SCIENCE23 - The Science of Sleep Part 1: Timeline of our Understanding of Sleep
As regular readers of this blog know, I get ideas for subjects from many sources. My primary requirement is that the subject is something I know little about, and want to learn more. Believe it or not, I found the subject for this blog on an online list of possible blog topics. The Science of Sleep is a big subject, very complex, and not well understood yet, despite centuries of observations and decades of scientific research. I decided to try to cover the topic in two parts. This blog, Part 1, is an historic listing of opinions, observations, and selected significant scientific research milestones, as we tried to understand this phenomenon. My objective is to show how our understanding of sleep (what is it, how it works, and why do we need it) has expanded over the years. For convenience, I will discuss this in chronologically-ordered time periods of history, from ancient times through today. This review of progress in our increasing...