Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness by Austin James H

Author:Austin, James H. [Austin, James H.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 1999-06-03T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 14 Sleep cycles on two successive nights, before and after LSD

In the top graph, the subject descends, in “staircase” fashion, through the four stages of normal sleep. She is then awakened (vertical line) in the act of receiving an inactive placebo (small upward arrow). On the next night, at bottom, she is again awakened out of stage 4 sleep to receive 30 micrograms of LSD. At this point, she begins the LSD study, again in the waking state (W), at time zero.

The thick black horizontal bars indicate when each subsequent episode of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep began and how long it lasted. Note that most REM episodes enter at times when she is considered to be in stage 1 (REM) sleep as judged by electroencephalographic (EEG) criteria (vertical axis). The other thin lines, plotted in stepwise fashion, reflect the stages, from 1 to 4, through which the EEG evolves as she descends from shallower (1) into deeper (4) levels of slow-wave S-sleep.

This subject’s total sleep time averaged just over seven hours on each night. However, after LSD she spent more time in REM episodes. After LSD, REM periods took up 31 percent of her total sleep time, but only 19 percent of the time during the first, placebo control night. Note, too, that after LSD the long black bar of her second REM episode is (a) displaced earlier; (b) almost three and one-half times as long as the corresponding REM bar after the placebo. Moreover, many micro-REM episodes burst into sleep for several hours after LSD takes effect, especially after the fourth hour. (Redrawn and modified with reference to figure 5 of J. Muzio, H. Roffwarg, and E. Kaufman: Alterations in the nocturnal sleep cycle resulting from LSD. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology 1966;21:320.) with permission from Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd, Bay 15 K, Shannon Industrial Estate, Co. Clare, Ireland.

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