Word: sleeps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Doctors have usually been content to leave the subject of sleep to the poets, but now they are being forced to give it increasing attention because, in high-speed modern society, insomnia is leading to an alarming dependence on drugs...
...annual meeting in Glasgow last week, the British Medical Association found the matter pressing enough to open its scientific session with a serious discussion of sleep and the lack of it. Physicians from far-flung Commonwealth countries as well as those from Britain proper squirmed in comfortless, sleep-discouraging seats in garish Kelvin Hall and listened with never a wink or a nod to a panel of experts...
...Geoffrey Jefferson of Manchester, one of the world's top brain surgeons, faced up to the fundamental question of what is sleep, and had to admit that nobody really knows. But it is definitely not the same as unconsciousness: for man it appears to be a conditioned reflex...
Neurosurgeon Jefferson disposed of some medical fallacies, e.g., falling asleep has nothing to do with changes in synapses*- in the nervous system, or a shortage of blood in the brain, or accumulation of lactic acid. Neither is there, as some used to think, a sleep center in the brain...
Instead. Jefferson agreed with research which suggests that there exists a waking center within some nerve cells in the brain stem and basal ganglia called "retic-ular formations." Sleep comes when this waking center is deactivated, probably by enzymes. But how this happens is unknown...