This New Yorker essay on sleep explains why I have stopped sending emails at 3 a.m. so as to avoid comments that gently coerce me into sleeping like a normal person.<\/p>\n
\nWolf-Meyer refers to the practice of going to bed at around eleven o\u2019clock at night and staying there until about seven in the morning as sleeping \u201cin a consolidated fashion.\u201d Nowadays, adults are expected to sleep in this manner; anything else\u2014sleeping during the day, sleeping in bursts, waking up in the middle of the night\u2014is taken to be unsound, even deviant. This didn\u2019t use to be the case. Until a century and a half or so ago, Wolf-Meyer observes, \u201cAmericans, like other people around the world, used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day.\u201d They went to bed not long after the sun went down. Four or five hours later, they woke from their \u201cfirst sleep\u201d and rattled around\u2014praying, chatting, smoking, or making love. (Benjamin Franklin reportedly liked to spend this time reading naked in a chair.) Eventually, they went back to bed for their \u201csecond sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
She (writer Elizabeth Kolbert) identifies two kinds of people, what researchers refer to as larks (early risers) and owls (late sleepers), both of whom suffer, in their own way, due to the overly uniform nature of our culture. One must get up too early to go to work, the other must stay up too late for a social life.<\/p>\n
I used to say it was my goal to sleep only a quarter of my life (sleep is for the weak, I’ll sleep when I’m dead, etc etc etc), and maybe it’s killing me slowly (or not so slowly) to pursue this ambition. One experiment reported here was to keep rats awake days on end; after a couple weeks they keeled over. Tellingly, though, this experiment yielded little real insight into the mystery.<\/p>\n
\nBut Rechtschaffen and Bergmann could never figure out the precise cause of the rats\u2019 deaths, and so, they wrote in a follow-up paper in 2002, even \u201cthat dramatic symptom did not tell us much about why sleep was necessary.\u201d Rechtschaffen has observed that \u201cif sleep doesn\u2019t serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This New Yorker essay on sleep explains why I have stopped sending emails at 3 a.m. so as to avoid comments that gently coerce me into sleeping like a normal person. Wolf-Meyer refers to the practice of going to bed at around eleven o\u2019clock at night and staying there until about seven in the morning as sleeping \u201cin a consolidated …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/910\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnestes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}