15 Quick Sleep Facts

Note: This is a guest post contributed by List25.com.
  1. People getting only 6 to 7 hours of sleep every night have a longer life expectancy than those who sleep 8 hours.
  2. Both whales and dolphins literally fall half asleep. Their brain hemispheres take turns so they can continue surfacing to breathe.
  3. The world record for not sleeping was set by 17-year-old Randy Gardner in 1964 when he was awake for 264 hours and 12 minutes.
  4. An adult bedbug can survive up to one year without feeding.
  5. In 2004, more than 35 million sleeping pill prescriptions were filled in America, a number that more than doubled from the previous four years.
  6. Although people born blind don’t see images when they dream, they do have an increased auditory, tactile, and olfactory experience
  7. Scientists haven’t been able to figure out why exactly we need sleep.
  8. Somniphobia is the fear of sleep.
  9. 12% of people have black and white dreams. Before color television though, the number was 75%.
  10. Uvulopalatopharyngoplasty is a surgical procedure used to fix snoring by tightening the throat. Possible side effects include changes to the tone of your voice.
  11. When you die, you will have slept about 1/3 of your life, which for the average person is approximately 25 years.
  12. Not sleeping for 16 hours leads to a decrease in performance equivalent to having a blood alcohol level of .05%
  13. Every 90 minutes, during REM sleep, a burst of electrical activity flows through your brainstem which also happens to be when you experience dreams.
  14. The average person spends 6 years of their life dreaming.
  15. That moment right before you fall asleep when all of a sudden you jolt wide awake has a name – it’s called a myoclonic jerk.

Find more interesting lists at List25.com

Source

Disclaimer: Guest Articles are written by various people and while I do my best to make sure they are factual by checking their sources and as well as weighing the plausibility of the thing before allowing them to be posted, I do not guarantee that everything in them is going to be 100% accurate as I myself didn’t do the research for these articles and it’s possible their sources, even if they are reputable, are themselves inaccurate.
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3 comments

  • Facts 11 and 14 seem to contradict each other….

    • Daven Hiskey

      @Chris: Not really. You only dream at certain times of night (mostly during REM sleep, but there is also some evidence that there are certain other times some people dream when they sleep).