A SLEEP STUDY

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3939, 18 March 1930, Page 7

A SLEEP STUDY

RESEARCH BY AMERICANS

NOVEL INVESTIGATIONS

It’s a great invention, sleep. One would rather have a good night’s sleep than be able to quote poetry about it. Nature’s soft nurse deserves all the praise given it by Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Keats. . The Americans are keener on clinics than poetic conceits, and have lately made thousands of experiments on sleeping children and men with a view to the settlement of some disputed questions. Doctors differ as to whether we should sleep on the back, or the right side or the left side, borne of them reommend the right side, “so as not to oppress the heart,” or “so as to avoid oppresion of the stomach by the liver.” In view’ of conflicting opinions. Professor H. M. Johnson, of Pittsburg University, undertook to direct the Simmons investigation of sleep, and in a recent article in the Dundee ‘ Courier ’ gave the results of about a million separate measurements. One feature of American research is its thoroughness, and this is made possible only by the generous funds placed at the disposal of the universities by citizens. . The method of investigation involved a term extending over some years, and necessitated instruments either totally new or adapted in a new way to quite unfamiliar purposes. The aim was to study normal sleep, to learn how healthy, robust people actually do sleep. This was the scientific way of making sure of facts. There was a serious difficulty. How could sleep be studied without disturbing the sleeper? There could be no photography without light, and light would w r aken the sleeper up, or at least destroy normal sleep. When the investigators proposed to attach an instrument to the sleeper’s body so as to discover the number and nature of changes of posture, the difficulty amounted to impossibility. It was agreed to attach an instrument to some part of the bed which would yield to the sleeper’s movements Dr Szymansky, a physiologist of the University of Vienna, had already used an instrument which embodied the principle. Th#e Pittsburgh modifica* tion was called a “ kinetograph,” and included the use of an electric gramophone motor, almost noiseless. This drove a moving strip of paper on which the record w’as to 1 ; made. The motor was geared dowm to 1,200 to 1, so that the chart ordinarily moved about one inch in five minutes. Later we found that it is practicable to make the sleeper’s movements disturb an electrical circuit, passing through a recording galvanometer which may be located in a distant room. Thus a person’s sleep can be studied without his knowledge.” The ingenuity of the arrangement was a triumph, and the professor tells in a modest way 1 w he set to work. Over 100 subjects w'ere studied in the investigation, most of them for periods of several months. There was no ‘ ‘ raw haste, half-sister to delay. Time on this ocasion was no" of the essence of the contract. Over a million separate measurements were made on the length of the rest periods. It must have been startling to the scientists to discover that the first 30,000 observations upset all their expectations. They were already aware from bedside observations that postural activity had been under-rated. We all make far more changes of attitude during sleep than anybody suspects. Thousands of measurements of three individuals in each of six groups gave the following results; — ■ AVERAGE REST PERIODS OF HEALTHY PEOPLE. Most Least Most active active typical individual, individual, individual. Children, 2J to 4 years smm 10mm 7rmn Unselected college 1Q ._ men 7min 22mm 13mm College athletes ... Bmin 15min 11mm Middle-aged men ... 6mm 13mm 9mm

One infant came under investigation on the sixteenth day of her life, and was found to stir far more frequent y than the young children. Generally speaking, the young children have a number of short rest periods, about two and a -half minutes in duration, but they have also a larger number of rest periods of between 50min and 75min. Of course, they are more active than the adults, and as a rule take longer to go to sleep, ine following table is interesting:— AVERAGE TIME REQUIRED TO GO V TO SLEEP. Most Most Most prompt tardy typical individual, individual, individual. “r 3i . 10 : 4 ... 21min 6-lmin 36min Unsdectcd college . . . men Bmm 23mm 13mm Middle-aged men ... 9min 25min ISmin Restlessness is found to be greatest in early childhood, least near the end oi adolescence, and tending to increase with age. The most restless people are intellectual workers who study in the evening. The difference between them and the manual workers is about bU per cent. Professor Johnson, in his report, anticipates doubt and even scorn of his figures, which show that a typical healthy sleeper awakens from twenty to fifty times in an eight-hour night, but he claims that the evidence would convince even a SC Hiat is not the end and full significance of the experiments. It was a triumph to show when the sleeper changed his bodily positions, but it was a greater triumph to show what positions he changed from and into. In the course of eight hours and twenty-five minutes a good typical sleeper assumed thirty-three different major positions which he held tor periods ranging between two and fifty-six minutes —an average or about fifteen minutes. The favourite posture was that of a swimmer; the second was that of a “ kitten coil, lying on one side with the back bowed, the head forward, both arms in front, and both legs drawn up. Different attitudes came in a regular sequence. This account carries the reader’s mind to Leigh Hunt’s ‘ Essay on Sleep,’ in which the author says that however proudly a man may walk, sit, or eat bis dinner, sleep, the petrifying magician, brings him to the com mon level. “He arrests the proudest lord as well as the humblest clown in the most ridiculous postures; so that if you could draw a grandee from bis bed without waking him, no limbtwisting fool in a pantomime should create wider laughter. The toy with

the string between its legs is hardly a posture master more extravagant. . . . What a scarecrow to lodge majestic power in!” , The truth is that all parts'of the muscular apparatus cannot rest at the same time. The ideal is mu that of sleeping like a log. “ The most refresning sleep,” say the American investigators, “is that which is interrupted, on the average, from two to eight times an hour. That the sleeper remembers but few of these happenings next day means simply that they do not last long, and that nothing happened while they lasted that was worthy of recall.” The perusal of these interesting reports leaves some questions unanswered. The professor and his assistants admit that thev studied only normally healthy people under normal conditions. Byron writes of slumbers that are not sleep, “ but a continuance of enduring thought, which then T can endure not.’’ Macbeth murdered sleep. It would be enlightening and impressive to have an automatic record of the sleep of criminals and of those condemned to death. It would be still more instructive to have had a graph or record of “ the last sleep of Argyle.” Comparisons of good and evil consciences, as revealed in the tape, would give food for thought. Nevertheless, we hope our gyrations during sleep will never appear in the movies.