Not straying too far from last week’s entry, I decided to keep Pop Psychology within Kanye West’s inner circle. Kid Cudi’s first single is a bit of a surprise hit, considering that this time last year, Cudi was only known by the most diehard mixtape enthusiasts. Not only has the man played a hand in the three most successful songs off West’s 808’s and Heartbreaks, he has fully embraced the rap lifestyle by announcing he would retire from hip-hop after the upcoming release of his debut album (better known in the rap world as “pulling a Jay-Z”). Fortunately, he has since rescinded his alleged retirement.
Cudi’s first single, “Day n Night,” has had a very solid debut, peaking at #18 in the Billboard Top 100. The song details Cudi’s 1-2 punch of loneliness and insomnia, as the video depicts the Ohio rapper working the night shift at a convenience store. Of course, it’s a rap video, so Cudi is met with a barrage of very attractive women who have no problem dancing for a complete stranger. It’s hard to distinguish whether the women actually appear in the store or if they are instead a figment of his tired and overworked imagination. In the simple yet catchy chorus, Cudi repeats:
The lonely stoner seems to free his mind at night.
He’s all alone through the day and night.
The lonely loner seems to free his mind at night.
It’s apparent that Cudi is embracing his nocturnal lifestyle. Unfortunately, some new research has shown that consistently working at night can have some serious consequences. A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is practically a replication of Cudi’s video (minus the stripping, natch). In the experiment, led by Harvard’s Frank A.J.L. Scheer, 10 participants were put on a schedule that would gradually “disrupt their circadian rhythms,” which basically just means they would shift their biological schedule 12 hours out of phase so as to sleep during the day and work at night.
On this new schedule, it took only eight days for the researchers to spot some alarming changes in their participants’ health. Sleep efficiency decreased, blood pressure rose and the release of the hormone cortisol was severely disrupted. However, the most striking findings dealt with the body’s production of insulin. The 10 “night-shift” participants now made more insulin, yet their blood sugar continued to rise. In essence, this new schedule was making the participants seem as if they had diabetes, which should definitely make the graveyard shift sound less sweet (pun heavily intended). So it’s apparent that Cudi’s late-night job may provide him with a steady stream of pleasurable fantasies, but it will also take a serious toll on his health. Our bodies are finely tuned to coordinate with a natural day, and tinkering with this arrangement can have some dangerous consequences.
An interesting tangent here concerns the neurological roots of circadian rhythms, or what part of the brain is responsible for keeping track of the separate functions that need to occur during the day or night. Most evidence points to an area found right in the middle the brain called the pineal gland as being the brain’s day planner. For some reason, Descartes became a huge fan of the pineal gland, even writing that the gland was “the seat of the soul, and the place in which all our thoughts are formed.” Sure, Descartes might be going a little overboard here, but for a man writing in 1640, his understanding of the pineal gland’s importance in human life is pretty impressive. Descartes got a lot of things wrong (see: dualism), but, in this case, he is not too far off. As is evident from these unfortunate night-shift workers, defying the pineal gland is a dangerous move. Work at your own risk, Cudi.
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