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As far as I can tell, the 8 hours figure is on pretty shaky grounds and most believe it due to pop-science books like 'Why we sleep' and it could easily be the case that this is just another study showing how exaggerated that claim is.
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What does spending 8 hours in bed but only sleeping for 5.5 hours mean specifically, and how is this measured? What is the expected amount of sleep for a healthy person that spends 8 hours in bed?
> What does spending 8 hours in bed but only sleeping for 5.5 hours mean specifically It means that the TV is in the bedroom.
Those in the study were low-income adults in Chennai, India who sleep only 5.5 hours per night on average despite spending 8 hours in bed. The key takeaway was: > increased nighttime sleep had no detectable effects on cognition, productivity, decision-making, or well-being, and led to small decreases in labor supply. I find the result surprising. When I get under 6 hours I see a clear drop off in performance.
I read it as then saying they just got them to spend even more time in bed, despite the problem being they already have a lot of non-sleep time in bed. So it just reduced their time available to do other stuff. Am I misunderstanding?
The majority of comments seem to have the belief that the need for 8 hours of sleep is truth, and seem to mostly be making up various excuses why the increase in sleep here doesn't show results. As far as I can tell, the 8 hours figure is on pretty shaky grounds and most believe it due to pop-science books like 'Why we sleep' and it could easily be the case that this is just another study showing how exaggerated that…
Recent consensus statement: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4434546/
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They employed 452 adults for a one-month data-entry job, which the authors say it's "a relatively cognitively-demanding task intended to be sensitive to sleep deprivation." As a side note, the study also says that short afternoon naps increased productivity.
Chennai's extremely hot. Having been there, intuitively I'd suspect a Spain-like siesta would work very well there and boost productivity. The nights there are extremely warm too. I wonder if that's a factor in ensuring that 5.5 hours of sleep is no worse than 8?
Just imagine what we'll do to the labor supply if we can figure out a way to keep the poors working 24/7 and have them not suffer any ill effects from it!
This sort of inflammatory mind set is not helpful, and in this case the abstract describes they are actually getting adequate time in bed, just having interrupted sleep. The causes of the interruptions could be manifold but i would hazard a guess that the primary cause would be interruption from young children in small domiciles and lack of could social responsibility within the neighbourhood. I've experienced both h…
Although not completely relevant to the topic, it's not outside the realm of possibility for what was stated to become a reality. And it's very much an important idea to explore, because to not do so would help those willing to exploit such "zombie workers" actually go through with it.
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It could also be a function of their jobs, which weren't specified in the abstract. While insufficient sleep might cause physical discomfort and contribute to long-term health problems, if their job weren't highly physically or mentally demanding, I suspect that most people could get through the day with negligible detriment to their short-term economic output after having a cup of coffee.
The average teacher’s job is reasonably mentally demanding but despite waking and starting work at unnaturally early hours (in the US and China) people do acceptably with coffee. The students do worse because the schedule is even more divergent from their natural sleep schedule and they’re less likely to have coffee or other stimulants.
Do they, though?
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Britain’s Factory Laws were created to prevent 8 year olds from working 16 hours per day with only a single break, but weren’t really enforced until automation made child labour obsolete. If we had the technology to force people to work 24/7 but proved to it was detrimental to people’s health, somehow I know deep down that society would just bite the bullet and people would burn the midnight oil for a few more dollar…
It probably wouldn't be a good idea because demand would collapse, and there's no work without customers. This is actually why economics is called the "dismal science", it's not because everyone hates economists, a slave-owner gave it that name because he was mad economists didn't like slavery.
There's a reason why overall income didn't really go down in 2020 (and even increased in some places), and thats because poor people don't actually make that much money, nor do they provide any significant value.
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It probably wouldn't be a good idea because demand would collapse, and there's no work without customers. This is actually why economics is called the "dismal science", it's not because everyone hates economists, a slave-owner gave it that name because he was mad economists didn't like slavery.
Weird... maybe he was also mad at economists because they proved again and again that slavery was more expensive than paying people a wage!