Is sleep that important?

Sleep is one of those funny things about being a human being -- you just have to do it. Have you ever wondered why? Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about the importance of sleep.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you should know
from House stuff Works dot com? Howdy and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Sitting across from me is
Charles Chuck Bryant. It's the usual day here at how
Stuff Works. Thanks for joining us. What's going on? Chuck? Chuck?

(00:25):
Is sleepy? Chuck? Y? Y? By? You're ready to podcast? Mommy, no, Josh, oh, mommy? Yeah, Hey, Chuck,
I'm right there with you. Check a little sleepy here today?
So am I? Actually I'm a little sleep deprived. I
don't like it, Chuck. I I um feel a little dirty.

(00:45):
I smell a little bit. You get this weird thing
growing on my jawline that won't go away? Yeah, I
just I just feel unhealthy from not having had enough
sleep lately. How about you? Uh? Yeah, you know, I
was actually just finding people. I wasn't awake. I'm sorry,
I didn't really, I was just funny people. I wasn't
really asleep. But I am a bit tired going out
of town this week. So I've been, you know, staying

(01:06):
up a little later, getting things ready and Uh, I'm
in the same way, a little rundown, a little foggy headed.
You know, it's kind of funny that we should both
be this sleepy on the same day we're going to
discuss an article you wrote. Is sleep that important? Right you?
You would almost think that we planned it? Yeah? Yeah,
I actually didn't, you know, lose sleep in preparation for this.

(01:28):
If you did, hats off to me. Yeah, exactly, So Chuck,
what I got from this article that you wrote. It's
a fine pine article, by the way, thanks, Uh that
you know, the University of Chicago is the place to
be if you are interested in dedicating your career to
sleep research. Is in the case yeah, and well yeah,
they do a lot, but there's tons of sleep research

(01:49):
out there. This is one of those articles that almost
wrote itself because there's one thing that scientists like to study,
it's sleep. Yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing is, though,
is we still don't have any definitive answers with for
exactly why we sleep. Yeah. I mean, it sounds kind
of odd to pose that question, but we don't know
why we sleep other than to say I know what
I mentioned the article. One of the old jokes that

(02:10):
doctors say, is that, uh, sleep is to cure sleepiness. Yeah,
and that's really the best answer they have at this
point still and it makes sense too. But lucky for you,
after having been assigned to sleep that important for the site, uh,
you were able to find out that we know plenty
about all the bad things that happened when you don't
get enough sleep, and there are lots of them. All. Well,

(02:31):
you know, give us a couple, will you. Well, I know,
just let me quickly say before this is all in
the last you know, fifty years or so, because before
the early nineteen fifties, scientists thought it was just shut
down mode and that like your brain slept and it
was just your body is just catching up on all
the uh, you know, your organs. They might even thought
your organs shut down except for your heart. Not true. No, no,

(02:54):
that's a really bad thing when your organs shut down.
That's not true at all. Because the doctor years later
um hooked his son up to a a machine, brain
wave machine Eugene Azarinsky of Surprise the Prize the University
of Chica, Chicago, and he found that the brain actually
there were periods where the brain actually sped up its

(03:16):
activity oh really, Yeah, which is REM sleep r AM sleep,
a rapid eye movement sleep exactly. Okay, so all of
a sudden, what that's just like this uh this huge
hyper speed launched forward in sleep research, right. Uh yeah,
at the time, it was you know, they found out
that during REM sleep, you know, your eyes would trip

(03:36):
I'm sorry, your eyes would twitch, and the limbs and
facial muscles would move. It's kind of unsettling to see
somebody in r EM sleep. Yeah, it is. Yeah, I
would agree with that. So. Uh so he figured out
basically that you know, not only are we shut down,
but we're more active in some areas of our brain. Uh.
But most of the research since then has been done

