Hello friend, this is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Tech City.

Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.

From WNYC, this is New Tech City, where digital gets personal. I'm Anouche Summerodi.

One of my absolute favorite episodes this year, the one that really most changed my behavior, was the one about sleep.

And how technology has messed with sleep through the ages. This show really made me think, huh, well maybe the reason I haven't been sleeping well for a while is because I'm constantly looking at screens.

And I'm going to tell you some of the changes that I made in a minute. But first, let's go way back.

To before we had electricity or gas lighting, back then we slept differently. Maybe you've heard the term before, it's byphasic sleep.

After toiling in the fields, we'd rest at sundown, seduced by the natural dark, then three or four hours later we'd wake up. Maybe just lie there in the dark and chill out.

Or have a snuggle with someone, sing a song around the fire. Then it was back to bed, more sleep.

This is natural sleep. But once we could turn on lamps in our homes, our streets, the day's got longer.

We didn't lie down with the sunset, we started staying up later. We started consolidating our sleep into what we do today, a six to eight hour stretch on a good night.

And here comes the fascinating part. Not only did we use to sleep in segments, but being awake then felt different. Call it pre-tech consciousness.

A psychiatrist and researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health named Thomas Ware proved this recently. It's really interesting how he did it.

I did an experiment where I had healthy people go into a dark room for 14 hours every night for at least a month in some cases for three months.

Initially, Dr. Ware was trying to measure melatonin levels. That's that hormone in our bodies that regulates our daily biological clock.

But I realized that actually no one had ever done an experiment like this. No one had ever really looked to see how humans respond to changes in day length.

So I thought I should really measure everything I could manage to measure. And that included sleep. And the sleep findings were actually some of the most surprising and interesting ones.

Segmented sleep, the way people used to sleep before the gaslight invaded our homes, came back. In the dark, nature crept back in.

They would typically lie awake for a couple of hours and then suddenly fall asleep, maybe sleep 3, 4, 5 hours, and then wake up for an hour or two, and then go back to sleep and sleep another 3, 4, 5 hours.

Maybe for a total of 8 and a half hours. So I tend to think of this as a kind of, let's say, natural human sleep or sort of default human sleep.

Where watched and tracked and watched and tracked these regular people drifting off night after night in his special sleep box.

And it almost seemed like they were reaching a higher state of mind.

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