Several years ago, we put out a two-part series, episode numbers 211 and 212, called the

economics of sleep.

We looked at the relationship between sleep and health, both physical and cognitive.

You simply cannot think as fast and solve a problem as quickly when you're sleep deprived

as when you're not sleep deprived.

And the relationship between sleep and income.

Generally, people who have more opportunities, more control over their lives are also better

sleepers.

None of these claims were particularly surprising, or at least they shouldn't be.

Anything the human body requires for one third of its operating hours must be pretty important.

What did surprise us was how little good, clean, real-world data there was on sleeping.

I realized that we have data on the social experiences of individuals from childhood to middle

age or older ages, and we were looking at what social factors explain health.

And they had an enormous amount of data on these individuals on two-thirds of their lives,

the waking hours.

But they didn't have anything on what's going on during that remaining third at night.

Why don't we have better sleep data?

It's quite difficult to get accurate information about people's routine sleep behavior.

What would it take to get that kind of information?

What we really need is something like an experiment for sleep.

We did learn about one sleep experiment that was just getting underway in Chennai, India,

a city of 10 million people.

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