(03:57):
on what happens if you don't get enough sleep and
the health impacts. Right. Well, one of the things that, um,
that I understand about r M sleep is is, um,
there's a theory that basically that's the stage where our
brain is sorting through all the information we've taken in
throughout the day. Yeah, that's one they and kind of
filing it away that this seems pretty logical to me. Actually, yeah,
that would make sense, and unfortunately it's nothing they can

(04:18):
really prove but I think that's a pretty good theory
because you've take in things all day long, and uh,
the analogy I'm making the articles that it's like a
computer desktop and you're just filing everything away, and then
when we sleep is when our brain kind of does
the big masterfile, moves whatever needs to be in the
recycled bin to the recycled bin, and everything else is
put on the hard drive. Basically, I think Chuck and

(04:38):
I subscribe to that theory because we both share a
common hatred of a cluttered desktop. Right, Yeah, it's terrible.
It's really annoying. Yeah, it is. It throws me off. Well,
you know R E M sleep. After that discovery, um
really kind of uh it became the superstar of sleep studies,
didn't right, And for a long time they assume that
if you don't have R E M sleep, you are

(05:01):
going to suffer memory loss and all sorts of other
terrible things. Um. It sounds like from later studies and actually,
this terrible accident that happened to an Israeli man Um
who was hitting the head by shrapnel, suffered a brain trauma,
and Um was incapable of achieving R E M sleep

(05:22):
was still able to um go ahead and you know,
move on to graduate from law school, which kind of
undermines the idea that not getting r EM sleep, you know,
uh impairs your memory. Not getting r EM sleep does
um screw with you physiologically though, right right, and now,
just sleep deprivation in general, uh is no good for

(05:44):
you at all. And we're talking will shorten your life?
Tell them about the three week lab rats study. Oh yeah,
the three the infamous three week labrates and is so unsettling. Yeah,
that lab rats that would normally live for three years
would die and three weeks without sleep. And you know
there's only one way to find that out, definitively, to
poke these rats and keep them alife for three straight weeks.

(06:07):
Can you imagine a worse existence? Now? And I can't
imagine being the poker of the rat either. That's probably
not funny. Well, think about it. They had to have
poker's work on shifts or else there'd be pokers who
had to stay up for three straight ranks. That maybe
people were poking the pokers and but an unfair advantage.
It's an endless chain. Yeah, yeah, so sleep not only
will killed lab rats, and that's if they don't sleep
at all. So that's that's the far end of the

(06:28):
spect it's still surprising. Three weeks, you know, equals death. Yeah,
that's pretty scary. But some of the ways of death,
some of the things that you can develop, like what hypertension, Yeah, hypertension. Um,
I think Parkinson's disease you can get if you sleep
more than nine Yeah. The the trick is, I mean
everyone's a little bit different, but the trick is to

(06:50):
get that right amount of sleep. And they say it's
generally for adults between six and eight hours, and too
little can lead to a bunch of problems. Too much
can lead to a bunch of problems. I found one
get another University of Chicago study UM that that basically
followed uh. I think ten healthy men uh in their twenties.
I think they were college students, UM and they got

(07:12):
four hours of sleep per night, and after six days
they were in a pre diabetic state after six days
of just getting four hours of sleep. Wow. So yeah,
apparently it can have some pretty bad health effects on you. Yeah,
that's crazy. I know. I was also looking into UH,
polyphasic sleep, which is a k A. Da Vinci sleep,

(07:32):
which I know a lot of people know about da
Vinci was famous for taking twenty to thirty minute naps
over a twenty four hour period, and that was how
he got his sleep. Do you ever see that Seinfeld
where Cramer tries that it does not pan out well
for him? No, and it's probably not. I know that
mainstream science doesn't endorse it, although a lot of people
are big believers in it. They have websites about polyphasic
sleep where, you know, they just think it's the best

(07:54):
thing since real sleep. Well, that's kind of the things
that you One of the things that you pointed out
in the article was that sleep is so different for
everybody in demand for sleep or you know, not needing it, UM,
that it's almost impossible to really conclusively study sleep, right
and come up with answers across the board. Right, But
there are some generalities, right like how many how many

