Is being awake for 22-hours in a day going to become commonplace?
“The more we understand about the body’s 24-hour clock the more we will be able to override it,” says Russell Foster, a circadian biologist at Imperial College London. “In 10 to 20 years we’ll be able to pharmacologically turn sleep off. Mimicking sleep will take longer, but I can see it happening.” Foster envisages a world where it’s possible, or even routine, for people to be active for 22 hours a day and sleep for two.
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{ 2 comments }
I like sleep, am I the only one? I guess I didnt realize sleeping normally was a problem that warranted immense resources and funding to fix. Curing AIDS and cancer will have to wait. Of course, we will have so many more hours to work on them when we dont sleep!
Enjoy the perfectly normal biologic function of the human body. While we don’t understand fully the function of sleep, it is perfectly clear that without it (or even with a slight deficit) we function quite poorly.
Since the typical person pads their day with 6 hours of television, it is clear that there is little need for additional wakeful hours.
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