Life Time

What makes a good scientist is the speed at which preconceptions are abandoned in the face of new knowledge

their arms and legs about, but some individuals can experience sleep talking, shouting, screaming or even physical violence. Unfortunately, RBD is most often acted upon after harm has been caused to a sleeping partner.41 A famous, and widely reported case in the UK media, involved Brian Thomas, a ‘decent and devoted’ husband who strangled and killed his wife while on holiday. In his dream he was attacking an intruder, but in reality, and very sadly, it was his wife. The Crown Prosecution Service accepted he had not been in control of his actions and the jury at Swansea crown court were ordered to acquit Thomas. The only thing that Mr Thomas remembered of his dream was the break-in by an intruder.

In the 4th century BC, Plato argued that we are able to see because light emitted from the eye and that this light seizes objects with it's rays. This was the "extramission" theory of vision, and as bizarrely as it seems to us today, until the 1500s this was the widely held view in Europe of how the eye worked. To his credit Aristotle (384-322BC) was one of the first to reject the extramission theory of vision, arguing in favour of the "intromission" theory, whereby the eye receives light rays rather than projecting light into the world. Sadly, this eminently sensible theory from the ancient world was not embraced. Even Leonardo da Vinci in the 1480s first supported the extramission theory, but after dissecting the eye in the 1490s, he switched to the intromission theory. early observations by Islamic physicians, notably Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, who lived from 965 to 1040 AD and is known in the West as Alhazen, documented that the pupil dilates and contracts in response to different levels of light and that the eye is damaged by strong light. He used these observations to argue correctly that light enters the eye and that light is not emitted from the eye.

I mentioned that during REM sleep we experience our most complex and vivid dreams. It is during this time that projections from the mid-brain to the spinal cord cause paralysis (also called ‘atonia’), from the neck down. This is thought to prevent us from acting out our dreams. Support for this idea comes from a condition known as REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD), where there is no or little atonia during REM sleep. I will discuss this in more detail later, but RBD is an early sign of the future development of Parkinson’s disease.40 At one end of the severity scale of RBD, individuals just move

melatonin

Physics is like sex; sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.