Why Babies Don’t Sleep Through the Night
I can shoot a running millipede with a BB gun from a dozen feet away.
I couldn’t do this before my son was born.
Shooting isn’t even a hobby I would have come to on my own. It’s my father’s hobby that I tried on a lark one
afternoon a couple years ago. As it turns out, using buckshot to shatter a single or pair of orange disks cruising at 50
mph feels an awful lot like doing a half-hour of yoga.
Last May my son was born, and I made a quick, drastic career change from high school teacher and administrator to
at-home parent. That fall, I went shooting for the first time since becoming a father.
Despite not having shot for over half a year, that first time back I hit 80 percent of my clays -- better than what I'd
been shooting before Otto was born. And I picked up all of my doubles.
A few weeks later I was pouring tea from a teapot when the handle unexpectedly broke off. I caught the pot as it fell
and set it onto the counter without spilling a drop or burning myself.
#
Since my son’s birth, something has been happening to my brain.
I sleep less, but have less trouble staying awake. I eat less. I have less stamina -- physical and mental -- but more
endurance. My hearing has been deteriorating for years, and although I often cannot make out what's being said to
me from across a mildly noisy room, I can pick up the first ragged in-breath preceding my son's scream, even when
he is sleeping in his bassinet in our bedroom and I am in my basement office with music playing.
My memory skips and stutters like a scratched CD. At the end of the day I can't remember what I did in the morning,
but old memories come to me now unbidden, dredged up by long strings of associations that had never linked before:
water running into a red mug inexplicably brings to mind a stretch of road that runs in front of a Des Moines Catholic
church I once slept in, a woodcut in a book of Grimm’s fairytales reminds me of a school bus conversation I had
when I was eight.
I've been dreaming in Spanish, a language I’ve neither spoken or studied in almost a decade.
I can no longer estimate time, either how much has passed, or what time of day it is.
My taste in music has changed. And I've begun to be able to play melodies by ear, something I could never begin to
do before Otto’s birth.
I explained all of this to a close friend, as of yet unmarried and childless, and he replied:
This explains why most people with babies can only talk to other people with babies: Mentally, they've become a new
species. They’ve leveled. They’re now level 5 grown-ups who can cast all sorts of new spells involving home-
ownership and thriftiness.
#
At one time the reigning scientific view was that, unlike the rest of our bodies' cells, neurons do not regenerate: you
are born issued a finite set, you wire them up throughout your youth, and are stuck with them until the bitter end.
Most of us were taught this in school and work under the assumption that our brains are a kind of engine, akin to Eli
Whitney's cotton gin: raw notions and sensory data go in, the brain threshes and grinds and presses that information,
and out drops a world-view and beliefs and skills. The engine's basic design parameters -- will it be good at math? at
reading sheet music? at stringing together words? -- are laid out immutably in our genes, and the machine gets built
during our childhood and adolescence. Some of its operation can be tweaked and optimized by chemical additives --
hormones, pharmaceuticals, caffeine -- but its functions are set: a grain harvester will never be a '64 Impala, a
Picasso will never be a fry-cook, a drunken ne’er-do-well never a president.
It's long been accepted that when a woman gets pregnant and gives birth, her whole system gets a hormonal wash-
and-rinse that softens ligaments, relaxes muscles and elevates her mood in preparation for her baby’s coming. The
Mommy Brain by Katherine Ellison even lays out five ways in which a mother's brain is optimized by the action of
hormones, resulting in increased sensory perception, efficiency, resilience, motivation and emotional intelligence.
This is all well and good for my wife, who’s had the benefit of relaxin, estrogen, oxytocin, but what about me?
What’s happening to my brain?
First off, scientists are increasingly discarding those old notions about neuron regeneration. We now know that
neurons grow on daily basis, forming new connections. This isn’t tweaking, as the hormone adrenaline tweaks the
heart into beating faster; these are gross structural changes in the brain, as if adrenaline might cause the heart to
suddenly have more chambers. Our brains, as it turns out, are plastic, which is to say that they are easily molded by
our experiences and environments.
