Who Needs Sleep?

None of you realise it yet, but this is an advance as big as the step the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump called sleep, it’s nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives. For the first time Man will be living a full twenty four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight hour peep show of infantile erotica…

Sometimes Neill’s aggressiveness surprise him; it was almost as if he regarded sleep itself as secretly discreditable, concealed vice. What I really mean is that for better or worse, Lang, Gorrel and Avery are now stuck with themselves. They’re never going to be able to get away, not even for a couple of minutes, let along eight hours. How much of yourself can you stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get the shock of being yourself. What happens if they get fed up with themselves? - J. G. Ballard, Manhole 69

Nap or more coffee? I ask myself this question several times a day. Like everyone else, I’m in sleep debt and the interest rate is a bitch. A few months ago, University of Pennsylvania researchers published a report in Nature making a hypothesis about sleep’s real function. They studied the sleep-like state known as “lethargus” of roundworms, observing that sleep is ubiquitous in nature. It enables nervous system plasticity — better performance, better memory, physical and mental wellness. In other words, sleep defrags your hard drive. Eight hours is the 8GB RAM stick you can install every night.

cbale_machinist.jpgBut it sure becomes a bother when there is so much more to be done. My favorite short story, Manhole 69, quoted above, is about a team of scientists trying to enable a 24-hour day. Read it and you will never consider even ripping off the telephone number from coffee shop flier to volunteer for a sleep study. But if you’ve seen The Machinist, you’ve already resolved to get at least 6 hours, if not 8. Curiously, the director of that film asked Christian Bale to starve himself for the role, while in fact, sleepless people tend to grow more obese (again, due to the neural plasticity, malfunction of the “hypocretin neurons” means one’s appetite never shuts off.) Sleep depravation so rapidly affects your endocrinology, you could be in a pre-diabetic state within several days.

On 60 Minutes, Leslie Stahl talked with Matthew Walker, of the University of California-Berkeley Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab, who says after five days deprived sleep, lab rats started to die. She also toured a sleep lab where the volunteers, mainly college students, were shown graphic disturbing images. The control group, who rested, had minimal response in the amigdula (the part of the brain that controlls emotions,) but the sleep-deprived had hyperactive brain activity. Participants described the unclean and slow feeling, like “moving through molasses.” Skin feels tight around the mouth and dirty, even after several showers.

Yet, for about $9,000 comp for four weeks of procedures, these volunteers made out better than the sad sacks who appear in “Solitary” on the Fox Reality Channel, where as Nick Douglas says, “they couldn’t even get as famous as a Blind Date contestant,” and only one of several walks about with 50k.

The most amazing thing about sleep is that evolution actually put us in danger — interrupting our consciousness — in order for us to experience it. Still, “polyphasic sleepers” try to hack it. Claudio Stampi, founder (and sole-proprieter?) of the Newton, MA-based Chronobiology Research Institute says you can get by on 20-minute nap every four hours, but I wouldn’t trust any place with so minimal a web presence. Polyphasic sleep advice is right here, and the web communities seem almost like pro-ana.

randygardner.jpgIn 1964, Randy Gardner, then a 17-year-old high school student, went 264 hours (about 11 days) without sleep. It was just a benign science fair idea that blew out of proportion. Prior to that, radio DJ Peter Tripp went 8 days without sleep inside a glass booth in Times Square. He also experienced extreme hallucinations and psychosis, but was taking drugs to keep at it. Several people, like Tony Wright last year, claim to have beat Gardner’s record, but they were not under constant, careful observation. David Blaine is considering an attempt. “The idea came to me during a sleepless night,” he said. Recently, Britney Spears went 100 hours without sleep. Now do you see why sleep is necessary? Kindly then, get some rest tonight. If not for yourself, than for the people around you.

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Posted by Joanne on Mar. 18, 2008 Tagged: , , , , , , ,

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