The Myth of the 8 hour sleep...

So the 8 hour sleep is something we force upon our children..

We often worry about people who lie awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. Scientists have been saying for 20 years that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural, and historians increasingly are backing them up.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.

Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists.

More recently, the theory that humans slept in two distinct chunks has resurfaced, but in the rather less likely field of history.

[link to www.bbc.co.uk]