The fact that every person needs 7-8 hours of sleep per day is quite known. But what you did not know about sleep is that most scientific information on the subject have been discovered in the last 25 years. We present some of them here.
- The record for longest time spent without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours and 40 minutes. In this interval, the owner of this record has had hallucinations, blurred vision, difficulty speaking, lack of concentration, and even paranoia.
- It is impossible to know if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. That’s because people can get a good sleep even with eyes open.
- Although until recently it was believed that dreams occur only during REM sleep (rapid eye movement) can also appear during the non-REM type, just there are of shorter duration.
- REM sleep dreams are strange, and what happened in non-REM sleep are closer to reality, without too much imagination (eg dream about late at work or somewhere you forgot your cell phone).
- Some eye movements during REM sleep may be similar to those that occur when watching a movie.
- Elephants stand up when they enter in the non-REM sleep status, and lie down when they enter in REM sleep.
- Some researchers believe that the reason we dream is to lock in long-term memory experiences that deserve to be preserved. Others believe that dreaming about aspects that may be forgotten because they are not important (to avoid duplication of memories and memory overload).
- Specialists from the Ministry of British Defence have managed to reset the internal clocks of some soldiers, to be able to withstand 36 hours without sleep. Some optical fibers embedded in special glasses that projecting around soldiers retina a light similar to that produced by sunrise, makes them feel they just woke up. The system was used for the first time pilots in the United States.
- Oil spill in 1989, which occurred after the sinking of the ship Exxon Valdez in Alaska, dismemberment of the space shuttle Challenger just a few tens of seconds after launch and the nuclear accident at Chernobyl were attributed to human errors in which sleep deprivation played a role.
- A certain hormone called adrenocorticotropin, plays an important role in the difficulty awakening each person depending on how stressful it is waking up.
- Even a few small rays of light from a digital clock can disrupt sleep even if you do not wake up fully.
- People sleep on average three hours less than other primates like chimpanzees and baboons, who sleep about 10 hours a day.
- Ducks that feel threatened by predators are able to combine the need for sleep with maintaining survival instinct, half of the brain awake while the other goes into a sleep state.
- Experts believe that one of the most tempting distractions from sleep is able to access the Internet 24 hours of 24.