Part 1 (part 2 on next page)The recent expose on 60 Minutes by Leslie Stahl was an amazing piece of journalism. As quoted by CBS News:”Human beings spend on average one third of their lives asleep. We know we need to sleep but most of us have never really given a whole lot of thought to why.
Part 2Why do we spend seven or eight hours a night immobile and unconscious? What really happens inside our brains and bodies while we’re sleeping?

We’ve known the purpose of our other biological drives for hundreds of years: we eat to give our bodies energy, we drink to keep hydrated, we procreate to perpetuate the species - among other things. But what is the biological purpose of sleep?

It turns out no one really knows for sure. As correspondent Lesley Stahl reports, why we sleep is one of the biggest unanswered questions in all of science, which is why researchers all over the country are doing studies and coming up with some new and intriguing discoveries.
“We don’t sleep just to rest our tired bodies?” Stahl asks Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Well, that’s been one of the long-standing theories. But I think what we’re starting to understand is that sleep serves a whole constellation of functions, plural,” Walker explains.

One thing that’s clear, says Walker, is that sleep is critical. In a series of studies done back in the 1980s, rats were kept awake indefinitely. After just five days, they started dying.”

The 60 Minutes piece also points out that research showed that patients that were sleep deprived and did not enter into REM (deep restorative sleep) were “pre diabetic” after only 5 days and found themselves ravenously hungry because there is a lack of a chemical in the brain that tells the body that it doesn’t need any more food. It shows us that lack of sleep can be a crucial part of the diabetes and obesity problems we are facing.

There are several other fascinating points made related to drowsy driving and several well known accidents. A National Institute of Health study done at the University of Pennsylvania by David Dinges, the scientist in charge, shared that “Studies show that all of that stuff people tend to do - slapping themselves in the face, rolling the window down, radio up, singing - they’re convinced it helps. But it’s only a matter of seconds or minutes. And you can have a sudden sleep attack right in the midst of doing that,” Dinges says.

And it’s not just driving. Dinges has examined, sometimes as an expert witness, the role of inadequate sleep in some of the world’s most well-known accidents.

He thinks inadequate sleep may have contributed to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Chernobyl, the Three Mile Island disaster and the 2003 Staten Island ferry crash.

60 Minutes checked. The Exxon Valdez spill happened after midnight with a man at the helm who’d slept only four hours the night before; Chernobyl and Three Mile Island also occurred late at night and involved human error. And the assistant captain who crashed the Staten Island ferry into a pier, killing 11, admitted that he felt exhausted before the accident.

As a doctor who treats sleep apnea and snoring, I see this many patients who are pre-diabetic, exhausted and at risk of heart attacks and strokes. Many of these symptoms and risk factors are reduced if treated.

Let’s face it. We all need our sleep. (and if you snore…so does your spouse…) Get treatment. Don’t put it off.

The enitre article is located at 60 Minutes-The Science of Sleep.

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