Word: sleepings
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Whatever combination of exotic or mundane things sleep turns out to be for, researchers admit they still don't know the ideal amount of it needed to keep our bodies and brains in good working order. "There's this enormous commercial push now to convince people that if they don't get eight hours of sleep a night, there's something wrong with them," Siegel says. But in fact, there's more mythology than substance to the eight-hour figure. Back in the 1980s, a survey of more than 1 million people found that those who slept more than...
Some of the most provocative sleep research doesn't have anything to do with the brain at all. A few years after researchers isolated a natural hormone they called leptin, which tells the brain that the body has enough fatty tissue, Eve Van Cauter and her colleagues at the University of Chicago began to wonder whether sleep deprivation has any effect on the amount of leptin in the blood. They soon discovered that after just a couple of days in which 12 male volunteers were allowed to get only four hours of sleep a night, their leptin levels fell sharply...
Besides, the findings don't take into account the quality of sleep you get. Although surveys suggest that we get less sleep than folks did a century ago, that's not necessarily a problem. "Our sleeping environments are better than they ever have been," says Jim Horne, director of the Sleep Research Center at Loughborough University in England. In Victorian workhouses, to give just one example, folks used to sit on benches and drape themselves on long ropes, called hang-overs, to sleep. They must have got used to it, Horne says. Indeed, the sleep system can be very flexible...
...much sleep should you get? Most researchers take a decidedly practical stance. "If you feel sleepy the following day," says Dr. Pierre-Hervé Luppi at the University of Lyons in France, "if you have episodes of sleepiness or a feeling of major fatigue throughout the day, it means you're not sleeping enough." You don't have to know what sleep is for to know that it's good for you. --With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Simon Crittle/New York, Helen Gibson/ London and Grant Rosenberg/ Paris
...says. "When you get home late like that over and over again, then you just can't fall asleep as easy. So you stay up an hour. Then an hour becomes two hours. Then the next thing you know, the sun's coming up as you're going to sleep." Eventually, Warren says, "you start to realize it's daytime and you could be doing something with your time, like schoolwork or whatever. Now it's easy to stay up. I can go a day and a half without sleep as long as I keep my mind active. Sleep becomes...