HOW WE SLEEP

Greymouth Evening Star, 9 October 1928, Page 2

HOW WE SLEEP

AS STUDIED BY THE SCIENTIST.

That a bed may be too soft; that early is soundest; that most of us sleep too little; that a sudden loud noise may alter a sleeper’s blood pressure, though it does not awaken him—these are some of the things discovered by Dr Donald A. Laird, of Colgate University, in his “sleep laboratory’’ in a long series of experiments in which (says the “Literary Digest”) his students have aided, both as subjects and as obesrvers. Dr Laird, in Science Service’s “ScienceNews-Letter” (Washington) writes :— “Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years. This record is surpassed by the average man who lives out his allotted three score years and. ten, for the seventy-year-old person has spent more than twenty-five years in sleep. . “Sleep overtakes an individual at the close of Iris day’s work, and after about eight hours it releases its hold. Beyond this the average person and most scientists know little. Scientific workers who have devoted their time to intensive studifes of sleep number scarcely a dozen since the beginning of the scientific era; while in contrast there are at the present moment more than a hundred scientists working on how to make the face more attractive by surgical procedures. “At the Psychological Laboratory of Colgate University we have been trying to find out all we can about sleep, especially what is practical and best.. “Beginning three years ago at Colgate, volunteer subjects slept in quarters that fraternity houses loaned us for temporary use. The investigatioji has grown and expanded from that beginning, until next year an entire ten-roomed house will be used for the sleep laboratory. “Since the field has been practically untouched it has been necessary to plan and construct much apparatus for studying what goes on in people while they sleep, and how sleep can be made more restful. “Some of the apparatus is constructed so that time is measured not merely jn seconds or tenths of seconds, but in thousandths of seconds. “In measuring muscular relaxation, which appears to be of paramount importance of restful sleep, we have had to -devise other which will tell us the effect a single twitch of a finger has upon the total muscular relaxation of the sleeper’s body. “We have had to develop special methods to measure the exact amount of bodily energy expended when doing work after sleep of various kinds and amounts. “The greatest difficulty in file experimental work is in the loss of sleep it demands from those being' experimented upon and those doing the experimenting. It is somewhat of a lark to stay up unusually late one night. But when the experimenters request that you get along with six hours’ sleep every night for a month in place of the eight you have been accustomed to having, the fun disappears the second night about 10 o’clock. Nevertheless, we were able to get some students to make this sleep sacrifice without credit or pay three years ago. “We have also had our ‘human guinea pigs’ sleep with a gas mask glued to their faces for a half-year of nights at a time so that we could make chemical analysis of the expired air the whole night long. In this particular case the more severe hardship fell upon those making the experiments, since they had to keep wide awake all night to make accurate determinations of the energy expended of those enjoying sleep.. Two subjects sleeping peacefully with gas masks will keep ten ethers awake making the chemical analysis of exaled breath collected through the masks. “Other cruel and inhuman practices

are essential in order to discover the what and why of sleep. Imagine yourself, for instance, being awakened at 4 o’clock this morning and put through strenuous tests for an hour and a-half on this incomplete amount of sleep—tests which range from how much electricity is needed to shock you, to lifting weights with your middle finger every second, until you are exhausted and unable to lift even an ounce. “Then further imagine that you are awakened for the same work at 3 o’clock two mornings later, then at 2 o’clock, and so on until all the hours of your sleeping period have been tabulated and charted. It takes considerable determination to stick through a job like that when you also have your regular work to do during the daytime, wlhen sensible people work exclusively. But you can never fully appreciate the complete pleasure of a long Sunday morning sleep until you have been through a semester or two of such work. “It comes to many people as somewhat of a surprise to find that another

hardship is changing from a medium soft, comfortable bed to a hard, and sagging bed. This demands more willpower in some cases than to cut down on one’s hours of sleep. But sleeping in uncomfortable beds is just another of the cruel and inhuman things we require of our subjects from time to time, although there are thousands of people complacently sleeping on beds far from comfortable or right, and blissfully ignorant of the fact. Since our boys have slept around on different combinations of mattresses and springs in the laboratory they have found that differences may be as marked as changes in the weather. “The best bed combination to sleep upon to obtain most restfulness seems to be a medium soft bed with a large number of vertically-placed coil springs. A bed which sags keeps muscles under tension and does not allow for a desirable amount of restfulness. “We were somewhat astonished to find that a bed can be too soft, especially for the person of above average weight. In some of flhe tests seven hours’ sleep on some beds gave a recovery equal to eight hours on other beds. The type of spring and mattress found in practically all college I dormitories gives a poor sleeping com-J.

bination. A praiseworthy charity to undertake on a national scale is to replace these, since a poorly rested person is the weak-willed person.’ Dr Laird and his students find that the old idea that sleep is deepest the first few hours expresses truth. It does not matter whether the first two or three hours come before or after midnight. Afore noise is necessary to awaken a. person during the first hours of his sleep. If he is awakened it is harder for him to keep awake. Intense bodily rebuilding activities are taking place. And recovery of ability to do strenuous tests appears more marked after the first two or three hours’ sleep than during the following six hours. He continues:-—

“Many changes unknown to the individual take place during sleep. When a noisy taxicab passes a. sleeper’s window, for instance, there is a change in his blood pressure caused by the noise, although the sleeper is not awakened at the time. Between 4 and 6 o’clock in the morning, when sleep is light, these disturbances, which we do not consciously sense, are responsible for the predicament of many persons who wake and toss about restlessly. The crash of a garbage can on to a paved alley or the passing of the milkman have'caused many worries about “what’s the matter with me that I always wake up at 5 o’clock lately ?’ “With each question about sleep we

have answered the answer has raised a dozen new questions which are important and which can be answered in turn only by experiments. We have discovered, for instance, that during the last two hours of sleep there are some rather intense body rebuilding activities taking place. What these are we do not know, and moreover this is a question, to be answered by the chemist. Ghemists working in the United States Public Health Service and at the University of Chicago have not found what this chemical rebuilding is. “A race which does without sleep, however, is well on the road to a race of mentally-disordered people, probably within the first generation, for sleep is not merely a great restorative, but its dreams are often a safety valve for sanity. So when such a pill appears, if ever, I would warn you still to take no substitute for real sleep, lots of it, under the best conditions, and dream pleasantly to your heart’s content.”