that difficult. There are, however, strategies to make wake initiated lucid dreaming an even easier and less scarring process.
Don’t do this method at your normal bedtime: It’s very hard to transfer into the dream state while sobs of sorrow, anguish, and acute arousal are wracking your body to sleep. It’s best to attempt this method after having already slept for three to seven hours, or before an afternoon nap, according to Wikipedia.
Transfer techniques include: Slowly and methodically counting your breaths, quietly chant your favorite hymns of the dark prince Lucifer, feel your entire body relaxing, envision yourself pooping, slowly and silently, in a dark and far away jungle. Basically, do anything that will keep your mind active while, at the same time, relaxing your body.
There, you have learned how to gain control over your dreams. That’s only the beginning.
It’s hard to concentrate when you’re lucid dreaming. Unlike the painful and limited sorrow that is reality, there are virtually no limits to what you can choose to experience in your dreams. This can lead to distraction, which can lead to you forgetting that you’re dreaming in the first place. Or, even worse, you could find yourself waking up seconds after you realize that you’re dreaming, and missing your wonderful Superman-like flying dream sex experience. Every. Single. Time. Luckily, there are people who study this sort of thing, and there are solutions!
In your dreams, you can wink like Superman too!
When you realize that you’re dreaming, you should:
Rub your hands together: This, according to Wikipedia, engages your attention on the action of rubbing your hands together, ensuring that you do not focus on the sensation of lying in your bed and breaking your dream state. Real life research has shown that rubbing ones hands together prolongs lucid dreams for 90% of people.
Start spinning around like a drunken three-month-old chimpanzee: After having your true desires suppressed by our patriarchal society for so long, and being forced to conform to cruel societal expectations, your new-found ability to freely spin around will overwhelm any other intrusive brain activity. The pure state of ecstatic joy in your brain will be unconquerable. Research has shown that spinning will prolong lucid dreams for 96% of people. It works best to rub your hands together and spin around at the same time. Finally, there’s a use for the very actions that got you beat up in high school!
Lucid dreaming, like all worthwhile activities, has its share of downsides. Unlike most activities, however, one of those downsides has the potential to be utterly pants-shittingly terrifying.
Sleep Paralysis: This doesn’t sound so bad. When you’re asleep, you don’t need to move anyway, right? In fact, if you’d had this a little earlier in life, your mother would have never walked in on you violently humping your Winnie-the-Pooh pillow during that particularly intense dream. Your family would have saved the thousands of dollars spent on therapy, and your shameful passion in life could have been kept private for years to come!
If you’re going to be open about your passion, at least buy attire-appropriate footwear.
Well, despite the relatively harmless name, sleep paralysis is that bad, and it’s a semi-common side-effect of wake initiated lucid dreams. Since, during wake initiated lucid dreams, you are teetering on the edge between wakefulness and dreaming, you have the potential to get stuck in a state of sleep paralysis. This is what Wikipedia had to say about it.
“Sleep paralysis occurs when the brain awakes from a REM state, but the body paralysis persists.”
Now, since we all know that it’s not nearly fun enough to just have full-body paralysis, there is an added aspect of terror. You will have the unique pleasure of experiencing vivid and terrifying hallucinations and, oftentimes, sweeping feelings of dread. You can tell yourself that it will not be scary, since you will be fully aware that those knife wielding midgets are not real, but you’re wrong. Knife wielding midgets, by their very definition, are always terrifying.
Sleep paralysis has an actual function, by the way. It’s not just your body being an asshole. Without it, your mind would have complete control over your body during dreams, and you would constantly thrash around throughout the night, and your family would have to spend tens of thousands on your therapy.
Conclusion: So, that’s one potential consequence, out of nearly infinite possible benefits. Has a single potential risk ever stopped us from exploring an entire facet of life? Yes, yes it has.
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Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn’t want us to know.
But by no means should that stop us from tinkering around in there, using somewhat questionable and possibly dangerous techniques to make our brains do what we want.
