The myth of the eight-hour sleep
We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
His book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
Much like the experience of Wehr’s subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
“It’s not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.
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Nothing like a “fair and balanced” news organization to give you the unbiased truth.
A deer dog peering over the wall, looking for Becky
Leland Stanford, the former Governor of California in 1872, offered Eadweard Muybridge $25,000 if he could find the answer to something that Stanford had bet on against several others in the horse racing world: When running or trotting, is there ever a moment when a horse has no hooves on the ground? Stanford thought the answer was yes, but most thought he was crazy.
This was Muybridge’s picture that proved Stanford right… there is a moment when a horse’s hooves are ALL off the ground.
Ran Hwang, 2008
The way movies were before people wanted to sit and stare for hours.
For Rebecca on a very gray day, internally and externally.
