APUNTES valiosos: Dormir 8 horas seguidas podría ser una práctica antinatural

A menudo nos preocupa quedarnos desvelados durante la noche, sin saber que eso podría ayudarnos. Tanto la ciencia como la historia parecen confirmar cada vez más que ocho horas de sueño podrían ser antinaturales. A principios de la década de los '90, el psiquiatra Thomas Wehr realizó un experimento en el cual se dejaba a un grupo de personas en la oscuridad durante 14 horas cada día durante un mes. Hizo falta tiempo para que el sueño se regulara, pero para la cuarta semana los individuos habían adquirido un patrón muy diferente:primero dormían durante cuatro horas y luego se despertaban durante una o dos antes de caer en otro sueño de cuatro horas. Aunque los científicos del sueño quedaron impresionados por el estudio, la idea de que debemos dormir ocho horas consecutivas se mantiene entre el público general. En 2001, el historiador Roger Ekirch del Virginia Tech, publicó un artículo que resultó premonitorio -basado en 16 años de investigación- que revelaba una enorme cantidad de pruebas históricas de que los humanos solían dormir en dos tramos de tiempo diferentes. Su libro "At Day’s close: Night in the past" (La noche en el pasado) se publicó hace cuatro años y desenterraba más de 500 referencias de patrones de sueño segmentados, que había encontrado en diarios, libros de medicina y literatura y notas de tribunales, desde La Odisea de Homero hasta reseñas antropológicas de tribus modernas en Nigeria. Como en el experimento de Wehr, esas referencias describen un primer sueño que empieza unas dos horas después del anochecer, seguido por un periodo de una o dos horas de vigilia y por un segundo sueño. La historia del sueño Cuando el sueño era diferente "Cumplió don Quijote con la naturaleza durmiendo el primer sueño, sin dar lugar al segundo, bien al revés de Sancho, que nunca tuvo segundo, porque le duraba el sueño desde la noche hasta la mañana, en que se mostraba su buena complexión y pocos cuidados". Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (1615). “Al despertar de tu primer sueño, deberás tener lista una bebida caliente y al despertar del siguiente sueño tus penas quedarán aplacadas”. Antigua balada inglesa, “Old Robin of Portingale”. La tribu tiv de Nigeria utiliza los términos "primer sueño" y "segundo sueño" para referirse a partes específicas de la noche. "Él lo sabía, ni siquiera en el horror con el que comenzó a partir de su primer sueño, y abrió la ventana para disiparlo con la presencia de algún objeto, más allá de la habitación, que no hubiera sido, por así decirlo, testigo de su sueño". Charles Dickens, "Barnaby Rudge" (1840). "Lo relevante no es sólo una cantidad de referencias, es la manera en la que ellas se refieren a ese hecho, como si fuera algo conocido por todos", dice Ekirch. Durante el periodo de vigilia, esas personas estaban bastante activas. A menudo se levantaban, iban al baño, fumaban y algunos incluso visitaban a los vecinos. La mayoría de las personas se quedaban en la cama, leían, escribían y rezaban. Innumerables manuales de oraciones de finales del siglo XV ofrecían plegarias especiales para las horas de vigilia. Y esas horas no eran completamente solitarias. La gente solía hablar con sus compañeros de cama o tener relaciones sexuales. Un manual médico francés del siglo XVI incluso aconsejaba a las parejas que el mejor momento para concebir no era al final de un largo día de trabajo, sino "después del primer sueño", cuando "se disfruta más y se hace mejor".Ekirch descubrió que las referencias al primer y segundo sueño empezaron a desaparecer a finales del siglo XVII. Esta tendencia se inició en las clases altas de Europa del norte y a lo largo de 200 años se filtró al resto de la sociedad occidental.Ya en 1920, la idea de un primer y segundo sueño había desaparecido por completo del imaginario colectivo. Una de las razones de este cambio, según el experto, se debió a las mejoras en el alumbrado público, la llegada de la electricidad a las casas y la proliferación de salones de café, que en ocasiones estaban abiertos toda la noche. Los "peligros" de la noche Ekirch señala que este grabado de 1595 demuestra la actividad nocturna de la época. A medida que la noche se convirtió en un momento legítimo para realizar actividades y la actividad nocturna aumentó, el tiempo que la gente dedicaba a descansar disminuyó. En su nuevo