Deans' stroke musings: Microsleep: How Your Brain Can Fall Asleep for Seconds Without You Noticing

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Microsleep: How Your Brain Can Fall Asleep for Seconds Without You Noticing

I'm sure this occurs a lot in stroke survivors. What is your doctor doing to combat this?
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/microsleep-brain-fall-asleep-seconds-noticing/story?id=35304495

If you're exhausted and in the need to zone out, you might actually be grabbing bits of down time called "microsleep."

The phenomenon can occur most readily when a person is sleep-deprived, when their brain is primed to switch into sleep mode at any second. While a person can appear awake and even have their eyes open, their brain may have slipped into sleep mode, maybe reaching the first or second level of sleep.

Dr. Ilene Rosen, a sleep expert and associate professor of clinical medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, explained if a person appears "zoned out" they might actually be catching some Z's.

"They might have been thinking about nothing," Rosen explained. "Something brings them back to focus attention."

Dan Childs, managing editor of ABC News' Medical Unit, stayed up for 50 hours straight this week -- 40 hours of it on the "Good Morning America" livestream, which was part of a slate of events to commemorate the 40th anniversary of "GMA."

During that period, Dr. Steven Feinsilver at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, found evidence that Childs' was slipping in an out of consciousness after just a few minutes of sitting quietly. That becomes evident when a person is hooked up to an EEG scan to look at their brainwaves.

Certain brain waves called theta waves showed how quickly a person could be "asleep," Feinsilver said.

Microsleep episodes usually last a few seconds and the person often isn't even aware that the microsleep occurred. It can be dangerous especially if a person is driving, a few seconds of microsleep and a person can miss a red light or not notice a curve in the road, according to the National Institutes of Health.