Interesting Facts About Sleep


1.      A new born baby sleep around 400 – 750 hours in sleep.
2.       If you lose two hours of sleep, you can impair your performance.
3.       A sleeping directly after learning something new will improve your ability to remember it effectively.
4.       An average human will spend 1/3 or their life sleeping.
5.       Some studies suggest women need up to an hour's extra sleep a night compared to men.
6.       Upon five minutes of waking, 50% of a dream is forgotten. Within 10 minutes, 90% of it is forgotten.
7.       Sixty-five percent of Americans lose sleep because of stress.
8.       Both whales and dolphins literally fall half asleep. Their brain hemispheres take turns so they can continue surfacing to breathe.
9.       Children don’t react the same way to sleep deprivation as adults: while adults get sleepy, children become hyperactive.
10.   Children need an average of nine to 10 hours of sleep each night.
11.   A research shows that regularly sleeping too little (6 hours and less) OR regularly sleeping too much (more than 9 hours) is associated with shorter lifespan! 7-8 hours is the ideal.
12.   Lack of sleep can raise the sensation of hunger by 25 percent. Sleep more and you can eat more or burn more calories.
13.   No-one knows for sure if other species dream but some do have sleep cycles similar to humans.
14.   The “natural alarm clock” which enables some people to wake up.
15.   The average person wakes up about six times per night.
16.   Dreams may not serve any purpose at all but be merely a meaningless byproduct of two evolutionary adaptations – sleep and consciousness.
17.   You can only dream about faces you have already seen.
18.   Somniphobia is the fear of sleep.
19.   Ducks at risk of attack by predators are able to balance the need for sleep and survival, keeping one half of the brain awake while the other slips into sleep mode.
20.   If you lose two hours of sleep, you can impair your performance equal to a .05 blood-alcohol level.
21.   No-one knows for sure if other species dream but some do have sleep cycles similar to humans.
22.   An average human will spend 1/3 or their life sleeping.
23.   Some studies suggest women need up to an hour's extra sleep a night compared to men.
24.   Upon five minutes of waking, 50% of a dream is forgotten. Within 10 minutes, 90% of it is forgotten.
25.   Sixty-five percent of Americans lose sleep because of stress.
26.   12% of people have black and white dreams. Before color television though, the number was 75%.
27.   Elephants sleep standing up during non-REM sleep, but lie down for REM sleep.
28.   Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering.
29.   It’s impossible to tell if someone is really awake without close medical supervision. People can take cat naps with their eyes open without even being aware of it.
30.   Giraffes sleep only 1.9 hours a day in five- to 10-minute sessions. Koalas, however, are the longest-sleeping mammals, sleeping up to 22 hours a day.
31.   Humans can survive longer without food than they can without sleep.
32.   The average amount of time people sleep has dropped from nine hours in the pre-lightbulb era to seven-and-a-half hours today.
33.   Studies show that less sleep (six hours or less) can lead to higher inflammatory proteins in the blood.
34.   People who are in a coma or under anesthesia may seem to be asleep but the complex, active brainwave patterns seen in normal sleep are absent.
35.   The record for the longest period without sleep is 18 days, 21 hours, 40 minutes during a rocking chair marathon. The record holder reported hallucinations, paranoia, blurred vision, slurred speech and memory and concentration lapses.
36.   Dreams usually run in 90-minute cycles during sleep.
37.   A study showed that 42% of people felt they had had a dream about something that later came true.

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