"Sleep We Have Lost" | Hacker News Reader

"Sleep We Have Lost"

history.vt.edu

48 pointsdel_operator9 comments

I may not understand what this page is. Is it simply a collection of quotes presented out of context? (for instance, any of these quotes might on the next page of the original work be refuted by the same person, and so their value is unknowable without significant additional work, making the aggregation as a useful resource questionable at best).

Are you confused because that resource doesn't try to convince of you of any particular standpoint, omitting contrary positions in the process, and instead gives you a collection of thoughts and viewpoints on the matter?

In my opinion this is vastly more "useful" than the alternative: This is a nice overview and invites you to dive deeper into any of these sources.

Edit: Though after skimming over the rest of them, most of them seem to be referencing pretty much the same thing. I can kind of see what you found odd.

Edit 2: Definitely looks like this is just a list of commentary specifically about the work of Roger Ekirch, who is is also the owner of that site - definitely might be biased (as in not an exhaustive list) then.

It seems to be a collection of references to this article: http://www.academicroom.com/article/sleep-we-have-lost-pre-i...

I think the site is intended as marketing for the article, like the quotes from reviews that appear on the backs of books. Of course the article itself is not linked very prominently, so this is kind of hard to figure out.

> from the dawn of literature in ancient Greece until well into the Industrial Revolution it was customary for us to snooze for a few hours, wake and toddle around doing chores in the middle of the night, and then go back to bed until morning.

I've read this a few times. I think it may not necessarily be a bad thing that we get all of our sleep in one continuous block. It may have been as vestigial behavior from our ancestors -- fearing predators and other threats.

The advent of artificial light has brought lots of benefits but it clearly has some big drawbacks wrt sleep.

The "two sleeps" thing is entirely about long nights far away from the equator. It never really happened in tropical climes, or during summer.

Cheap lighting has simply allowed people away from the equator to sleep in the more natural pattern, if you grant that humans are less adapted to cold climes than to tropical ones.

I hate articles like this. Studies of hunter-gatherer tribes isolated from the rest of society [1] show that, without technology, humans sleep for 6 to 8 hours in one chunk, starting a few hours after sunset, exactly as we do today. The only difference is that they don't get insomnia.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many...

The irony of reading this at 2:16am pt...

This might not be a problem with screens using only red, or at least omitting blue and green components..

Yes, currently watching the world blitz chess championship (started at 03:00 pt). Amazing performance by 15-year-old Andrey Esipenko, currently with 8 points in 12 rounds (6 wins and 4 draws against grand masters) tied for 9-19 places with others including world champion Magnus Carlsen.

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