of my favorite subjects,

and that is the neuroscience of sleep.

Now, there is a sound --

(Alarm clock) --

aah, it worked --

a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us,

and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock.

And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does

is stop the single most important behavioral experience

that we have, and that's sleep.

If you're an average sort of person,

36 percent of your life will be spent asleep,

which means that if you live to 90,

then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.

Now what that 32 years is telling us

is that sleep at some level is important.

And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought.

We throw it away.

We really just don't think about sleep.

And so what I'd like to do today

is change your views,

change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep.

And the journey that I want to take you on,

we need to start by going back in time.

"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber."

Any ideas who said that?

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

Yes, let me give you a few more quotes.

"O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse,

how have I frighted thee?"

Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it --

the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2]

(Laughter)

From the same time:

"Sleep is the golden chain

that ties health and our bodies together."

Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker,

another Elizabethan dramatist.

But if we jump forward 400 years,

the tone about sleep changes somewhat.

This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century.

"Sleep is a criminal waste of time

and a heritage from our cave days." Bang.

(Laughter)

And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you

may remember that Margaret Thatcher

was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps."

And of course the infamous -- what was his name? --

the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said,

"Money never sleeps."

What do we do in the 20th century about sleep?

Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb

to invade the night, and we occupied the dark,

and in the process of this occupation,

we've treated sleep as an illness, almost.

We've treated it as an enemy.

At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep,

and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep

as an illness that needs some sort of a cure.

And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.

Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts?

Well, it's because you don't do anything much

while you're asleep, it seems.

You don't eat. You don't drink.

And you don't have sex.

Well, most of us anyway.

And so therefore it's --

Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong.

Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology,

and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why

it's so very important.

So let's move to the brain.

Now, here we have a brain.

This is donated by a social scientist,

and they said they didn't know what it was,

or indeed how to use it, so --

(Laughter)

Sorry.

So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay.

(Laughter)

The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep,

this thing doesn't shut down.

In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active

during the sleep state than during the wake state.

The other thing that's really important about sleep

is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain,

but is to some extent a network property,

and if we flip the brain on its back --

I love this little bit of spinal cord here --

this bit here is the hypothalamus,

and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures,

not least the biological clock.

The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up,

when it's good to be asleep,

and what that structure does is interact

with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus,

the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei.

All of those combine, and they send projections

down to the brain stem here.

The brain stem then projects forward

and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here,

with neurotransmitters that keep us awake

and essentially provide us with our consciousness.

So sleep arises from a whole raft

of different interactions within the brain,

and essentially, sleep is turned on and off

as a result of a range of interactions in here.

Okay. So where have we got to?

We've said that sleep is complicated

and it takes 32 years of our life.

But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about.

So why do we sleep?

And it won't surprise any of you that, of course,

the scientists, we don't have a consensus.

There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep,

and I'm going to outline three of those.

The first is sort of the restoration idea,

and it's somewhat intuitive.

Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day,

we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night.

And indeed, as an explanation,

it goes back to Aristotle,

so that's, what, 2,300 years ago.

It's gone in and out of fashion.

It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown

is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes

have been shown to be turned on only during sleep,

and those genes are associated with restoration

and metabolic pathways.

So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.

What about energy conservation?

Again, perhaps intuitive.

You essentially sleep to save calories.

Now, when you do the sums, though,

it doesn't really pan out.

If you compare an individual who has

slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much,

the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night.

Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun.

Now, I would say that a hot dog bun

is kind of a meager return for such a complicated

and demanding behavior as sleep.

So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.

But the third idea I'm quite attracted to,

which is brain processing and memory consolidation.

What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task,

and you sleep-deprive individuals,

the ability to learn that task is smashed.

It's really hugely attenuated.

So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important.

However, it's not just the laying down of memory

and recalling it.

What's turned out to be really exciting

is that our ability to come up with novel solutions

to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep.

In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage.

Sleeping at night enhances our creativity.

And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain,

those neural connections that are important,

those synaptic connections that are important,

are linked and strengthened,

while those that are less important

tend to fade away and be less important.

Okay. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep,

and I think the important thing to realize is that

the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons.

But sleep is not an indulgence.

It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually.

I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade

from economy to business class, you know, the equiavlent of.

It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class.

The critical thing to realize is that

if you don't sleep, you don't fly.

Essentially, you never get there,

and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days

is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.

So let's now look at sleep deprivation.

Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived,

and let's look at our sleep-o-meter.

So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us

were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night.

Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night,

so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league.

For teenagers, it's worse, much worse.

They need nine hours for full brain performance,

and many of them, on a school night,

are only getting five hours of sleep.

It's simply not enough.

If we think about other sectors of society, the aged,

if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block

is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again,

less than five hours a night.

Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary,

perhaps 20 percent of the working population,

and the body clock does not shift to the demands

of working at night.

It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us.

So when the poor old shift worker is going home

to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired,

the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake."

So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker

is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region.

And then, of course, tens of millions of people

suffer from jet lag.

So who here has jet lag?