每天8小时不是必需睡眠？_BEC初级作文

每天8小时不是必需睡眠？

It seemed that, given a chance to be free of modern life, the body would naturally settle into a split sleep schedule. Subjects grew to like experiencing nighttime in a new way. Once they broke their conception of what form sleep should come in, they looked forward to the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity. Most of us, however, do not treat middle-of-the-night awakenings as a sign of a normal, functioning brain.

看起来，如果得到一个远离现代生活的机会，我们的身体能够自然而然地适应片断式的睡眠节奏。参加实验的人渐渐喜欢上了用一种新的方式来感受夜晚。一旦他们打破了关于睡眠形式的既有观念，就会期待着能趁着午夜时分来进行沉思，不管他们是用这段时间来进行反思、为第二天做好准备、还是想感情方面的事情。不过，我们中的大部分人都觉得在子夜时分醒来，不能算是大脑运行如常的信号。

Robert Stickgold, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, proposes that sleep — including short naps that include deep sleep — offers our brains the chance to decide what new information to keep and what to toss. That could be one reason our dreams are laden with strange plots and characters, a result of the brain’s trying to find connections between what it’s recently learned and what is stored in our long-term memory. Rapid eye movement sleep — so named because researchers who discovered this sleep stage were astonished to see the fluttering eyelids of sleeping subjects — is the only phase of sleep during which the brain is as active as it is when we are fully conscious, and seems to offer our brains the best chance to come up with new ideas and hone recently acquired skills. When we awaken, our minds are often better able to make connections that were hidden in the jumble of information.