Sunday, February 8, 2009

Thermomodulation and Sleep


Well it’s been a few days since I have updated with a post. The reason is a combination of school, trying to relax a little, and also a massive amount of research that doesn’t ever seem to end or get close. At any rate, the more I research the more I understand and don’t understand about our sleeping lives.

One area that I have been paying particular attention to the last week would be the thermomodulation of our circadian rhythm controls. It seems that current research has been moving into the direction that temperature change has a lot to do with sleep onset as it seems to be one of the first indicators in disassociation. This would be hypothesized that change in body temperature is possibly the first experienced onset of disassociation let that be hypnotic induction, drug induced, or natural dreaming. It has even been hypothesized that this temperature change in our sleep is the biases of why we sleep according to an evolutionary function of the Mid-to-Late Triassic period causing non-uniform condtions for primitive sleep. In order to look more into the correlation of change in temperature to the change in mental states, it would be important to conduct research on things we can control or drug induced research.

A few instances that I have looked at core temperature change with the use of Salvia, MDMA, and DMT. In each experience of disassociation, core temperature change was apparent up to one degree. Drugs that correlate to Kappa receptors reaction (Salvia) show a decrease in temperature along with normal sleep. DMT as well as MDMA show a slight increase in body temperature depending on dose as well as duration of the psychedelic.

What we can take from this information as well as past research is that circadian temperature control is very important to our lives and how we operate. A slight change in this control can lead to serious problems and possibly of the onset of a psychological episode. I obviously have a lot more research to conduct in this area, including research into temperature change in hypnosis stages as well as mediation induced temperature changes. Still I think that something in this information is well worth being noted.

References:
Rogers, N. L., Bowes, J., Lushington, K., & Dawson, D. (2007). Thermoregulatory changes around the time of sleep onset. Physiology & Behavior. 90(4), 643-647.

Shiloh, R., Munitz, H., Portuguese, S., Gross-Isserof, R., Sigler, M., Bodinger, L., Katz, N., Stryjer, R., Hermesh, H., & Weizman, A. (2005). Corneal temperature in schizophrenia patients. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology. 8(4), 537-547.

Strassman, R. J., Qualls, C. R., & Berg, L. M. (1996). Differential tolerance to biological and subjective effects of four closely spaced doses of N,N-dimethyltryptamine in humans. Biological Psychiatry. 39(9), 784-795.

Inoué, S., & Honda, K. (1999). Vitamin B-sub(12) promotes sleep and modulates the circadian rhythm of sleep and brain temperature in rats. Sleep and Hypnosis. 1(2), 98-104.

-L

1 comment:

  1. Well, while I’m still scouting out information, I certainly agree that there seems to be something going on with core temperature change in relation to the onset of altered states. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for more info. It would really be nice if we could at least find some common ground that all of these states share. Who knows, perhaps temperature change is a great place to start ☺.

    -R

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