(08:17):
hours to sleep do I need? I'm thirty two? You
need between six and eight. I mean that's the wheelhouse
for everybody. If you get less than that. UM, Actually
Parkinson's is less or more than that. UM. Obesity, diabetes,
heart disease, high blood pressure. It can make you stupid.
Students perform uh less on test scores. If they don't
get enough sleep, we'll check, check and check for me,

(08:39):
because I get like nine or ten hours and nine. Yeah,
that's that's you probably a little much. Yeah, that's not
that's no good. You need to wake up earlier, my friend.
But yeah, aside from all those things, uh, fatalities of
all uh drowsy driving fatalities occur and kids basically to

(09:00):
the age of five. So it's not as think about
old people, you know, falling asleep off the side of
the road. This is happening more with with kids these days.
And you know it's because kids are sleep deprived. You
go to college, you're out from under the thumb of
your folks, and uh, you don't sleep, you're up partying
all night right. Well. Plus also, I mean it's it's
kind of a common knowledge that older, older adults need

(09:22):
less sleep, hence early bird specials, and you know that
they're up in at them a lot earlier. That kind
of thing. On the other end of the spectrum, babies
need like newborns point they need like um, tend to
sixteen to eighteen hours and yeah, sixteen eighteen the first
year of life. Yeah, and then uh, I think the

(09:43):
three month mark or so is when babies start to
recognize the circadian rhythm, which we've talked about, which is
basically day is day night as night. You sleep at night,
you're up during the day, but they're still sleeping ten
to twelve hours and then napping a few hours on
top of that. And I noticed the owning your article
made it sound like you're a little envious of babies
getting to sleep that much. Are you sleep deprived? Uh?

(10:06):
You know, I wake up pretty easily and I'm an
early riser, so I'm pretty good. And do you do
you experience daytime sleepiness? Like do you hit the wall
at like three or four in the afternoon? Not really,
you really don't see I read I read an article
that found that only forty of of people I think
it was in your article, actually of people suffer from

(10:28):
daytime sleepiness, right, So I'm like, what are the other
sixty percent doing that? They're just feeling so good all
the time. I don't get it, because I get I
hit a wall at like three, I have to start
drinking coffee again for the second time that day, and
not the second cup, sucking the second time, and each
time consists of like three or four cups of coffee.
What am I doing wrong? I don't know. Maybe they're

(10:50):
taking tons and tons of happy drugs or something. I
don't know these people maybe so well because because you know,
I generally get to get a little sleeping during the
day as well. Okay, good, thank you there, I said it,
Thank you, Chuck. I just I don't understand why you
couldn't have been up front at the beginning. Well that's
it for this one, obviously, Chuck nodding off, and frankly,

(11:10):
I'm about to hit the wall again myself. So why
don't you go check out his sleep? That important? Believe
Chuck and I it is. Stick around though, to find
out what article makes Chuck and I hungry for? We
just Nat follows right after this, Chuck, you want to
tell him? Can you can you come to again? Let

(11:31):
you go when I'm going to just bring you up
today I asked the people to stick around and find
out what article makes us hungry for Swedish meatballs? So
we already podcasting? Yeah, yeah, we're almost at the end there, buddy,
just hanging there. Just tell him what's the article? I
think most people probably does is a giveaway anyone who's
anyone who's ever been to Ikea knows did they serve

(11:51):
up and sell some yummy Swedish meatballs? And Chuck and
I are not paid in any way, shape or formed
by Ikea for this endorsement. We just like their meatballs
that much. Although I think I speak for Chuck as
well as myself when I say we kind of secretly
hope i Kea will send us some for mentioning them
how to be great. Yeah, well, they can go ahead
and email us at the podcast if they want our address.

(12:12):
In the meantime, you can go check out how i
Kea Works Great article on how stuff works dot com
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(12:33):
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