So what happens to we're asleep? Despite the fact that we spend a good portion of our lives fast asleep (around a third), most of us aren’t really aware of the fact that we experience different stages of sleep and different times of the night. Sleep is a vastly complicated science, and a typical night of sleep consists of just five sleep stages. Though sleep can also be divided into two broader stages, non-rapid eye movement (NREM), and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. The vast majority of our sleep (around 75 to 80 per cent) is NREM; during NREM sleep, dreams tend to be more abstract and quite vague, whereas during REM sleep dreams are more detailed and emotionally charged. During a nights sleep,every 90 to 110 minutes you cycle through five different stages of sleep, often experiencing anything between three to five dreams each night.
Stage One:Within a few minutes of falling asleep your breathing gradually becomes more steady and the heart rate begins to slow down. Your brain produces what are called alpha and theta waves (alpha waves are involved in relaxing you while theta waves are involved in your emotional experience) and your eye movements slow down. This stage of sleep is fairly brief, lasting up to seven minutes. This is where you are in light sleep stage, meaning that you’re somewhat conscious and can be woken easily. Stage Two: During this stage your muscle activity decreases further and your awareness of the outside world begins to fade away. As a sleeper you would not likely be conscious enough to notice any outside stimuli. During this stage, which is still also fairly light, the brain produces sudden increases in brain wave frequency known as sleep spindles (sleep spindles are bursts of brain activity visible on an EEG monitor). Shortly after your brain waves begin to slow down. Stage Three: Deep, slow brain waves known as Delta Waves begin to emerge during this stage (Delta waves are associated with relaxation and healing). This stage transitions you from a light sleep to a deep sleep. Stage Four: This is a deep sleep that lasts for roughly 30 minutes producing more delta waves. Your body begins to perform restorative functions such as tissue and muscle growth, energy restoration and memory consolidation where your brain files away any new information. Stage Five: Most dreaming occurs during this stage known as REM. REM sleep is defined by the eye movement, increased respiration rate and an in increase brain activity. REM sleep is also referred to as paradoxical sleep because, while the brain and other systems in your become more active, your muscles become more relaxed to the point of paralysis. Dreaming occurs due to an increase in brain activity, though your voluntary muscles become paralyzed. Voluntary muscles are the muscles you can consciously move such as moving your arms and legs or tensing your abdominals. Involuntary muscles are the muscles you do not have conscious control over such as your heart or your inner gut. Muscle paralysis during this stage of sleep is a function to prevent you acting out your dreams whilst you're sleeping.
As you may know body language is more complex than it seems at first glance. This is because reading body language has so many nuances and subtleties you have to account for such as context, culture, mood, level of comfort, baseline behavior etc. The list can go on. For example a country and its culture can have a wide range of facial expressions, body movements, and hand gestures that can signal particular emotions and feelings but go from one country to another and those same gestures and expressions can get lost in translation. Take a look at these 10 quick and interesting facts about body language and see if you learn something new. Because body language is often nuanced and subtle with wide variations of expression you'll always learn something new. There are also experts who professionally study and research in reading body language, and even they can’t always read and interpret body language correctly. It just goes to show how complex human beings can be! We hope you enjoy this list of interesting body language facts.
1. Amazingly woman have a wider range of peripheral vision which allows her to look at a man’s body from head to toe without even getting noticed. A male’s peripheral vision on the other hand is not as good. This is why a man would typically move his gaze up and down a woman’s body which is very obvious and can wind up with the man getting caught.
2. Britain, similar to a lot of Northern Europe and the Far East, is labelled as a “non-contact” culture where there is little physical contact in their daily interactions. The Middle East, Latin America, and Southern Europe are considered “high contact cultures” where physical touch is a part of everyday socializing.
3. Covering the eyes or "eye blocking" such as prolonged blinking, lowering the eyes for a longer than usual period are all powerful signals that portray confusion, disbelief or disagreement.
4. Custom officers often notice that passengers who point their feet toward the exit while talking to the officer to make their custom’s declaration are more likely to be hiding something they should have declared in the first place. 5. Research shows that whatever we’re feeling first shows up in our body before entering our conscious minds microseconds later.
6. Kissing and romantic touch releases Oxytocin in the brain. It is a hormone that strengthens the emotional bond between the two people.
