Always on always connected and getting better sleep

I found this BBC article on the misconception of a requisite 8-hour sleep cycle to be rather interesting:

A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks.

His book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past, published four years later, unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern - in diaries, court records, medical books and literature, from Homer's Odyssey to an anthropological account of modern tribes in Nigeria.

These references describe a first sleep which began about two hours after dusk, followed by waking period of one or two hours and then a second sleep.

"It's not just the number of references - it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge," Ekirch says.

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

File under: the destruction of everything.

Did any of you even know that sleeping patterns were so radically different in the past? 

How much have we forgotten, I wonder? About everything. How much did agraianism then industrialism change our fundamental human behaviors?

We may never know.

Strong evidence of this shifting attitude is contained in a medical journal from 1829 which urged parents to force their children out of a pattern of first and second sleep.

"If no disease or accident there intervene, they will need no further repose than that obtained in their first sleep, which custom will have caused to terminate by itself just at the usual hour.

"And then, if they turn upon their ear to take a second nap, they will be taught to look upon it as an intemperance not at all redounding to their credit."

Our smartphones and the mobile web keep us connected almost everywhere we go, at all times. Some of us can't put them down, it seems. Or refrain from going online, or tweeting, or updating, or responding or searching or reading or watching.

They are already changing how we work, when and where we work.

Perhaps this is good. Perhaps we've been doing something as basic as sleep all wrong all our lives. And our parents and our grandparents.

As Crosby Stills and Nash sang, "we got to get ourselves back to the garden." That doesn't have to mean going backwards, I suspect. But instead, moving forwards.