The very nature of being human means that we strive to understand the world around us. Scientists have long considered experiments the best way to test a hypothesis and draw a conclusion. Over the last century, scientists have begun to study sleep more and more. We know it’s necessary yet we don’t fully understand it. Such a vital function could contain so many important discoveries that we haven’t yet come across. In this infographic we look at some of the most bizarre sleep experiments. What were they, who ran them and why? Did we learn anything from them or did they go horribly wrong? On an article on Polyphasic Sleep, Yash Pandya also explores the benefits of this new research: As students, we all experience a lack of time at one point or another. There are just so many things on our plate that we must achieve in a short lifespan! Our decisions regarding priorities eventually boil down to a balancing act of the three-legged stool – education, social life, and sleep – with the last one ending up usually being cut. But what if I were to say that there is an alternative to the recommended 8 hours of sleep? Would you go for it? Looking around the world, people usually engage in monophasic sleep, which describes a pattern where one sleeps for a set period of time (8 hours) and functions uninterrupted for the rest (16 hours). However, there is a whole another umbrella of speculated sleep patterns known as polyphasic sleep, where sleep time can be divided up into various different segments. Source
