The Mathematical Structure of the Human Sleep-Wake Cycle PDF
by Steven H. Strogatz
Part of the Lecture Notes in Biomathematics series
Description
Over the past three years I have grown accustomed to the puzzled look which appears on people's faces when they hear that I am a mathematician who studies sleep.
They wonder, but are usually too polite to ask, what does mathematics have to do with sleep?
Instead they ask the questions that fascinate us all: Why do we have to sleep?
How much sleep do we really need? Why do we dream? These questions usually spark a lively discussion leading to the exchange of anecdotes, last night's dreams, and other personal information.
But they are questions about the func- tion of sleep and, interesting as they are, I shall have little more to say about them here.
The questions that have concerned me deal instead with the timing of sleep.
For those of us on a regular schedule, questions of timing may seem vacuous.
We go to bed at night and get up in the morning, going through a cycle of sleeping and waking every 24 hours.
Yet to a large extent, the cycle is imposed by the world around us.
Information
-
Download - Immediately Available
- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Publication Date:13/03/2013
- Category:
- ISBN:9783642465895
Information
-
Download - Immediately Available
- Format:PDF
- Publisher:Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Publication Date:13/03/2013
- Category:
- ISBN:9783642465895
