Another Clue To 'Old Time': Pre-Industrial 'Old Sleep'

I maintain that our sense of time will change as one side effect of stream-based communication tools. When people ask me how could such a thing happen I often use the example of 'old sleep' -- the way pre-industrial people spent the dark hours of the night. It is so different from our modern concept of night time that people simply don't believe me when I tell them about it.

Buried in a Sunday Times piece about modern mattresses and sleep, Jon Mooallem relates some of the findings of A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech:

[from Sleep - Insomnia - Beds and Bedding - Medicine and Health - Stress - Drugs - Science - New York Times]

[...]

Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission. “There was an extraordinary level of activity,” Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took “cold-air baths,” reading naked in a chair.

Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness — mimicking the duration of day and night during winter — fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence — just calmly lying there — in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, “may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself,” Ekirch told me. “It’s the seamless sleep that we aspire to that’s the anomaly, the creation of the modern world.”

In fact, many contemporary, nonindustrialized cultures contentedly pass portions of the night in the same state of somnolence, says Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University who is one of the first to look at how other societies sleep. Sleep and wakefulness are rarely seen as an either/or, but rather as two ends of a wide spectrum, and people are far more at peace with the fluidity in between. Among the Efe in Zaire, and the !Kung in Botswana, for example, someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot sleep “may begin to hum, or go out and play the thumb piano,” Worthman and a colleague have written. Others might wake up and join in. “Music or even a dance may get going.”

Worthman says, “In our culture, quality sleep is going into a dark room that is totally quiet, lying down, falling asleep, doing that for eight hours, and then getting up again.” She calls it the “lie down and die” model. “But that is not how much of the world has slept in the past or even sleeps today.” In some cultures sleep is more social, with crowds crammed together on little or no bedding, limbs entangled, while a steady traffic comes and goes. And while it all sounds unbearable, Worthman notes that science has never looked empirically at whether our more sophisticated arrangements actually benefit us. For children, learning to sleep amid all that stimulation may actually have developmental advantages.

Still, we can’t afford the same equanimity about not sleeping through the night as the Efe and !Kung; the flipside is that men and women in those cultures are content to pull a cloth over their faces and doze off during the day if necessary. Our peculiar preference for one well-organized hunk of sleep likely evolved as a corollary to our expectation of uninterrupted wakefulness during the day — as our lives came to be governed by a single, stringent clock. Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of the forthcoming “Insomnia: A Cultural History,” explains that in the 18th century, “we start overvaluing our waking time, and come to see our sleeping time only as a way to support our waking time.” Consequently, we begin trying to streamline sleep, to get it done more economically: “We should lie down and go out right away so we can get up and get to the day right away.” She describes insomniacs as having a ruthless ambition to do just this, wanting to administer sleep as an efficiency expert normalizes the action in a factory. Certainly all of us, after a protracted failure to fall asleep for whatever reason, have turned solemnly to our alarm clocks and performed that desperate arithmetic: If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours.

Nevertheless, while it may be at odds with our history and even our biology, lie-down-and-die is the only practical model for our lifestyle. Unless we overhaul society to tolerate all schedules and degrees of sleepiness and attentiveness, we are stuck with that ideal. Perhaps the real problem is that we still haven’t come to terms with the unavoidable imperfection of this state of affairs.

We become so enculturated that we can't even sense the line between what is a habit, engrained in use through repetition and training, and our innate drives, which we may be completely out of touch with.

Modern Westerners' reaction to the concept of 'old sleep' is first incredulity and then dismissal. Like Mooallem, the author of the piece, who suggests that we couldn't possibly go back to 'old sleep' as a model today. Note, also, that he never investigates the idea that modern perceptions of sleep problems could be caused by our cultural norms that push us to 'lie down and die'.

But streamlining everything for the sake of work is an enemy to the spirit, and corrosive to social relationships. Even our sleep time has been invaded by Taylor and his stopwatch-carrying efficiency imps.

I maintain that we really don't know much about a lot of things the mind does, although we are surrounded by all sorts of conventional wisdom that does unchallenged.

Attention, for example, is really not well understood. Cognitive researchers don't know if it is one center in the mind, or many, or what regions of the brain are directly involved. But there are gazillions of life coaches hectoring people to pay attention in various ways to get ahead, do better in school, whatever.

Our sense of time is one of these seemingly basic notions, which are actually quite slippery. I believe our perception of the world and our place in it is similarly slippery, and fluid.

We know that when we are exposed to different media our cognition changes. I believe that when we are exposed to streaming media, our sense of time -- and maybe how we sleep and dream -- will be shifted in subtle but significant ways. Just as there is an 'old sleep' that we have lost, but perhaps could recapture, there is an 'old time' lurking deep within our minds, behind the reasoning, below the cultural. Maybe we will find that again, too, once we learn to flow.

Comments

[Stuart Henshall]

Stowe, Fascinating post. Just shows how short our "experience timelines" are. Seeing as we find it hard to think back to the lives of our great grandparents I guess we shouldn't be surprised. We seem to forget more than we will ever know!

[Stowe Boyd]

Stuart - Yes, and the fact that people's minds boggle when they hear about something like this says even more about cultural blinders than anything. How much do we hold ourselves back, or contort ourselves based on programming?

[Leigh]

Tres interesting.....sleep patterns have been changing very dramatically in the past ten years the effects to which we are only beginning to understand (metaphorically speaking we are an entire continent of sleep deprived parents only the baby happens to be digital).

It makes perfect sense to me that the body, in an attempt to compensate, evolve, will physiologically change to in essence to survive and thrive. How those changes might manifest themselves, and how quickly, remains to be seen…

(but if i could put a good word in for the afternoon nap at work, allow me to do so now :)

[Kevin Marks]

Steve Strogatz's book 'Sync' has an extensive and thorough chapter on his sleep research. Here's the key diagram - there are two natural sleepy periods for people free-running without daylight cues, and traffic accidents correlate well with them (as do siestas).