We can’t vouch for any of these, either their effectiveness or safety. All we can say is that they sound awesome, since apparently you can make your brain…
So you just picked up the night shift at your local McDonald’s, you have class every morning at 8am and you have no idea how you’re going to make it through the day without looking like a guy straight out of Dawn of the Dead, minus the blood… hopefully.
“SLEEEEEEEEEP… uh… I mean… BRAAAIIIIINNNSSS…”
What if we told you there was a way to sleep for little more than two hours a day, and still feel more refreshed than taking a 12-hour siesta on a bed made entirely out of baby kitten fur? No more sneaking naps at the fry station for you!
It’s called the Uberman Sleep Schedule, and besides having a totally badass name, it’s a way to get the maximum amount of essential sleep for your body without wasting hours of precious time you could be using to work or drink or farm for World of Warcraft gold. The schedule consists of taking six, 20-30 minute power naps, every four hours during the day. Of course, this new sleep pattern blows donkey-dick to get used to, but it’s a price you have to pay to basically extend your waking life by several years.
We’re pretty sure Kramer did this once on Seinfeld. So it’s probably a great idea.
The best way to start it off is to just jump right in. Get to sleep at 8pm, set your alarm for 8:30. Get up, play some Call of Duty, sleep again at 12, alarm at 12:30, and so on. After three or four days of this you will start to get high as fuck because of sleep deprivation, and might just want to kill yourself, but don’t do it! That would be absolutely counter-productive.
By day 10 or so, your brain will say, “Fuck! FINE, we’ll do it your way,” and will adapt to your new superhuman sleep schedule.
When you sleep normally, your body gets only about an hour and a half of REM sleep, the kind of sleep that is thought to be the most important to keeping your brain sharp. While other stages of sleep help your body to heal and grow, the REM sleep is what makes you feel rested.
Of course, sleeping in a bed doesn’t hurt either.
The first few days of adjusting are tough because your body isn’t getting ANY of this REM sleep, and your brain hates you for it. After the third day, or so, your brain figures out that you mean business, and every time you lay down for one of these naps, dives directly into REM sleep in an attempt to compensate for the deprivation. Do some quick math and that’s two full hours of REM sleep, while those who are sleeping normally are only getting an hour and a half.
Before you know it, while the rest of the world snores away, you’ll be up and drawing dicks on their faces.
Yes, that’s right kids! Tell your dealer goodbye and worry no more about winding up naked on the roof of an office building after a bad trip. Now you can be stoned out of your mind by building a homemade deprivation chamber out of some regular, completely harmless household objects.
You are going to need three things: a ping-pong ball, a radio with headphones and a red light.
Step 1: Turn the radio to a station with just white noise (static), and put on your headphones.
Step 2: Cut the ping-pong ball in half and tape each half over your eyes.
Step 3: Turn the red light so it’s facing your eyes.
Step 4: Sit there for at least a half an hour.
Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after.
It’s called the Ganzfeld effect, and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. It’s the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for a while and lose vision, except at a larger scale.
The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain. With all those signals out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations come in. We can’t guarantee they won’t involve, say, the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax, but that’s the risk you take, dammit.
Now, if you want a little more control over your hallucinations…
What if we told you there was a way to make all your fantasies come true? You could have that sports car you’ve always wanted and the daily threesome with Sarah Palin and Cannonball Run-era Burt Reynolds. Hell, we’ll even throw in a few superpowers for your enjoyment.
Welcome to the wonderful world of lucid dreaming.
Most of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to your specifications. While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose, we’ve narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:
Cowboy hat, optional.
1. Keep a Dream Journal
As soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it. Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes certain patterns that only occur in a dream (since most dreams are immediately forgotten) and if they are on paper, you can recall them easily.
2. Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep. Makes sense. For instance you’ve probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie’s mustache as a hang glider.
Just us?
3. The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after. Studies have shown that more people have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up in the morning.
So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the NovaDreamer, a device that detects when you’ve entered REM sleep and then makes a noise that’s supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough to raise your awareness to, “Hey, this is totally a dream I’m having!” levels.
