That sounds like the beginning to a really deep post, doesn't it? 'Fraid it won't be, though. Nevertheless, I do have a lecture on sleep today, and I think it's incredibly fitting. I haven't been getting the best sleep of my life over the past few months (big surprise there, right?). In fact, my relationship with sleep mirrors that of most Americans - I don't get enough. It all started back in high school -while I was studying world history, actually. I hadn't done all of the reading for the next day, and I realized with a dawning, life-changing moment of clarity, that I could simply stay up and work. That was the beginning of everything; I began to relish those quiet, lonely wee hours. I liked the fact that there would be no one awake but me. Of course I stayed up late playing video games and watching TV, but the soft silence of those hours completely changed the way I studied - I conditioned myself to be able to focus better after dark. In college, my best papers were written after 2 am. The other edge of that sword, though, is that people simply work best during the day - and my nighttime habits are perhaps a contributing factor to my ending up at a Caribbean medical school. I won't mince words - I partied too much - but implicit in my thinking that I could study better at night, after everyone else had gone to bed, was the sense that there was always time to work on things.
That spiraled out of control a bit - I didn't have a high-enough anxiety level to push me to work harder. I'd wait until night came to work on things. There was, however, one time in my life when I made absolutely sure to get 9 hours of sleep a night - during the summer of my sophomore year in undergrad, I worked as a phlebotomist. I was fortunate enough to be trained directly by the lab director at the hospital, rather than spending a lot of time on the certification course. It felt like real medicine, and that made things a bit more realistic for me - I was determined to get it right. I felt that I couldn't go in there and miss stick and stick, and I noticed an obvious correlation between how rested I felt and how well I performed. Thus, I slept peacefully that summer, and got to the place where I felt that I could draw blood with my eyes closed.
Undergrad continued, and with it the late nights and the quiet focus that lives in darkness and stillness - nothing had changed. Now i find myself in medical school, where I'm more dependent than ever on the effective shuffling of tiny details from short term memory into long term memroy, and the neural synthesis that only comes from substantial REM sleep. I see my classmates staying up long into the night to go over things, but here I've come to appreciate the fact that, in order to do well on the tests, I need a certain level of familiarity with the information - I need to see it with a certain clarity and transparency. I simply cannot reach that level if I stay up into the wee hours; it won't work if I don't sleep. Perhaps it's the 8 am classes every day - sure, I had to be up at the same time for my work at the health plan, but that didn't require the same level of cortical functioning. For me, now, the wee hours are after 8pm.
Now, my saying that I've cultivated a greater respect for sleep doesn't mean that I get enough, but I'm working on it. I know that I shouldn't watch TV just before going to sleep, because I need to be my brain to release melatonin - which it does in the dark. I need this sleep like I've never needed it before - I depend on it. I can thank Nicole in part for this ideological shift; the girl loves sleep like I love caffeine.
Our sleep lecture is next; right now, the professor is talking about neurotransmitters and how he rescued a cat poisoned by strychnine.
Recently, I read Almuric by Robert E. Howard - author of the Conan series. Apparently, he was good friends with H.P. Lovecraft -another one of my favorite authors. I miss reading for fun, but I guess I can take pleasure in reading about the thyroid gland. Psch....right.
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