Secondly, the one physiological change that both parents share is disrupted sleep. Sleep deprivation has profound and
cryptic effects on the brain. For example, sleep-deprived individuals generally show a rapid collapse in math skills and
recall, a collapse documented by observably decreased activity in their parietal lobes (for math work) or hippocampus
(when being asked to dredge up a memory). But those same sleepy folks show greater activity in the prefrontal
cortex than their well-rested counterparts. The prefrontal cortex is the structure that coordinates information coming
in from all over the brain and gives us our most human quality: the ability to compare the eventual outcomes of
various courses of action, to make a plan, and then to delay gratification in the service of an eventual long-term
reward. Our capacity to feel guilt or remorse is bound in the folds of the prefrontal cortex, as is our ability to interpret
reality. During the Cold War, sleep deprivation was recognized as a non-violent way to effectively disassemble a
subject’s sense of personal autonomy.
Sleep deprivation is the reset for the brain. When our regular sleep patterns are disrupted much of the brain goes
dark, but the prefrontal cortex -- the part of our body via which we sense Gods and Culture and Religion and Law
and Justice -- goes into overdrive. Our narcissistic obsession with our own needs, goals and identity unravels,
making space for a new structure to determine how we assign value and use our scarce resources.
Human beings might experience bouts of sleeplessness in many situations: working long hours to bring in a crop,
carousing all night during a celebration, participating in a psychological experiment, or a war, or being tortured -- all
can mean lost sleep. There are plenty of times that a human might be deprived of sleep, but only one life-passage
where he or she is always deprived of sleep: the arrival of a new human.
My son -- your sons, your daughters -- do not sleep through the night because for hundreds of thousands of years
the babies who did not sleep through the night triggered the reset in their parents’ brains, sculpting those brains into
faster, more accurate, more sensitive instruments, instruments more accessible to the world, willing to forgo their
individual autonomy for a greater collectivism, to knit a new sense of self. These sleepless babies with sleepless
parents thus had a greater chance of living on to adulthood, living long enough to have their own babies who would
likewise not sleep through the night, who would likewise reprogram their parents’ brains, who would likewise
suddenly wake to see how much more important we is than me.
Our babies don’t sleep because they are knitting us new brains, accurate enough to kill the monster in a single shot,
quick enough to catch before the falling have fallen, sensitive enough to hear the snap of a twig out beyond the ring
of the fire’s light, perceptive enough to finally hear the way that the notes in a song stitch together.
David Erik Nelson
From Spring 2007 Issue II
I can shoot a running millipede with a BB gun from a dozen feet away.
I couldn’t do this before my son was born.
Shooting isn’t even a hobby I would have come to on my own. It’s my father’s hobby that I tried on a lark one
afternoon a couple years ago. As it turns out, using buckshot to shatter a single or pair of orange disks cruising at 50
mph feels an awful lot like doing a half-hour of yoga.
Last May my son was born, and I made a quick, drastic career change from high school teacher and administrator to
at-home parent. That fall, I went shooting for the first time since becoming a father.
Despite not having shot for over half a year, that first time back I hit 80 percent of my clays -- better than what I'd
been shooting before Otto was born. And I picked up all of my doubles.
A few weeks later I was pouring tea from a teapot when the handle unexpectedly broke off. I caught the pot as it fell
and set it onto the counter without spilling a drop or burning myself.
#
Since my son’s birth, something has been happening to my brain.
I sleep less, but have less trouble staying awake. I eat less. I have less stamina -- physical and mental -- but more
endurance. My hearing has been deteriorating for years, and although I often cannot make out what's being said to
me from across a mildly noisy room, I can pick up the first ragged in-breath preceding my son's scream, even when
he is sleeping in his bassinet in our bedroom and I am in my basement office with music playing.
My memory skips and stutters like a scratched CD. At the end of the day I can't remember what I did in the morning,
but old memories come to me now unbidden, dredged up by long strings of associations that had never linked before:
water running into a red mug inexplicably brings to mind a stretch of road that runs in front of a Des Moines Catholic
church I once slept in, a woodcut in a book of Grimm’s fairytales reminds me of a school bus conversation I had
when I was eight.
I've been dreaming in Spanish, a language I’ve neither spoken or studied in almost a decade.
I can no longer estimate time, either how much has passed, or what time of day it is.
My taste in music has changed. And I've begun to be able to play melodies by ear, something I could never begin to
do before Otto’s birth.
I explained all of this to a close friend, as of yet unmarried and childless, and he replied:
This explains why most people with babies can only talk to other people with babies: Mentally, they've become a new
species. They’ve leveled. They’re now level 5 grown-ups who can cast all sorts of new spells involving home-
ownership and thriftiness.
