The microbes that live in your body outnumber your cells 10 to one. Recent studies suggest these tiny organisms help us digest food and maintain our immune system. Now, researchers have discovered yet another way microbes keep us healthy: They are needed for closing the blood-brain barrier, a molecular fence that shuts out pathogens and molecules that could harm the brain.

We've all heard about the right brain-left brain theory, which we owe to Nobel Prize winner Roger W. Sperry. The theory suggests that ‘left-brained’ people are more logical and analytic than ‘right-brained’ people, who are more creative and have a holistic approach to life, but is it true? Despite its popularity, researchers say that most people learn to be both logical and creative and that lateralised patterns of brain activity change as we age. ...

Researchers have found that chronic sleep loss is more serious than previously thought and may lead not only to loss of brain cells, but to irreversible physical damage. According to this study, people who don’t sleep enough can also be at risk of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Researchers have shown that people who believe they've slept well and "deeply", even when they didn't, perform better on tests than those who're told they slept badly. So simply believing you had a good night's sleep can improve performance.

Scientists have worked out why your eyes move when you’re dreaming. Scientists have known for decades that the rapid eye movements (REMs) that occur during sleep signal that we’re dreaming, but what do the individual eye motions really represent? It’s long been hypothesised that each movement of the eye reflects new visual information in our dreams, and now for the first time researchers have demonstrated that this is actually the case. According to a new study by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, each flick of the eye that occurs during REM sleep accompanies the introduction of a new image in our dream, with the movement essentially acting like a reset function between individual dream "snapshots".

Source: http://www.sciencealer ...