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You cannot be serious! A degree in sleep! How can I possibly study sleep? Well, anything that is common to and needed by every single human being is something that can be commoditized, and sleep is no exception. In fact, we may soon be able to put a price on a good night’s sleep or even a nap. Many of the most successful individuals in history have apparently flourished on just a few hours of sleep – but it is the quality of sleep that is crucial and not necessarily the number of hours that one sleeps. Then there are variations from one person to another and host of other parameters such climatic conditions, noise pollution and stress, to name just a few.
A hundred years ago the average human being in the Western world clocked up around 9 hours of slumber per night; now that same person is down to about 6.5 hours – 2.5 hours of sleep lost in just a century! We can blame Edison, to a large extent for that. After all, he invented the electric light bulb, that game changer that abruptly and rudely extended our day to…well no night. There are offices that have daylight lighting installed that gives one the impression that it is day when in fact it is pitch dark outside. The repercussions are huge: the pharmaceutical industry has cashed in producing drugs that either keep us awake for longer or other drugs that help us to sleep whenever we wish. And all of these drugs are generally liberally endorsed, culminating in swathes of society becoming addicted to sleeping pills or other drugs that accentuate one’s focus and awareness even when one is exhausted and should be sleeping. Scientists at NASA have long been trying to fathom how certain species manage to hibernate for long periods in a quest to adapt such behaviour for humans, mainly to allow us to travel for longer, and so further, in space. Imagine being able to have the ability, the option, to just hibernate for a few months then wake up and resume one’s “normal” living. Of course, everything will have changed not least your body mass which will be at least 30% less than that before you commenced hibernating.
Sleep is thus an eminently fascinating and interesting area of knowledge which, in the scheme of things, we do not know too much about. There are some fancily named degrees popping up at venerable institutions such as John Hopkins University. No we cannot possibly call it a degree in sleep; instead we have to invoke a highfalutin’ euphemism that most have never heard in their living, let alone sleeping, days: polysomnography, or slightly better, Neurodiagnostics and Sleep Science. The brain is the final frontier of medicine and that of course is where our sleep is controlled. So if you are interested in studying sleep you had better contemplate first studying a medicine-based degree.
