10 Things you didn't know about sleep

264 Hours is the longest Documented stretch that anyone has stayed awake

In 1964, a San Diego student named Randy Gardner stayed awake without any kind of stimulants for 11 days, experiencing phantom sounds and visions the longer he went without sleep. When he finally fell asleep, he slept for nearly 15 hours. No long-term ill effects were reported.

Artififial lights have changed our natural sleeping patterns

 

 Without them, we would sleep in two blocks each night. We would fall asleep around 10pm and wake up a few hours later, going back to sleep after an hour. Psychologist Thomas Wehr found people revert to sleeping this way if isolated from artificial lights for more than a few weeks.

Some animals only send half their brain to sleep

In dolphins and whales, for instance, this gives them the ability to surface for air and be on the lookout for danger while still technically sleeping. Ducks are also able to sleep with one eye shut and one-half of their brains asleep, allowing some of the birds to stand watch while others in the group rest.

Female sleep is the key to a happy marriage

Psychiatrist Wendy Troxel of the University of Pittsburgh recently found that a woman’s ability to fall and stay asleep had a greater impact on marital satisfaction than her daily interactions with her husband. The same effect was not found for men in relationships.

Sleeping rhythms can affect sport performance

Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Maine found that circadian rhythms  the natural cycles that govern when we’re awake and when we’re sleepy have an ‘outsized effect’ on professional sports: athletes at their peak circadian rhythms have an unseen advantage over their opponents.

Therapy may be better treatment for insomia than sleeping pills

Psychologist Charles Morin of Laval University in Quebec found that people who used cognitive behavioural therapy to deal with sleepless nights reported much better overall sleep quality than those treated with sleeping pills alone.

The world have vastly different sleep patterns

Jodi Mindell of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Avi Sadeh of Telaviv University found that 95 per cent of babies in Vietnam sleep in their parents’ bed, compared to 15 per cent in Australia. In New Zealand, the average bedtime for an infant is 7.30pm; in Hong Kong, it’s 10.30pm.

Dreams tend to follow well defined patterns

In his lifetime, Calvin Hall, a psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, collected more than 50,000 dream reports from anyone who’d share them. Using Hall’s database, researchers identified that we tend to dream about the things that make us anxious. Adults tend to dream about other adults, while children are more likely to dream of animals.

Sleep may help us to learn new skills

 After having people play the video game Tetris before they went to sleep, Robert Stickgold of Harvard Medical School found that test subjects tended to dream about the game that night. Those subjects who dreamed about the game showed the most dramatic improvement once they played it again the next day. 

 

16-19°C is the ideal temperature for a good night's sleep

 Research in Lille, France arrived at this figure for someone sleeping in pyjamas and covered by sheets. If they sleep naked, the ideal temperature jumps to 30-32ºC.