Migrating Birds take Powernaps

Many people find that taking a fifteen minute powernap during the day can help improve their productivity and maintain their energy level. As it turns out, animals also use powernaps to keep them on their migratory schedule.
A recent study published in the journal Animal Behavior found that birds take hundreds of powernaps all day long, each one lasting an average of just nine seconds. This information helps explain the mystery of how birds are able to fly for many long hours during their migration with little time for rest.
The team of scientists from the Bowling Green State University in Ohio studied Swainson's thrushes, which fly up to 3,000 miles from Canada and Alaska to Central and South America each autumn, only to return north in the spring. The birds fly mostly at night and rest during the day. Scientists observed caged thrushes for a year and recorded their sleep patterns and found that during their migratory seasons, they reverse their sleep patterns to stay awake at night.
The thrushes were found to take two types of powernaps, which the scientists termed "unilateral eye closure," during which the birds rest one eye and one half of their brain while the opposite eye and side of the brain remain awake and alert; and "drowsiness," in which the eyes are partially shut but some visual processing is still performed.
If you co-sleep with your baby, this type of semi-consciousness may sound very familiar to you. Many new mothers claim they remain completely aware of their surroundings when they are sleeping with their child nearby. These mothers say that, particularly while co-sleeping, they can sense the child's presence and hear any noises that might alert them to a problem. While they are able to get some sleep, their senses remain awake all night.

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When Faced with a Big Decision, Don't Think

When faced with a really big decision, some people make lists of pros and cons, while others talk it out with their best friend, but a new study suggests that listening to your unconscious mind may be a better way to arrive at a conclusion.
The research, performed at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, found that our conscious mind can only consider a small amount of information at one time, so when it is faced with a lot of data, it has to ignore a significant percentage, which can result in an unsatisfactory decision. Therefore, it appears our conscious mind should only be trusted with simple decisions, such as what to have for lunch.
In the study, scientist Ap Dijksterhuis and his colleagues tested 80 people both in the lab and at furniture and department stores. The participants were provided with information about a number of products and asked to make decisions about simple and complex purchases, such as which shampoo, furniture, or car to buy. In one test, half the test subjects were asked to think about the information they were provided and then choose which item to buy among similar products. The other half were shown the same information but were given a series of puzzles to perform, such as anagrams and arithmetic. When the puzzle session ended, the participants were asked to make snap decisions about which product to buy.
"We found that when the choice was for something simple, such as purchasing oven gloves or shampoo, people made better decisions - ones that they remained happy with - if they consciously deliberated over the information," says Dijksterhuis, "but once the decision was more complex such as for a house, too much thinking about it led people to make the wrong choice. Whereas, if their conscious mind was fully occupied on solving puzzles, their unconscious could freely consider all the information and they reached better decisions."
However, the unconscious mind does appear to need some guidance when making decisions. "It was only when people were told before the puzzles that they would need to reach a decision that they were able to come up with the right one," Dijksterhuis concluded. If the test subjects were told that the product information they had been shown before the puzzles was unimportant, they failed to make satisfactory choices.
"At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously, and we're not very good at it. We should learn to let our unconscious handle the complicated things."
So what exactly is the unconscious mind? Read more:

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