5 TED Talks on sleep

Sara Mednick: Give it up for the down state-sleep

Sara Mednick, Assistant Professor of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of “Take a Nap! Change Your Life”, explains how napping (even when you have had a good night’s rest) has been shown to increase performance levels. She also describes how much better it is to take a nap than to take in caffeine!

Jeff Iliff: One more reason to get a good night’s sleep

Jeff Iliff, an Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and Perioperative Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, talks about how the brain uses a unique system to clear its waste that only activates when we sleep.

Russell Foster: Why do we sleep?

Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist, who is currently researching, with a team at the University of Oxford, a third photoreceptor of the eye that isn’t a rod or cone. In his talk, he describes the importance of sleep and mentions that a lack of sleep can make things like mental illness, worse.

Arianna Huffington: How to succeed? Get more sleep.

Arianna Huffington, co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post and author of several books, describes how the key to success is to get more sleep. She explains that even with the recent “trend” of one-upping each other in sleep deprivation, it is important to sleep because when you don’t, you miss out on a lot.

Jessa Gamble: Our natural sleep cycle is nothing like what we do now

Jessa Gamble is an author and co-owner of a science blog called “The Last Word on Nothing”. In her talk, she explains how everyone has internal clocks as well as our own body clocks. She also comments that although modern ways have their advantages, those living in modern society do not get to experience true wakefulness.

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