Sleep in sentence

1612 examples of Sleep in a sentence

Bang! (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps."

What do we do in the 20th century about sleep?

Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost.

At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure.

And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.

Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts?

Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important.

In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state.

The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property.

So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of interactions in here.

We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life.

But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about.

So why do we sleep?

There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.

It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways.

You essentially sleep to save calories.

So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important.

So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons.

But sleep is not an indulgence.

I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equivalent of.

The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly.

So let's now look at sleep deprivation.

So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around eight hours of sleep a night.

Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours every-night league.

So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up.

So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region.

When you're tired and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment.

It can actually ease the sleep transition.

A biological mimic for sleep, it sedates you.

So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.

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