Have We Always Felt This Tired?
The Inquiry
BBC
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 March 2018
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“Humans are the only species that willingly deprive themselves from sleep”. Ever since fire was discovered, we have traded off sleep time for other activities - from creating stone tools to partying. As our technology progressed, the list of things to do rather than sleep just got longer. But with sleep deprivation now a growing health problem, could we be reaching our limits? Or is tiredness part of our condition? In this week’s programme, an evolutionary biologist, a historian and a neuroscientist give us their take on whether we are now any more tired than our ancestors. We hear what makes human sleep unique and how it has evolved in surprising ways. And finally we hear from a woman with a dream – that we may never have to sleep again.
Presenter: James Fletcher Producer: Estelle Doyle and Sarah Shebbeare
This programme was first broadcast in July 2017.
(Photo: A woman shows signs of tiredness as she counts ballot cards. Credit: Leon Neal/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | No sleep, tell! |
| 0:05.7 | Brooklyn! |
| 0:08.2 | Welcome to the Inquiry on the BBC World Service with me, James Fletcher. |
| 0:12.8 | Each week, we bring you four expert witnesses, answering one pressing question from the news. |
| 0:18.4 | We live in a world of Yolo and Carpe Diem, Just Do It and Sleep |
| 0:22.4 | When I'm Dead. There's so much to do. Working, commuting, caring, relationships, family and friends, |
| 0:30.5 | emails, Facebook, Netflix, a life full of obligations and temptations delivered on an ever-accelerating conveyor belt. |
| 0:39.6 | And in a world of more, more, more, there's one thing we seem to get less and less of. |
| 0:45.5 | Sleep. How are you, we ask friends. Tired, comes the answer. |
| 0:50.9 | Last year, scientists in Canada launched the largest ever study of how sleep deprivation affects the brain. |
| 0:58.0 | Amid concern we're experiencing what some call a global sleep crisis. |
| 1:03.0 | One recent study estimated that sleep deprivation costs the US economy up to $400 billion a year. |
| 1:11.9 | But was there ever a past where we got the perfect amount of undisturbed sleep? |
| 1:17.0 | In this edition of the inquiry, first broadcast last July, |
| 1:20.7 | we're asking, have we always felt this tired? |
| 1:27.1 | Part 1, deep sleep. |
| 1:36.1 | I was basically nocturnal for about seven months. |
| 1:43.4 | If you're going to do this type of work, |
| 1:44.9 | you've got to be a really hungry graduate student wanting to get your dissertation done. |
| 1:49.9 | This once sleepless student is David Sampson, now a freshly minted assistant professor |
| 1:55.5 | at the University of Toronto, studying... Great apes, orangutans, chimpanzees, lemurs, as well as baboons, and recently |
| 2:04.6 | I've been working with traditional human populations. |
... |
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