libro, "Evening’s Empire" (El imperio del atardecer), el historiador Craig Koslofsky plantea una versión de cómo sucedió. (ver abajo) "Lo relativo a la noche, antes del siglo XVII, no era bueno", asegura. La noche era un momento poblado por personas de mala reputación, como criminales, prostitutas y borrachos. "Incluso los ricos, quienes podían permitirse tener candiles, tenían cosas mejores en las que gastarse el dinero. No había prestigio ni ningún valor social asociado con estar despierto toda la noche". Eso cambió en los albores de la Reforma y la Contrarreforma. Protestantes y católicos se acostumbraron a celebrar misas secretas por la noche durante los periodos de persecución. Si anteriormente la noche había pertenecido a los depravados, ahora las personas "respetables" se habituaron a aprovechar las horas de oscuridad. Esta tendencia se trasladó también al ámbito social, pero sólo en el caso de quienes podían permitirse tener luz artificial en casa. Con la llegada del alumbrado a las calles, sin embargo, socializar por la noche empezó a extenderse a las clases sociales más bajas. La revolución de la luz Las etapas del sueño Cada 60-100minutos pasamos por un ciclo de cuatro etapas del sueño: Etapa1: estado de relajación entre estar despierto dormir. La respiración se hace más lenta y los músculos se relajan. La frecuencia cardíaca disminuye. E tapa 2: sueño un poco más profundo. Podemos sentirnos despiertos o estar dormidos sin saberlo. Etapa 3 y Etapa 4, o sueño profundo: es muy difícil despertar de un sueño profundo, momento en queel cuerpo tiene su actividad más baja. Después del sueño profundo, volvemos a la etapa 2 durante unos minutos y luego entramos en el sueño de los sueños -también llamada fase REM(movimiento ocular rápido) del sueño-que, como su nombre indica, es cuando se sueña. En un ciclo de sueño completo una persona pasa por todas las etapas de uno a cuatro y luego por las etapas tres y dos, antes de entrar e nel sueño de los sueños. En 1667, París se convirtió en la primera ciudad del mundo con alumbrado público, que utilizaba cirios de cera en lámparas de cristal. Se le sumó Lille en el mismo año y Ámsterdam dos años después, donde se introdujeron unas lámparas de aceite más desarrolladas. Londres no incorporó este servicio hasta 1684, pero para finales del siglo, más de 50 ciudades importantes de Europa ya tenían alumbrado nocturno. La noche se puso de moda y pasar horas tumbado en la cama pasó a considerarse una pérdida de tiempo. "Las personas tomaron cada vez más conciencia del tiempo y de la eficiencia antes del siglo XIX”, indica Ekirch. "Pero la revolución industrial intensificó esta actitud a grandes pasos".Un diario médico de 1829, que apremiaba a los padres a acostumbrar a sus hijos a romper el patrón del primer y segundo sueño, es una prueba contundente de este cambio de actitud."Salvo en caso de enfermedad o accidente, no necesitarán más descanso que el que ofrece el primer sueño, que deberán acostumbrarse a terminar de forma natural a la hora normal". "Y entonces, si vuelven a intentar dormirse, deberá enseñárseles que eso es una mala costumbre que no redunda en su beneficio". Cambio de patrón Hoy, la mayoría de las personas parecen haberse adaptado bastante bien a dormir ocho horas, pero Ekirch cree que muchos de los problemas del sueño tienen sus raíces en la preferencia del cuerpo humano por segmentar el sueño, así como en la omnipresencia de la luz artificial. Esto, sugiere, podría ser el origen de un trastorno llamado "insomnio de mantenimiento", en el que los afectados se despiertan durante la noche y tienen problemas para volverse a dormir. Esa condición fue descrita por primera vez en la literatura de finales del siglo XIX, al tiempo que el sueño segmentado desaparecía. "Durante la mayor parte de nuestra evolución hemos dormido de una manera determinada", señala el psicólogo del sueño Gregg Jacobs. "Despertarse durante la noche es parte normal de la psicología humana". La idea de que debemos de dormir en un único bloque podría ser perjudicial, dice, si eso hace que la gente se despierte por la noche ansiosa. Esa ansiedad, agrega, puede impedir a algunos volver a dormirse y es posible que se extienda al resto de la vida.Russel Foster, profesor de neurociencia circadiana (sobre el reloj biológico) en la Universidad de Oxford comparte ese punto de vista. "Muchas personas se despiertan por la noche con