When I give lectures, people will wait behind until there is no one around and then tell me quietly, 'I seem to be one of those people who need eight or nine hours' sleep.' It's embarrassing to say it in public.
Friends say, 'Shall we go out to dinner at 8?' I say, 'I can't, I'm a 10 A.M.-till-6:30 P.M. kind of guy.' I keep that very regular, no matter what.
The amount of sleep - the total amount of sleep that you get - starts to decrease the older that we get. I think one of the myths out there is that we simply need less sleep as we age, and that's not true, in fact.
As you try to tweak your sleep one way or the other, you might be, you might be doing great - you might do better at remembering details of an event, but you might end up being poorer at abstracting the gist or the rules associated with it.
Do you tend to sleep in during the weekends? That usually signals that you're trying to sleep off a debt you've accumulated during the week.
If sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made.
Our circadian biology, and the insatiable early-morning demands of a post-industrial way of life, denies us the sleep we vitally need.
You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device, and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and, only when you're sleepy, return to the bed.
Sleep is the Swiss army knife of health. When sleep is deficient, there is sickness and disease. And when sleep is abundant, there is vitality and health.
Dream sleep provides a fascinating neurochemical soothing balm. It is during dream sleep and only during dream sleep when our brain shuts off a stress-related neurochemical called noradrenalin.
Your subjective sense of how well you're doing under conditions of sleep deprivation is a miserable predictor of, objectively, how you actually are doing.
If you were not to set an alarm clock, would you sleep past it? If the answer is yes, then there is clearly more sleep that is needed.
You're trying to sleep off a debt that you've lumbered your brain and body with during the week, and wouldn't it be lovely if sleep worked like that? Sadly, it doesn't. Sleep is not like the bank, so you can't accumulate a debt and then try and pay it off at a later point in time.
Based on the science, you can make somewhat clear statements: The number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep without impairment is zero.
What is dreaming, and what happens, and are there any real benefits to dreaming? Well, to take a step back, I think it's important to note that dreaming essentially is a time when we all become flagrantly psychotic.
I think many people walk through their lives in an under-slept state not realizing it. It's become this new natural baseline.