What insomniac fruit flies tell us about the importance of a good sleep
A variety of studies, some quite bizarre, have shed light on the importance of sleep and what happens if we don't get enough
If you're reading this after a long night's sleep, maybe catching up on some shut-eye after being awake too long on weekdays, ponder this: Nasa is funding research into extremely long sleep. Sleep of a bizarre kind, that is.
The study is being conducted by US firm SpaceWorks Enterprises, and aims to see if it is viable to put humans into a torpid state for long space flights, like a trip to Mars that could last 180 days. Subjects are chilled from the inside out using cooling pads and a nasally inhaled coolant, then hooked into an intravenous drip to supply nutrients. The metabolic rate falls by up to 70 per cent, and to date subjects have "slept" for up to seven days.
For earthbound folk, extended sleep does not deliver benefits, but can even be harmful, with the latest research suggesting the optimum nightly sleep for adults should be around seven hours. You may be unsurprised to learn that Hong Kong is among places where too many people are sleep underachievers, with a 2012 study led by Dr Wong Wing-sze, an associate professor at the department of psychological studies at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, reporting that some 2.2 million adults suffer from insomnia, and the average amount of sleep was just 6.46 hours.
While Dr Wong's study was conducted via phone interviews, sleep research has involved wide-ranging, sometimes bizarre methodology.
Though we spend almost a third of our lives asleep, sleep science did not really begin till 1953, the same year the structure of DNA was discovered. Dr Nathaniel Kleitman and one of his students, Dr Eugene Aserinsky, became the first scientists to report rapid eye movement (REM) during sleep. Another of Kleitman's students, Dr. William Dement, later made the association between REM and dreaming - though it has since turned out the two do not always occur together.
We are certain of the need for sleep partly thanks to experiments conducted in the 1980s by University of Chicago researcher Allan Rechtschaffen. He deprived rats of sleep for up to 32 days, by which time they all dropped dead - though it could be the cause was not actually sleeplessness, but hypothermia, wrecked immune systems, brain damage or extreme stress.