In the early 1990s, a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, took a group of ordinary subjects offall forms of electrical lighting for one month in order to determine if modern humans still carried within them the traces of a prehistoric mode of sleep. At week three, the subjects in Dr. Thomas Wehr’s study all began waking after four hours of sleep to a two-hour period of quiet rest before falling asleep again for another four. During the gap between those two sleep segments, the subjects experienced a condition of profound peace.Wehr could find no precedent for this in the scientific literature. It was a state having “an endocrinology all its own.”
Eventually, Wehr discovered that prolactin was involved. Prolactin is the hormone that keeps mammals still and at rest when they are asleep. Its levels also rise in nursing mothers when their milk lets down, keeping them calm and attentive to their babies’ needs. Nowadays it is called “the attachment hormone” because of its role in the bonding of infants with their mothers.
The prolactin levels in Wehr’s subjects should have fallen when they woke in the middle of the night. But they didn’t. They remained stable throughout that two-hour period of wakeful, quiet rest.
The only thing Wehr could find that was comparable to those two hours was the state experienced by advanced meditators. But there hadn’t been any meditators in his study. The participants were simply ordinary people who had agreed to go off artificial lighting for one month.
This story is from the January/February 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the January/February 2023 edition of Spirituality & Health.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.