At this very moment, some three billion people on the other side of the earth are sleeping or trying to sleep, and hundreds are dying because they are sleeping.
Perhaps 100 million people in the United States alone complain fairly intensively about their sleep; many more are distressed by impairments of daytime alertness. It has been shown that approximately twice as many people die of natural causes during the night as during the day.
Something is going wrong with the activity of the sleeping brain in more than a hundred million Americans. Narcolepsy, the sleep apnea syndrome, insomnia, stroke, epilepsy and the sudden infant death syndrome are some of the more common problems. Drugs, alcohol, abnormal work schedules and jet travel impair sleep, as does aging. The single best predictor of life expectancy established through highly respected epidemiological studies is how much sleep a person gets at night.
To alleviate the truly distressing human problems of sleep disorders, as well as disorders of sleep that occur as a result of almost all pathologies ranging from epilepsy to mental instability, we must know a great deal more of basic sleep processes.
The most obvious difficulty in dealing with sleep is that the responsible mechanisms are hidden by the "night". One of the major features of normal sleep, rapid eye movements, escaped science's observation for thousands of years. The investigation of sleep came into its own as a discipline only in the last two decades.
We now know that sleep is active, purposeful, and very complex. It is an exquisitely orchestrated process which can easily become abnormal. It is not the benign withdrawal of activity that an innocent observer might assume. A sleeping person may be experiencing the most intensely erotic experience, a horrible horror story, or a lovely afternoon in May - but an observer only sees an occasional limb twitch.
There are three fundamental principles of the healthy sleeping brain. The first is that the sleeping brain has periods during which it is more active than the waking brain. The second principle is that the sleeping brain is an entirely different brain from the waking brain. One way to conceptualize this principle is to think of the brain as a marvelous computer with two totally different operating systems. The third principle is that sleep has many purposes. An obvious purpose is to maintain the vital processes of breathing, heartbeat, and the flow of oxygenated blood while we sleep. Another task is the biochemical work that is required for us to remain fully awake throughout the subsequent day. Other purposes of sleep are less well understood. They have to do with the consolidation of memory, learning, growth, development, vitality and longevity. We know that we cannot live without sleep. Deprived of all sleep, animals deteriorate and die.
Basic sleep research of the highest caliber must therefore be conducted to alleviate human suffering, to satisfy human intellectual curiosity and to set the stage for serendipitous discoveries that will reveal the inner workings of our most precious organ, our brain, and how it functions while we are asleep and awake.
Truly, the hidden mysteries of the sleeping brain are enormously difficult to solve, and therefore worthy of the best efforts by our most distinguished scientists.
The breadth and depth of some of the scientific disciplines which are utilized in the field of basic sleep research to explore the unsolved mysteries of sleep are illustrated by the questions which are presented on facing pages.