Don't you think it's weird how there is a continuous wave of people going unconscious all around the globe whenever darkness falls, 'no, just me?

However you look at it if you were to get the recommended 8 hours of sleep every night, you would spend around 1/3 of your life that's 25… 30 years out from the count, but what if we didn't need to sleep, think of all that extra time you'd have you could be more productive at work, or you could master a musical instrument or maybe just party round the clock without the boring need for your daily full-body reset.

So, is it possible could we somehow find a substitute for our sleep? Well, the current generations are already pushing back on the recommended healthy option of 8 (eight) hours per night, with electronic devices creeping into the bedroom and increasingly unforgiving work schedules: people are sleeping less and they have ever done.

Around a third of working adults in the states now get less than <6 (six) hours of sleep a night and we're going to bed and getting up two hours later than we did fifty years ago.

But could we continue this trend and do without sleep altogether? In pursuit of perpetual sleeplessness we can look to the animal kingdom where certain species are really pushing the boundaries, at one end of the spectrum there's the brown bat who spends 20 hours a day slumbering only waking for a few hours each night to hunt and cats are down there to their Cathemeral they nap for long periods of times that they're ready and rested for whenever they need to hunt, me that night all day, these cat naps can add up to around 14 hours every day, right hands off if you really want to be a cat or a brown bat, but are the other end of the scale big terrestrial grazers like giraffes, and elephants only clock around three or four hours of sleep are a night since they need to spend as much time as possible looking for the epic amounts of vegetable matter that they need to survive.

Marine mammals need to stay moving to ensure that they can get air from the surface they're thought to sleep with only half of their brain after time, but more on that one later. Despite there's massive diversity in sleeping styles one thing is clear there are no animals that we know of that can forego sleep entirely and given that periodic unconsciousness is a bit of a health hazard out there in the dangerous wild, there must be a really good reason why all animals risk forty winks, but the problem is still entirely sure what that reason is? In fact, sleep is a subject that continues to baffle scientists, at the most fundamental level: no one is completely sure why we do it at all. It might be something to do with consolidating memories, when we make new memories we form new physical pathways between neurons in the brain, and when we sleep it seems that certain pathways are reinforced transferring information from short-term to long-term memory, whilst others are pruned to be lost from our minds altogether, this only seems to happen when the brain isn't busy with receiving new sensory stimuli ie when we're asleep, or it might be something to do with clearing out the junk to keep the brain healthy like a nightly spring clean.

In, 2013 a team from the UK found that Cerebral spinal fluid is pushed around the brain while we sleep where it picks up waste chemicals from natural cellular processes and clears them out. The scientists involved in the study likened it to a house party saying that you can either entertain your guests or clear up the mess, you can't do both at the same time clearing up is what the brain does when we sleep, leaving it to party while we're awake.

However, even though we know that these processes occur scientists still aren't completely sure how important each one is or if there's anything else going on what we do know though is how we feel when we don't get enough sleep. Whether we've pulled an all-nighter to revise for an exam or we've worked too, many shifts in a row, or simply burn the candle at both ends. Our bodies tell us in no uncertain terms when we need to get some rest one of the most marked effects is the cognitive decline that sleep-deprived people feel, we think and we feel slow, it can take us longer to react to even simple stimuli, oh and it doesn't just affect people who forgo and night's sleep completely. A study recently showed that sleeping for six hours a night for two weeks resulted in the same amount of cognitive impairment as to fully sleepless nights, it gets worse though as prolonged sleep deprivation can be fatal, researchers found that rats died after being kept awake for just two weeks. If their sleep was disturbed only in certain stages, they lasted up to seven weeks, but they still died, and although we don't know exactly what caused these exhausted rats' deaths. It's safe to assume that the same would happen to us on some scaled-up timeframe.

So, all the signs are there that we really, really do need our sleep.

But is there a way of artificially resting our brains so that we can push on with our busy lives? Many of us are pushing back the inevitable during the day with chemicals like caffeine, coffee, and Cola, and cans of energy drinks can help people to stay awake and alert through the day or the night but it can leave our heart hammering and they can't stave off your lethargy indefinitely.

Another stimulant that some people turn to is Amphetamines nicknames speed because of the energizing effects that allow club-goers to keep dancing like crazy throughout the night, but just like caffeine they are only delaying the inevitable and with side effects like psychosis and anxiety and a severe strain on the heart and feta means seem to be a lot more trouble than they're worth.

A decade ago scientists seem to have made some progress in developing a chemical escape from sleep. The drug was called Orexin and the media claimed that with just a simple nasal spray it could replace sleep altogether with no nasty side effects. Only that's not what it was intended to do, Orexin is being developed to treat Narcolepsy a neurological disorder that strikes sufferers with excessive sleepiness, it can help to keep those doses awake on a regular basis but it's not as simple as just snorting some artificial sleep up your snores, even with orexin we wouldn't be able to dodge the dire consequences of sleep deprivation.

So, if chemical interventions are the answer then how about something more psychological polyphasic sleep schedules involves substituting one long sleep at night for lots of small naps throughout the day. Depending on which schedule you adopt, you can get down to as little as two hours of sleep a day split among four thirty-minute naps. The idea was championed by Buckminster Fuller the father of those futuristic geodesic domes who claimed his days included twenty-two hours of productive dome designing while feeling more vigorous and alert than ever, the only problem is that most scientific studies of polyphasic sleep schedules have had to be abandoned because the participants couldn't take the strain there were simply collapsed headfirst into their morning cereal just a few days into the plan. So, while we don't yet know whether polyphasic mapping benefits the brain or not, you have to admit that the warning signs aren't great.

A more promising lesson could be taken from our friends the whales, again our understanding is still woefully incomplete but it seems that these guys are able to enter what's known as Uni hemispheric sleep, where one side of the brain goes through its memory consolidating and junk clearing rest while the other hemisphere stays alert, now if we could find a way to unlock this power in our own brains, that could really be the answer to sleep replacement. And although it sounds like science fiction, it's not as far off as you might imagine. One recent bit of research found that when we are super sleep-deprived parts of our brain are actually asleep, while the rest keeps on trudging on these snoozing parts also move around the brain to give every region its own fair chance at some shut-eye, that would bring a whole new meaning to the phrase half asleep, now all we need to do is we need to harness these modular naps and sleep could become a thing of the past.

What would you do if you didn't have to sleep anymore, would it be work or play?

 

 

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