End of Life and Saving Souls: Should a Desire for Converts Influence End-of-life Ethics?

In 1 Timothy 2:3, Paul states “God our Savior… wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (NIV). In keeping with God’s desire for the salvation of all, Christians should work towards that goal. From an evangelical Christian perspective, upon death, the status of one’s soul is fixed, bound either for heaven or hell. This perspective should deeply influence our interactions with unbelievers, not only encouraging us to share the gospel, but also giving us an incentive to delay their physical death. Indeed, according to 2 Peter 3:9, the reason God is delaying the final consummation of all things is because “he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.” Similarly, Christians should desire to avoid taking away an individual’s chance at salvation. This argument can be a powerful (though not necessarily all-trumping) argument against killing, often used in the context of pacifist or anti-death penalty argumentation, but I contend this argument is also an important consideration for end-of-life ethics in a medical context

Abnormal Locus Coeruleus Sleep Activity Alters Sleep Signatures of Memory Consolidation and Impairs Place Cell Stability and Spatial Memory

Sleep is critical for proper memory consolidation. The locus coeruleus (LC) releases norepinephrine throughout the brain except when the LC falls silent throughout rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and prior to each non-REM (NREM) sleep spindle. We hypothesize that these transient LC silences allow the synaptic plasticity that is necessary to incorporate new information into pre-existing memory circuits. We found that spontaneous LC activity within sleep spindles triggers a decrease in spindle power. By optogenetically stimulating norepinephrine-containing LC neurons at 2 Hz during sleep, we reduced sleep spindle occurrence, as well as NREM delta power and REM theta power, without causing arousals or changing sleep amounts. Stimulating the LC during sleep following a hippocampus-dependent food location learning task interfered with consolidation of newly learned locations and reconsolidation of previous locations, disrupting next-day place cell activity. The LC stimulation-induced reduction in NREM sleep spindles, delta, and REM theta and reduced ripple-spindle coupling all correlated with decreased hippocampus-dependent performance on the task. Thus, periods of LC silence during sleep following learning are essential for normal spindle generation, delta and theta power, and consolidation of spatial memories