Let sleeping giants lie – they may be solving our problems

There were times when our lads were younger where we considered moving to somewhere like New York or Boston – not for the same reasons as our forefathers made that transatlantic crossing, but just because it’s five hours behind us.

And if their sleeping patterns stayed the same, when they got up at lunchtime, it would still be only 8am on America’s East Coast – so they’d have a day of daylight after all.

Equally, at the other end, if they stayed up until four in the morning Galway-time, they’d actually be heading off to bed around 11pm – so we’d all have been winners.

Truth be told, ours were the same as teenagers the world over. When you wanted them to go to bed, you couldn’t lure them with a trail of sugar, and when you wanted to them to get up, a small bomb wouldn’t disturb them.

But now it seems they – and teens since the dawn of time – were right all along, because Chinese scientists have concluded that adolescents who get more sleep are better at coping in high-pressure environments and are more resilient under stress.

And separately a team from Oxford University have discovered that those who sleep on a problem or a conundrum sometimes find the answer as they slumber.

The most famous example concerns the periodic table; for years, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev couldn’t find a way of ordering the chemical elements so their properties made sense – until he fell asleep and in a flash he had the answer.

But, according to the team from Oxford, it’s far more commonplace than that – and they believe they have mapped the way in which the brain makes creative connections between apparently unconnected memories, and shown that these links appear to be solidified in sleep.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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