RE: Sleep patterns. Nature or Nurture?
July 4, 2016 at 8:36 am
(This post was last modified: July 4, 2016 at 8:36 am by Homeless Nutter.)
(July 4, 2016 at 7:14 am)ignoramus Wrote: I can't see any evolutionary benefit to that one though Rob? Was it theorised in a doco or something?
Be aware and awake during the day seems the most beneficial?
The myth of the eight-hour sleep
Quote:In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.
His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.
Much like the experience of Wehr's subjects, these references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.
Quote:A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." - George Bernard Shaw