The History of Sleep | Hacker News Reader

The History of Sleep

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26 pointsdiodorus11 comments

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'Segmented sleep' is total and utter bullshit. It never existed.

I find this an interesting meme that has polluted the web quite well.

There is no science to back this up, but people are happy to take medical science from one historian.

Humanity really is cursed by group stupidity.

http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/4559/were-our-an...

If Ekirch's findings are really so contentious and dubious, then it's on the doubters to challenge his claims. The very fact that there hasn't been any shows that the science of sleep is a sadly neglected field.

I find it interesting most exchanges just don’t work. The fact the person who is being questions is the ‘best’ response is not a good sign for a skeptic exchange :)

Funny, I came to the comments to say the same. Segmented sleep is a theory all from writings of a "second sleep". I imagine for some small groups this may have existed but seems extremely unlikely as a normal behavior.

BBC went as far as to write "The Myth of the 8 hour sleep" http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783 without citing any anthropologist or medical insight.

I imagine however, prior to modern society, humans took naps more often, especially in agrarian societies after particularly laborious days.

Why would it be 'extremely unlikely as a normal behavior'?

1) Are you a sleep researcher? Links to research? 2) Do you have ANY proof/citations to back your claim? 3) To call ANYTHING in history 'utter bullshit' and 'never existed' is the kind of BOLD CLAIM that professional historians are known to undertake only with a large background of research behind them. Do you have the extraordinary backing for your extraordinary claims? 4) You call humanity stupid. Considering 1, 2, and 3, would you consider toning down the language? EVEN IF you had ALL THE EVIDENCE IN THE WORLD to support you, that would sound mean. Considering you present none, would you agree with the assessment this is an unnecessarily arrogant and 'negative' comment that really doesn't deserve to be in this otherwise generally respectful and civilized forum?

edit: spelling.

I'm sorry but group think is a serious issue. And this is a major attack on basic science. We are swapping in wife's tales for fact.

You mightn't think it doesn't matter on this issue, but it does. Sleep is an incredibly important part of our lives and has major health ramifications.

This split sleep idea, comes up again and again and again and is stated as fact without even question, there's no 'one theory thinks'. This is an insane way for us to be acting in the age of science.

It is obviously fiction. There's 7 billion people on earth. 2.5+ billion people on less than $2 per day. Over a billion without electricity. You don't get much more medieval than that but we have to rely on cold reading documents hundreds of years old?

If it was a one off then I mightn't care. But it's common form on the web for many topics. We need to find a way of stopping it.

If I sounded mean to be heard, then so be it, I'm happy to be downvoted, that's what downvoting is for, changing behaviour.

Hopefully people will see there's upvotes to be had and move in with nicer ways of saying it or prove me wrong and get even more up votes. Anything that's gets us out of these topics based solely on magic.

There's a big difference between Ekirch's biphasic sleep model and the pseduoscientific polyphasic sleep lifehack popularized on the internet.

If this theory is really so corrosive and wrong, why have no other experts attacked it?

Roger Ekirch is a historian.

Why has no scientist confirmed it?

Group think is my theory.

I wake and stay awake for an hour or 2 in the middle of my sleep (what you probably mean by segmented sleep) in the winter when the nights are long. (I usually read on the web or maybe do some light programming. I try to avoid heavy programming because too much mental effort tends to make it hard to get back to sleep.) When the nights get shorter, it becomes more likely that on a night picked at random that my sleep will occur in one contiguous block.

Most nights I sleep in a room much darker than most bedrooms because I blocked the window with opaque materials (Dennyfoil and aluminum-foil tape). That is relevant because the accounts of segmented sleep that I have seen or heard postulate that it is light pollution or in other words the invention of the light bulb that caused most people to stop waking in the middle of their sleep. Before I covered the windows with the opaque material, I probably slept right through the night even during the winter months. (I say "probably" because I'm not sure because it was about 18 years ago when I covered the window.)

I sleep one or two nights a week in a room (at my girlfriend's place) with only ordinary blinds and consequently with much more light coming in through the windows, and I am just as likely to wake for an hour or (more typically) two there than I am in my much darker bedroom, which leads me to believe that it is mostly habit that decides whether there will be period of awakeness in the middle of any particular night. So for example, a person who is in the habit of sleeping through the night should not expect to shift immediately to a "segmented" pattern of sleep on his or her first night in a very dark room.

I should add that after the sun goes down, I usually employ measures (namely Flux.app and System Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts > Accessibility > Invert colors, a.k.a., shift-option-command-8) to minimize my exposure to artificial light that might interfere with my sleep.

I totally agree that there exists people with sleeping patterns of all different types, it is interesting you sleep this way, thanks for sharing.

I’m not sure on the light pollution thing matching though. I thought the ‘theory’ wasn't about while sleeping, but more about before sleeping .

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