Obviously the big difference between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in Vietnamese, your first thought would be “This is a strange and unusual event that is occurring right now, and I should question my perceptions.” If the same thing happens in a dream, you just go with it.
Yes, Mel Gibson is dressed like Col. Sanders. No, this is not a dream.
In a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything that’s happening because dreaming just doesn’t involve the critical part of your brain. You’re all worried that you’re at work in your underwear, and don’t even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach.
But if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland. If you can perfect the technique of dreaming while not all the way asleep, the next thing you know you’re ordering up a Smurf orgy.
So say you haven’t followed that first step up there and choose to continue sleeping like other mere mortals. A very minor change in your schedule can still let you use your sleep patterns to your advantage, by making you smarter.
No, we’re not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you’re asleep. What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a bunch of information (say, for a big exam), do NOT study right up until time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it.
Note: “Sleep on it” is simply an expression. You can sleep in a bed.
They did a study at Harvard that proved this technique works. Participants were separated into three different groups after being shown images that they were told to memorize. One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20 minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do best, but that would, of course, make a really shitty story.
No, the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst.
Wasting your time, nerds, go to sleep.
Scientists say the ability your brain has to retain information works in three different ways: acquisition, consolidation and recall. While the first and last occur while you’re awake, it’s the middle-man that is important during sleep.
When you sleep, your brain is constantly processing information that you couldn’t have processed with everything going on up there during the day. This works to strengthen your neurological bonds in the brain. Think of it like downloading something on a computer. When you go to download something while your porn is up, it takes longer, right? Close up any applications that are running and you have a smoother, quicker download. Yeah, kind of like that… maybe.
So does this technique work with the “sleep two hours a day” system we mentioned earlier? We’re not sure anyone has tried it, but by our calculations such a person would immediately gain mental superpowers, possibly including telekinesis. Somebody in the comments try it and let us know.
Stop for a moment and recall your fondest childhood memory. Or your worst. In either case, there’s a really good chance that it’s total bullshit.
Memory is a funny thing. Research has consistently found that our memories from when we were kids are either extremely inaccurate, or didn’t happen at all. They are just elaborate constructions of a memory storage system that isn’t very good at distinguishing real memories from fake ones.
Are you positive this didn’t happen?
So what if we told you that there was a way to do this on purpose? To hack your brain into believing (and “seeing” vividly) a completely made-up event that never actually happened?
The trick is you need somebody else to do it for you (or to you). But it takes very little effort, and no Total Recall-style brain-hacking machines.
Or torso mutants.
For instance, in a study in 1995 researchers sat down a group of people and mentioned four incidents from their childhood (gathered from family members) and asked subjects how well they remembered them. What they didn’t mention was that one of the stories (a tale of them being lost in a specific shopping mall) was utter bullshit.
It didn’t matter. Twenty percent came back with sudden memories of the event that, in reality, never happened. The sheer act of asking them if it did, caused them to manufacture the memory, filling in details on the fly.
Remember when Bruce Campbell was President?
Researchers knew they could up that 20 percent figure. In another test, an unsuspecting group of people who had visited Disneyland in the past were placed in a room with a cardboard cutout of Bugs Bunny and/or were shown fake ads for Disneyland featuring Bugs. Afterwards, 40 percent claimed they vividly remembered seeing a guy in a Bugs Bunny costume when they were at Disneyland. They didn’t, of course (Bugs isn’t a Disney character).
Another study took it a step further, and actually Photoshopped a picture of each subject riding in a hot air balloon. When asked if they recalled this non-event, 50 percent said they did. Other experiments successfully convinced people they had at one time nearly drowned, been hospitalized or been attacked by a wild animal.
Your brain kind of plays it fast and loose when it stores memories, and for good reason: Usually the details don’t matter. You remember your best friend’s phone number but don’t remember exactly where and when he told you. You remember that you hate zucchini, but don’t remember what day of the week you tried it. Your brain breaks up memories into a stew of general lessons learned and important stuff you’ll need later.
