The Unified Theory of the Nervous System
and Behavior
Cognitive Philosophy /Brain Theory by Steven Michael Harris
Sleep Loss May Cause Weight Gain (ABC News, Dec. 7, 2004) (Link retired)
A lack of slumber alters hunger hormone levels and boosts appetite, a new study finds.
This concept that an association between anything studied and hormone levels that are observed to change in response needs to be addressed. Is it the carrot or the horse? Could they know for sure. Hormone levels change in the body very quickly, up and down, but hormone levels that change through the intervention of a pharmaceutical don't have that flexibility. The body has no ability to change the levels down when the level is increased by a drug. Drugs are unnatural to the body and the reference to hormone levels in putting together any study that should be observing many changes caused by something studied (in this case it is sleep deprivation) is a reference designed to promote the drug culture, to promote the drug companies and the “theories” that articulate support of their interests.
Also inherent in this topic of sleep is the topic of stress. Sleep is a shutdown of major portions of the nervous system to give active sites a rest in activity so that settings of the transmitters can be adjusted to make them collectively more responsive to excitatory influences than before the rest period. It is the removal of stress.
And let's face it: all stress is associated with weight gain. Mental disorders are caused by stress and there is more obesity in the population with mental disorders. Other sicknesses cause weight change. Stressful events cause changes in diet. Stressful drugs cause weight gain. Lack of sleep is a way of increasing stress.
"That is the major finding, that we identified the mechanism by which sleep loss affects appetite. The changes in hunger are proportional to the changes in the hormones," said study author Eve Van Cauter, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago.
This study would have more useful meaning if they had studied other kinds of stress to see if other varieties of stress show correlations with hormone changes (and remember that these changes in the hormones are statistical and measuring averages that changes the meaning when the body is making constant adjustments).
The point of mentioning this press release is that it is necessary to notice what the basic events are that happen in the brain and then it is easier to make the right correlations between observations and theory. Narrow focus of statistics makes it look like sleep is uniquely associated with weight change (and the changes in hormone levels is given credit) but if such changes in habit occur while getting sleep but under other kinds of stress (and major increases in stress happen to change sleep habits and decrease sleep anyway) then the conclusion of this study is on the wrong topic. Stress is much more inherent in the way the system works and much less particular (in relation to hormones, for instance) than the doctors currently suggest. You can be stressed by lack of sleep, inherent genetic settings, life events, drug abuse, aging; it is a long list. All of these forms of stress will affect eating and weight.
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Many of the problems of medicine, biology, psychology and philosophy require an understanding of the basic mathematical principles behind how the nervous system does what it does to achieve function and experience, and that mathematics is not explained using narrowly-focused statistics. Understanding how this math works will be the tool for the discovery of many answers of great importance to humanity. The case for this concept and the offering of an explanation of this kind of math is made in the many essays of this website.
On these pages you will find ideas that should haunt you. Included are new concepts in science, medicine, sociology, evolutionary psychology, philosophy and more...
This website and the podcasts of Everyone's Revolution explain how the brain creates the mind, but many side issues must be resolved in order to teach this material. Once you realize that the "hard problems" are really the first problems to be answered, you then have a tool for changing all of science and medicine by explaining a massive number of discoveries that will fall into line in order to unify the evidence. All of the evidence is good. The interpretations of the evidence are mistaken in many cases. For ten years now there have been new discoveries of evidence that all move in the direction of supporting this theory (or this school of many theories) and its predictions. Quite a few people have started to pay attention to this theory as well.
