{"id":3397,"date":"2019-09-18T18:02:00","date_gmt":"2019-09-18T11:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/?p=3397"},"modified":"2019-10-02T18:11:58","modified_gmt":"2019-10-02T11:11:58","slug":"why-do-we-sleep","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/2019\/09\/why-do-we-sleep\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Do We Sleep?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Importance of Sleep for Urban Society<\/span><\/h2>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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People sleeping on a commuter train in Tokyo, where \u2018inemuri\u2019 (being present while sleeping) is common practice. Source: Alamy\/Theguardian.com<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Sleep is seen as interrupting life, but the real scourge is chronic sleeplessness. In Japan, about 40 percent of the population sleeps less than six hours a night. A full night\u2019s sleep now feels as rare and old-fashioned as a handwritten letter. We all seem to cut corners, fighting insomnia through sleeping pills, guzzling coffee to slap away yawns, ignoring the intricate journey we\u2019re designed to take each evening.<\/p>\n

Around 350 B.C., Aristotle wrote an essay, \u201cOn Sleep and Sleeplessness,\u201d wondering just what we were doing and why. For the next 2,300 years, no one had a good answer. In 1924 German psychiatrist Hans Berger invented the electroencephalograph, which records electrical activity in the brain, and the study of sleep shifted from philosophy to science. It\u2019s only in the past few decades, though, as imaging machines have allowed ever deeper glimpses of the brain\u2019s inner workings, that we\u2019ve approached a convincing answer to Aristotle.<\/p>\n

Everything we\u2019ve learned about sleep has emphasized its importance to our mental and physical health. Our sleep-wake pattern is a central feature of human biology\u2014an adaptation to life on a spinning planet, with its endless wheel of day and night. The 2017\u00a0Nobel Prize\u00a0in medicine was awarded to three scientists who, in the 1980s and 1990s, identified the molecular clock inside our cells that aims to keep us in sync with the sun. When this circadian rhythm breaks down, recent research has shown, we are at increased risk for illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and dementia.<\/p>\n

There is further evidence that sleep is essential for maintaining a healthy immune system, body temperature, and blood pressure. Without enough of it, we can\u2019t regulate our moods well or recover swiftly from injuries. Sleep may be more essential to us than food; animals will die of sleep deprivation before starvation, says Steven Lockley of Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital in Boston.<\/p>\n

Yet an imbalance between lifestyle and sun cycle has become an epidemic. \u201cIt seems as if we are now living in a worldwide test of the negative consequences of sleep deprivation,\u201d says Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School. The average American today sleeps less than seven hours a night, about two hours less than a century ago. This is chiefly due to the proliferation of electric lights, followed by televisions, computers, and smartphones. In our restless, floodlit society, we often think of sleep as an adversary, a state depriving us of productivity and play. Thomas Edison, who gave us light bulbs, said that \u201csleep is an absurdity, a bad habit.\u201d He believed we\u2019d eventually dispense with it entirely.<\/p>\n

Insomnia is by far the most common problem, the main reason 4 percent of U.S. adults take sleeping pills in any given month. Insomniacs generally take longer to fall asleep, wake up for prolonged periods during the night, or both. If sleep is such a ubiquitous natural phenomenon, refined across the eons, you might wonder, why do so many of us have such trouble with it? Blame evolution; blame the modern world. Or blame the mismatch between the two.<\/p>\n

Maybe, then, we\u2019ve been asking the wrong question about sleep, ever since Aristotle. The real wonder isn\u2019t why we sleep. It\u2019s why, with such incredible tranquility available, do we bother to stay awake?<\/p>\n

Abstracted from National Geographic magazine August 2018 edition.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Importance of Sleep for Urban Society People sleeping on a commuter train in Tokyo, where \u2018inemuri\u2019 (being present while sleeping) is common practice. Source: Alamy\/Theguardian.com Sleep is seen as interrupting life, but the real scourge is chronic sleeplessness. In Japan, about 40 percent of the population sleeps less than six hours a night. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":3400,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3397"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3397\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3410,"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3397\/revisions\/3410"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/student-activity.binus.ac.id\/tfi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}