7. Similar to how a dog will expose its throat to show submission or surrender, humans use their palms to show that they are harmless and not threatening.
8. It has been noted that in stores thieves will try to hide their physical presence by restricting their motions by hindering their head exposure by raising the shoulders and at times lowering the head. Otherwise most people walk around the store with their arms quite free and active and their posture upright.
9. Squinting is a motion that can be very brief, just fraction of a second, but it can often signal negative thoughts or emotions. We tend to squint when we are angry or when we hear sounds, or music or even voices we don’t like.
10. Even when a person is standing still, a person’s body is always telling a story. For more free and interesting tips on body language, click to get our free Body Language Guide here
First named by the psychologist Robert Rosenthal; The Pygmalion Effect is where the someone who is in a position of leadership has expectations of someone to perform a task well and can encourage them to actually meet those high expectations and display higher levels of performance compared to if there wasn't any expectations at all. Conceptually it is similar to having Confirmation Bias where expected behaviors are shaped creating an expected outcome. An example of the The Pygmalion Effect is in an office setting where Supervisor A is considerably favorable to one of his office workers and has high expectations him to do well in any task that is given to him. This office worker in response thrives under his supervisors leadership and does his utmost to live up to his high expectations. It motivated him to work harder and to do his best.
Then then another supervisor comes along, Supervisor B. Things changed when Supervisor B replaced Supervisor A. Supervisor B did not think so highly of this favorable office worker. In fact, it would be safe to say he didn't think very highly of him whatsoever. Eventually Supervisor B's low expectations became a reality. The office worker made mistakes and didn't seem to have the same pride in his work he did when Supervisor A was in charge, his mind went blank whenever he was asked questions, his confidence evaporated along with his motivation. His performance suffered in Supervisor B's presence. What seemed to have happened was the office workers good performance was encouraged by Supervisor A's high expectations and because he worked well Supervisor A would praise him on his good work which would spur this office worker to keep perform well again. And this would cycle over again and again. The opposite would happen with Supervisor B would have little to no expectations of the office workers performance causing him to behave accordingly, having a similar cycle.
Psychologist Robert Rosenthal performed a study which proved that if teachers were led to expect a higher level of performance from students, then these students performance would improve accordingly. A selection of students in a California school in the 1960s were given a disguised IQ test. The teachers were told at the start of the study that some of their students could be expected to be "intellectual bloomers" that year, performing better than expected compared to the other classmates. The bloomers' names were revealed only to the teachers. At the end of the study, all students were again tested with the same IQ-test used at the start of the study. True enough the experimental group the "intellectual bloomers" performed higher than the other students keeping in mind that they were chosen at random. The conclusion of the study was that the teachers may have without realizing that they had given the supposed academic bloomers more personal interactions, more positive feedback, approval, and other positive gestures, such as nods and smiling as a result of having higher expectations. On the other hand, teachers would may have paid less attention to low-expectancy students, seat them farther away from teachers in the classroom, and offer less reading and learning contributing to a poorer learning experience.
The power of the Pygmalion effect, can be used for better or for worse in the classroom, in the workplace, in the military, and elsewhere.
Out of all the relationships throughout our lives whether it's a friendship, parent/child relationship or a romantic relationship one of the most unique and powerful bonds we may have is the relationships with our siblings. Our siblings are usually the ones that we share our life journey's with from a young age all the way across to our adult years and during that journey you experience the ups and downs, family woes, jealousy and hostility towards each other, competitiveness, joint responsibilities and most of all the joys of being part of a family unit.
Jeffrey Kluger a science writer and author of the book The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal about Usspeaks in this video about not only the common characteristics and behaviours of individual siblings in a given family but he also talks about how parental influences effect how siblings develop and interact to gain attention by cultivating their individual roles within the
family household. A particularly interesting segment of the talk is where he speaks about parents and sibling favouritism, he briefly speaks about how opposite gender resemblance is a common factor when parents have a favourite child whether the parents know this or not; for instance the hard headed father may favour the no nonsense daughter because he see's a little of himself within her or the soft speaking mother may favour the quietly spoken son because of their similarities. Kluger describes it as a sense of reproductive narcissism from the parent to their favourite. This is a very profound talk from a very good speaker who cites some of the studies based on the topic of sibling bonds, it generally is a topic which would likely relate to most people, a great talk and very interesting overall.
