You need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new

memories, so that you don't forget.

But what we've also learned is that you need

sleep before learning as well and now -to almost prepare your brain, a little bit

like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information. So you need

sleep on both sides of that equation and that's why pulling the all-nighter

before the exam is a very bad idea.

When you sleep you actually see almost a

three-fold increase in creative abilities as a consequence and there's

some wonderful anecdotes demonstrating this sleep inspired creative benefit.

Keith Richards, from the Rolling Stones, actually used to go to sleep with a

guitar and a tape recorder because he understood the power of dream sleep, what

we call REM sleep, and he describes in his autobiography how one night he

started the tape recorder, went to sleep and the next morning the

tape had run all the way through, he rewinded it back and there in some ghostly

vision were the opening chords of Satisfaction,

the most famous Rolling Stones song.

And then he said it was followed by about 43 minutes of snoring thereafter.

It's probably the reason that no one has ever told you

to stay awake on a problem.

Sleep is a wonderful health panacea. Every major disease that seems to be

killing us in the developed world has significant -and many of them causal-

links to a lack of sleep. So the two most feared diseases,

which are Alzheimer's disease and cancer, both have strong links

to short sleep duration across the lifespan.

Short sleep will actually predict all cause mortality. So you may

have heard that old maxim people would tell you that "you can sleep when you're dead".

Well, it is mortally unwise advice if you adopt that mindset.

We know from the science that you will be both dead sooner

and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse.

Less sleep does not equal more productivity, it's a fallacy that still

remains in business and it's actually a very costly one too. The RAND Corporation

several years ago performed a global survey of the cost of sleep deprivation

across nations and what they found was that insufficient sleep within the

workplace cost most nations about two percent of their GDP. So, just think about

that, if we could solve the sleep crisis within the workplace we could perhaps

double the budget for education, maybe we could even half the healthcare deficit

that were suffering in most of these developed nations. So sound sleep is

sound business, that's exactly what the science teaches us.