Nick Weiler has a new piece in the Stanford Magazine dedicated to the study of sleep (A Bedtime Story). Nick presents the career of the key protagonist, Bill Dement, in entertaining fashion. Professor Dement created the very first sleep laboratory at Stanford in 1970. He studied the relationship between REM sleep and dreams, and was the first to classify the various sleep states in humans.
To do all of this work, Professor Dement had to be able to do continuous physiological monitoring during sleep. Back in the day, this was a non-trivial affair. With the Sheepdog Sciences headband today, we believe Dr. Dement would have been able to do the majority of his work at the subjects’ homes. This would have reduced the experimental noise arising from the stress of sleeping in a research lab, and probably increased the number of participants in his studies.
Some interesting tidbits:
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We don’t know what the “right” amount of sleep for humans is.
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40 million Americans suffered from chronic sleep disorder (1992 study).
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24 percent of men in an epidemiology study suffered sleep apnea