I’ve recently begun reading a manga, Death Note. Online. The translated version, of course. I was pretty bored. It is not bad, pretty interesting. The only problem is that now I have one extra thing to procrastinate with. Heheh.
Anyway, Sze Chuan highlighted to me that a 17-year-old ought to have at least 8.25 hours of sleep every day, to remain healthy. I do not know of the veracity of this information, but let’s assume for argument’s sake that it is true.
If a person my age really needs eight and a quarter hours of sleep daily, then we are all most likely sleep-deprived. People have to wake up any time between 5am and 6.30am in order to reach their schools in time. For the sake of ease, we’ll use 6am as the standard. 8.25 hours before 6am is 9.45pm of the previous day. Now, who sleeps at 9.45pm? Many of us consider “any time before midnight” to be turning in early.
Clearly, our work schedules and lifestyle choices do not permit us to have the sufficient sleep that we need. It’s not that we can’t perform on less sleep than we should be having. Our daily activities are testament to that. We work late into the night, and wake long before the sun rises, and yet we are able to learn, to lead, to think.
I came up with a shell of a theory about what might happen in the long run. There are two ways humanity can go, in regard to sleep. One, is that we slow our pace of life and take more time to enjoy sufficient hours of our daily comatose. Productivity might decrease somewhat. Technological innovation may appear less frequently. This shouldn’t be a problem, unless sometime in the distant future we’re going to be attacked by aliens.
The other way it would go is that we don’t change our lifestyle. Our health will be slowly eroded over the long term, and thus, we end up producing lower-quality offspring. The upside to this is that the few people who are genetically coded to require less sleep than others will be favoured. Not by much, but they will hold an ever so slight advantage over the rest of the population. Requiring less sleep means that they can hold up their daily activities while suffering negligible health effects. This leaves more time and energy for reproduction. Over many, many years, natural selection will enable these people and their offspring to populate the world. Humanity will require less and less sleep as time goes by.
Of course, by that time, we’d all be dead.
So, here’s a thought. Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were some kind of drug, or neural modification, that allowed you to achieve the benefits of eight hours of sleep in a much shorter time? You could pop a pill, go to sleep for three hours, and then wake up feeling as if you’d had a good night’s sleep. Of course, the other things that sleep does would need to be included in the effects of this drug. I’m just saying “what if”.
Anyway, I’d take this thing, if it worked.
-Joe