Sleep has plagued the existence
of complex organisms since their evolution early on in the formation of
Earth. Although there are various stages to the sleep cycle, essentially
one falls into a temporary coma for a few hours each day. It seems
totally irrational that evolution would dictate a system where one lets
down their guard for hours every day, leaving one prone to a deadly attack
(this, of course, by no means excludes the violent awakening by a particularly
cruel suite-mate). It seems a fairly logical assumption that sleep
is exceedingly important to life if, in order to get some rest, animals
in the wild irrationally risk their lives. Our bodies are telling
us that they have run at full capacity for long enough, and therefore need
to replenish valuable resources.
In researching sleep, I
found "replenish" to be a key word. During the day, one's body is
constantly metabolizing ingested food and water, turning them into useful
forms of energy. The body depletes a great deal of its energy stores
(glycogen, mostly) and also experiences a large buildup of toxic byproducts
(lactic acid, for example) during the day.1
Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to replenish these lost stores and
get rid of the toxic chemicals coursing through your blood. Four
hours seems to be the minimum amount of time one can sleep per night in
order to coherently function during the day. A lack of sleep can
have grave consequences, greatly caused by the inability of your immune
system to work without rest.
Sleep is a multistage cyclic
process, involving five steps. Fast waves, called "Beta" waves are
those which result from being awake. Once you become sleepy and close
your eyes, your body relaxes and your brain waves greatly slow down, becoming
"alpha" waves. After approximately five minutes in this relaxed state,
your brain waves further slow down to become "theta" waves, transporting
you into Stage I sleep. Stage one sleep generally does not last very
long, and is accompanied by a lowered pulse rate and slower breathing.
After a few minutes in Stage I sleep, Stage II sleep begins, marked by
a further slowing of brain waves as well as bursts of electrical activity,
called "spindles." These bursts manifest themselves as a sort of
twitching. After fifteen to thirty minutes of Stage II sleep, the
body moves on to Stages III and IV, the deepest stages of sleep.
Brain waves named "delta" waves dominate the brain signals in these two
stages. Since "delta" waves are the slowest of the sleep-associated
brain waves, these stages are often referred to as Slow Wave Sleep (SWS).
After approximately half-an-hour, the brain ascends once again through
all the previous stages in order to begin the REM (rapid eye movement)
stage, when dreams occur. The length of REM sleep is highly variable,
and can last anywhere between a few minutes to an hour. The full
sleep cycle generally takes from ninety to one hundred minutes, and occurs
four or five times a night.2
Although sleep contains
a cycle, it also belongs to a larger cycle involving Circadian Rhythms.
Circadian Rhythms is a general term used to describe a variety of cyclic
trends that run through their cycle once a day, including body temperature,
melatonin levels, and fatigue. It has been postulated that fatigue
runs in six hour cycles. Therefore, if you were to wake up at around
8 am, you would hit an alertness peak at around 11 am, three hours later.
After that peak, you would become increasingly drowsy, until 2 pm, when
you hit your famed "Post Lunch Dip." This ebb inherent in your circadian
fatigue rhythm is the culprit behind the dreariness associated with the
dreaded 1 pm class (finally, it's not our fault that we fall asleep in
class!).2
Several methods have been
proposed to "optimize" your alertness throughout the day by cleverly exploiting
your circadian rhythms. Anders Sandberg, a research student at the
SANS group at NADA at the Royal Institute of Technology, proposed a method
that allows for competent daily functioning on five and a half hours of
sleep. He suggests sleeping from 3:30 in the morning to 8, and then
taking two half-hour naps, one in the afternoon and one in the evening.
This method would ideally take advantage of the ebbs of your circadian
rhythm without allowing you enough time during your naps to wake up groggy
from stage III or IV sleep.3
This method has the potential
to be quite beneficial and productive, although it must be followed religiously
or it will most likely become detrimental to your health. A friend4
and I have developed a potentially better sleeping method for per capita
productivity. Given, this proposal is horribly impractical and too
technologically advanced for today's age, but the potential remains nonetheless.
The ideal situation for maximum productivity is being able to function
on no sleep. The human body alone lacks the capability to cope with
absolutely no sleep. Therefore, we propose to introduce a "sleeping
chip." It would be like running a gas-powered automobile in that
you would start with a full chip, and deplete its capabilities as you went
about your daily activities. If the chip were to become "empty,"
you could transfer it to another person, whose job it would be to sleep
and refill the chip. There are, of course, inherent problems with
this scheme that would need to be worked out. For example, the chip
would have the seemingly impossible task of keeping the body constantly
stocked with energy, assuming the body,s immune system would accept the
chip in the first place. Another major problem with this plan, as
with many scientific theories, involves major ethical issues. The
people whose job it would be to restock the chips would have a continuously
lowered rate of metabolism, and so they would be quite prone to obesity
and other slow metabolism-related problems. On the whole, however,
I believe the chip would be benificial to society, as it would aid in its
overall productivity. Unfortunately, we do not yet possess the technology
to create a sleeping chip, and so we must continue to deal with our coma-induced
vulnerabilities...for now.
4. Cedar McKay