post 184

By anders pearson 06 Nov 2000

one thing that i’ve wondered about for a long time and never really found a satisfactory answer to is why we need to sleep. there really doesn’t seem to be any real, easily verified function to sleep.

UCLA’s Basics of Sleep Behavior starts out as: “in spite of a century of scientific study of sleep, including three decades of modern intensive research, the function of sleep remains a biological enigma.” and then goes on to list several different theories on the matter. nothing there actually seems to be a compelling explanation of why we need to sleep. the best we can do, it seems, is to explain why we sleep in evolutionary terms: the reduced energy consumption and reduced degree of exposure to predators would give organisms that sleep an evolutionary advantage in many situations. but now that food is more or less abundant and i very rarely run into tigers wandering the streets of manhattan, it shouldn’t be necessary.

if we could explain it as “the body only produces certain hormones during sleep” than we would be able to synthesize those chemicals. and i don’t buy the “your brain needs to rest” explanation that people try to give when they haven’t really thought about it for very long. Nikola Tesla, according to his autobiography, slept about 2 hours a night for his entire adult life. Leonardo Da Vinci reportedly took a 15 minute nap every 4 hours and otherwise didn’t sleep at all. The UCSD School of medicine has even found that brain activity is increased by sleep deprivation.

why are we not researching methods of conquering sleep with the same intensity that we work on curing Aids and cancer? curing cancer will extend a percentage of people’s lives by a few years, and then only at the end. conquering sleep will effectively extend ALL our lives by 33% (assuming 8 hours a night of sleep; far more than i get…) and not just when we’re old. that’s 33% more of our youth as well.