The problem is that same process makes it very difficult to distinguish real memories from fake ones since the source of a memory is so often discarded in the stew. A fact you think you read in a newspaper might in reality have been read in a fictional novel, or heard from a friend, or dreamed, or implanted by somebody who’s fucking with you.
So not only could somebody do this for you (though it would have to be set up so that you don’t know where and when) but it seems like you could run a pretty successful business just implanting happy childhoods for people.
You know, like that time you found out you were adopted, and that your real parents were the Thundercats.
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Most people only think that there is one way to sleep: Go to sleep at night for 6-8 hours, wake up in the morning, stay awake for 16-18 hours and then repeat. Actually, that is called a monophasic sleep cycle, which is only 1 of 5 major sleep cycles that have been used successfully throughout history. The other 4 are considered polyphasic sleep cycles due to the multiple number of naps they require each day. How is this possible? How is this healthy? Well the most important of every sleep cycle is the Stage 5 REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, which has been shown to provide the benefits of sleep to the brain above all other stages of sleep. When changing over to a polyphasic cycle, the lack of sleep tricks the body into entering REM sleep immediately instead of 45 to 75 minutes into sleep like in the monophasic sleep. This way, you still get the benefits of 8 hours of sleep without wasting all of the time it takes to get to REM cycles, resulting in a much more efficient sleep cycle. Here are polyphasic cycles:
20 to 30 minute naps every 4 hours, resulting in 6 naps each day. The uberman cycle is highly efficient, and usually results in feeling healthy, feeling refreshed upon waking and extremely vivid dreams. Many uberman-users report increased ability to lucid dream as well. However, the rigid schedule makes it near impossible to miss naps without feeling horribly tired. Blogger Steve Pavlina tried the cycle for 5.5 months and had amazingly positive results.He only reverted to monophasic sleep so that he could be on the same cycle as his wife and children. Read his articles and updates on the cycle here.
One longer “core” nap that is supplemented with several 20-30 minute naps. The most successful variations that I have read about are either one 3 hour nap and three 20-minute naps or one 1.5 hour nap with 4-5 20 minute naps, all of which have equal amounts of time in between each nap. This cycle is much easier to adjust to than the Uberman and allows for more flexibity in nap times and in skipping naps when necessary. It is also still extremely efficient compared to monophasic with only 3-4 hours of sleep per day. Many bloggers have tried out this cycle and reported no negative effects on their health.
Bucky Fuller invented the cycle based on his belief that we have two energy tanks, the first is easy to replenish whereas the second tank (second wind) is much harder to replenish. So Bucky began sleeping for 30 minutes every 6 hours. That’s 2 hours a day of sleep! He reported feeling, “the most vigorous and alert condition I have ever enjoyed.” Doctors examined him after several years of using the cycle and pronounced him perfectly healthy. In fact, Fuller only stopped the cycle because his business associates were still stuck on monophasic cycles. This is by far the most extreme of the 4 alternate cycles, but also the most efficient.
Not even worthy of a diagram, the biphasic cycle is basically that of every college student in America. The biphasic cycle consists of sleeping for 4-4.5 hours at night, and then taking a 90 minute nap around noon. So not all that different, still more efficient than monophasic, but not by much.
That completely depends on your lifestyle. Keep in mind that if you decide to switch to either the Dymaxion or Uberman cycles, you will be a zombie from day 3 to around day 10 until your body fully adjusts to the cycle. Here are some other tips I have gathered from reading other people’s accounts:
- Eat healthy, avoid fatty foods and the adjustment will be much easier
- Make sure you have a project to work on during all of your new awake hours as it makes the time go by faster
- Also make sure you have two or three weeks of freedom to adjust to the cycle so that you don’t go to work or school completely dead from sleep deprivation
- Hang in there. Each of the cycles will get exponentially easier all of the sudden after the first 2 weeks or so. Just be patient and diligent! Don’t skip naps or change your nap times around or you will basically have to start your adjustment period over.
- Use natural cues for being waking up from naps like sunlight and loud music, while using darkness and silence for sleep (obviously)
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