#
At one time the reigning scientific view was that, unlike the rest of our bodies' cells, neurons do not regenerate: you
are born issued a finite set, you wire them up throughout your youth, and are stuck with them until the bitter end.
Most of us were taught this in school and work under the assumption that our brains are a kind of engine, akin to Eli
Whitney's cotton gin: raw notions and sensory data go in, the brain threshes and grinds and presses that information,
and out drops a world-view and beliefs and skills. The engine's basic design parameters -- will it be good at math? at
reading sheet music? at stringing together words? -- are laid out immutably in our genes, and the machine gets built
during our childhood and adolescence. Some of its operation can be tweaked and optimized by chemical additives --
hormones, pharmaceuticals, caffeine -- but its functions are set: a grain harvester will never be a '64 Impala, a
Picasso will never be a fry-cook, a drunken ne’er-do-well never a president.
It's long been accepted that when a woman gets pregnant and gives birth, her whole system gets a hormonal wash-
and-rinse that softens ligaments, relaxes muscles and elevates her mood in preparation for her baby’s coming. The
Mommy Brain by Katherine Ellison even lays out five ways in which a mother's brain is optimized by the action of
hormones, resulting in increased sensory perception, efficiency, resilience, motivation and emotional intelligence.
This is all well and good for my wife, who’s had the benefit of relaxin, estrogen, oxytocin, but what about me?
What’s happening to my brain?
First off, scientists are increasingly discarding those old notions about neuron regeneration. We now know that
neurons grow on daily basis, forming new connections. This isn’t tweaking, as the hormone adrenaline tweaks the
heart into beating faster; these are gross structural changes in the brain, as if adrenaline might cause the heart to
suddenly have more chambers. Our brains, as it turns out, are plastic, which is to say that they are easily molded by
our experiences and environments.
Secondly, the one physiological change that both parents share is disrupted sleep. Sleep deprivation has profound and
cryptic effects on the brain. For example, sleep-deprived individuals generally show a rapid collapse in math skills and
recall, a collapse documented by observably decreased activity in their parietal lobes (for math work) or hippocampus
(when being asked to dredge up a memory). But those same sleepy folks show greater activity in the prefrontal
cortex than their well-rested counterparts. The prefrontal cortex is the structure that coordinates information coming
in from all over the brain and gives us our most human quality: the ability to compare the eventual outcomes of
various courses of action, to make a plan, and then to delay gratification in the service of an eventual long-term
reward. Our capacity to feel guilt or remorse is bound in the folds of the prefrontal cortex, as is our ability to interpret
reality. During the Cold War, sleep deprivation was recognized as a non-violent way to effectively disassemble a
subject’s sense of personal autonomy.
Sleep deprivation is the reset for the brain. When our regular sleep patterns are disrupted much of the brain goes
dark, but the prefrontal cortex -- the part of our body via which we sense Gods and Culture and Religion and Law
and Justice -- goes into overdrive. Our narcissistic obsession with our own needs, goals and identity unravels,
making space for a new structure to determine how we assign value and use our scarce resources.
Human beings might experience bouts of sleeplessness in many situations: working long hours to bring in a crop,
carousing all night during a celebration, participating in a psychological experiment, or a war, or being tortured -- all
can mean lost sleep. There are plenty of times that a human might be deprived of sleep, but only one life-passage
where he or she is always deprived of sleep: the arrival of a new human.
My son -- your sons, your daughters -- do not sleep through the night because for hundreds of thousands of years
the babies who did not sleep through the night triggered the reset in their parents’ brains, sculpting those brains into
faster, more accurate, more sensitive instruments, instruments more accessible to the world, willing to forgo their
individual autonomy for a greater collectivism, to knit a new sense of self. These sleepless babies with sleepless
parents thus had a greater chance of living on to adulthood, living long enough to have their own babies who would
likewise not sleep through the night, who would likewise reprogram their parents’ brains, who would likewise
suddenly wake to see how much more important we is than me.
Our babies don’t sleep because they are knitting us new brains, accurate enough to kill the monster in a single shot,
quick enough to catch before the falling have fallen, sensitive enough to hear the snap of a twig out beyond the ring
of the fire’s light, perceptive enough to finally hear the way that the notes in a song stitch together.
David Erik Nelson
From Spring 2007 Issue II
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| In the last several years a wealth of reading on neuroplasticity has hit store shelves. For further reading, you might want to check out: |
Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley Mindset: The New Psychology Success by Carol Dweck The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M. Schwartz & Sharon Bagley |
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