Up to this point, my columns have hopefully been educational and entertaining, but perhaps not immediately applicable to most of your everyday lives. And while I would be thrilled if my writing inspired one of you to a lifelong voyage of scientific exploration, I can also understand that some of you may already have plans (for life, that is). To this end, I’d like to write about a subject that each of you can research every day! Particularly in light of the fact that this is Dead Week, it seems like a great time to talk about modern research on sleep.

Despite the fact that all humans spend nearly a third of their life sleeping, scientists have only recently begun to understand sleep in terms of its purpose and function. While it’s easy to piece apart a cadaver to study most other organs, sleep is inherently a function of the brain, and understanding how 30 billion neurons work in harmony can be a daunting task (despite years of field research, I am still trying to understand the minds of individuals with two X chromosomes). To aid this problem electroencephalography (EEG), or “electric brain mapping,” is incredibly useful. Scientists understood since the late 1800s that neurons communicated via electric signals and, using this knowledge, Hans Berger developed EEG in the mid 1920s. His device consisted of two simple silver wires, attached to the front and the back of the head and then connected to a galvanometer that measured the activity between the two. EEGs have gotten much more sophisticated since then and can now, aided with knowledge of what different components of the brain do, be used to analyze many more aspects of human thought.

One of the main things EEG allowed researchers to study was overall brain activity. While awake, the human brain consumes around a quarter of all the energy the body uses, despite weighing only about two percent of the average human body. Or, more plainly, the average brain cell gets 12 times its fair share of energy. As an illustration, even with our fancy linear accelerators, the average Stanford student uses only about three times the global energy average (which is still more than one, so keep conserving!). Because being awake is so energetically draining, during sleep the brain drastically lowers its energy consumption, in several different stages, which can be monitored through EEG. The first four stages entail sequentially deeper sleep, marked by reduced energy output, but, curiously, in the deepest sleep, brain activity suddenly jumps up to near wakefulness. This, of course, indicates dreaming, and the associated Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep was first documented by Dr. William Dement, the beloved Stanford professor of “Sleep and Dreams” – a class I highly recommend.

The exact function of each stage of sleep is still not well understood. On the whole, by freeing up energy from the brain, sleep greatly aids the body’s immune system, wound healing and growth processes. Additionally, sleep aids hormone regulation, allowing effective control over weight and alertness levels, among other things. Other studies indicate that sleep might aid the brain in organizing thoughts into memories and thereby aid learning. Lack of sleep can have disastrous effects on judgment. Both the Challenger explosion and the Exxon-Valdez oil spill may have been avoided had those involved with each been well-rested. Several recent repeated studies have indicated that pulling even one all-nighter can impair driving performance worse than a .10 percent BAC. So while sleep isn’t fully understood, it’s definitely a good thing to get on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, basic math works against Stanford students. With an average of 15 units a quarter, students are expected to spend 15 units in class, plus 45 out of class, for a total of 60 hours a week on school work, as a very rough lower bound. Given that many students are involved in one or two student organizations, possibly a sports team and a job or a research position, roughly tacking on 10 hours a week for each of those brings the total up to 100. Adding in six hours on weekends to socialize and at minimum two hours a day for meals, showering, and anything else in life, the total comes to 120 hours, yielding 48 for sleep – or barely under seven hours a day. While these are all rough calculations, the fact remains that the odds are stacked against us getting anything resembling a reasonable amount of sleep.

While I wouldn’t give up a second of my busy Stanford life, we all need more sleep. Perhaps we suffer from hubris; as successful Stanford students, surely we can wade through the waters of drowsiness unscathed. It’s amazing how Stanford students take meticulous care of physical, mental and academic health, and yet routinely neglect sleep. I hope the above examples have illustrated the flaw in this logic, and I encourage you all, even during Dead Week, to develop healthy sleep habits. At least, a man can dream.

The clock right now says that Jack is an incredible hypocrite. Tell him to go to bed at [email protected].