“The slow waves facilitate the transmission of information,” says Jan Born, director of the Department of Medical Psychology and Behavioural Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
It allows the necessary brain regions to pass our memories from short-term to long-term storage – so that we don’t forget what we have learnt. Research since the 1980s has shown that slow-wave sleep is essential for the brain’s maintenance. (It’s a bit like a crowd chanting or beating a drum in unison). On a regular night, the brain cycles through many different stages of sleep, each with a characteristic pattern of ‘brain waves’, in which neurons in different regions of the brain fire together, in synchrony, at a particular rhythm. Various experiments across the world have shown that it is possible to boost the efficiency of the brain’s night-time activity – speeding up the descent into deep sleep and enhancing our rest once we get there. This possibility may be closer than it sounds, thanks to new ‘sleep optimisation’ techniques. When our immediate demands exceed the hours in the day, sleep is still our top sacrifice.īut what if we were able to simply optimise the sleep experience so that we enjoyed most of the benefits of deep sleep, in less time? The consequences – including impaired memory and decision making, and increased risk of infection and obesity – are well known, but easy to ignore. Many of us are following suit: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one third of US adults fail to get enough sleep on a regular basis.
Thomas Edison, Margaret Thatcher, Martha Stewart and Donald Trump have all famously claimed to get by on just four or five hours’ sleep a night – much less than the seven-to-nine hours recommended to most adults. We often wear our sleeplessness as a badge of pride – a measure of our impossibly hectic schedules.
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