pánico", afirma. "Les digo que lo que experimentan es una reminiscencia del patrón de sueño partido". Problemas del sueño Russel Foster, Universidad de Oxford Pero la mayoría de los médicos todavía no reconocen que un sueño único de ocho horas puede no ser natural. "Más del 30% de los casos que los doctores enfrentan radican directamente o indirectamente del sueño. Pero ese tema ha sido ignorado en la educación médica y hay muy pocos centros en los que se estudia", comenta. Jacobs sugiere que los periodos entre sueños, en la época en que la gente se imponía periodos de descanso, podrían haber tenido un papel importante en la capacidad de los humanos para regular el estrés de forma natural.En sus hallazgos históricos, Ekirch encontró que la gente usaba ese tiempo para meditar sobre sus sueños."Hoy empleamos menos tiempo en esas cosas", dice Jacobs. "No es una coincidencia que, en la vida moderna, el número de gente que padece ansiedad, estrés, depresión, alcoholismo o drogadicción haya crecido". De modo que, la próxima vez que se despierte en mitad de la noche, piense en sus antepasados de la época preindustrial y relájese. Quedarse tumbado despierto puede ser bueno. --- Hablando de costumbres cotidianas, Fermín Sánchez de Medina se pregunta por qué tenemos los españoles unos horarios tan tardíos, por ejemplo, para comer y cenar. Lo único que sé decir es que ese desfase es algo relativamente reciente. Hace un siglo o dos los españoles tenían un horario muy parecido al del resto de los europeos. A principios del siglo XX los bohemios madrileños empezaron a retrasar el horario. Esa costumbre tan rara fue adoptada poco a poco por el resto de los madrileños y al final por todos los españoles. The reinvention of the night Craig Koslofsky EVENING’S EMPIREA history of the night in early modern Europe433pp. Cambridge University Press. £55; paperback, £18.99 (US $90; paperback, $29.99).978 0 521 89643 6 ----------- -- Craig Koslofsky, a professor of history, was named the winner of this year’s Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award for his book “Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe.” The award, announced at a ceremony in London Jan. 11, goes to the best first or second history book, as determined by a panel of judges. “Evening’s Empire” tells the story of how Europeans moved from fearing the night to embracing it, roughly between 1500 and 1700, well before the age of electricity. The book award is one of several established by History Today Ltd. and the book publisher Longman Pearson Education to promote the study, publication and accessibility of history to a wide audience. Published: 21 September 2011 I n 1710, Richard Steele wrote in Tatler that recently he had been to visit an old friend just come up to town from the country. But the latter had already gone to bed when Steele called at 8 pm. He returned at 11 o’clock the following morning, only to be told that his friend had just sat down to dinner. “In short”, Steele commented, “I found that my old-fashioned friend religiously adhered to the example of his forefathers, and observed the same hours that had been kept in his family ever since the Conquest”. During the previous generation or so, elites across Europe had moved their clocks forward by several hours. No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky calls “nocturnalisation”, defined as “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night”, a development to which he awards the status of “a revolution in early modern Europe”. The case is well made, supported by an impressive range of archival and printed sources, mostly French, English and German. More than fifty years ago, Richard Alewyn published his study of court festivities Das grosse Welttheater (“The great theatre of the world”). It proved to be highly influential, not only in its own right but also because it supplied Jürgen Habermas with much of what little empirical illustration he provided in his even more seminal The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Alewyn’s main concern was the change that took place in the seventeenth century, as the grand secular festivals moved spatially from streets and public squares into palaces, and temporally from day to night. Now the carriages of courtiers going home to bed passed labourers going to work. Koslofsky gives due recognition to Alewyn’s insight but goes a long way beyond it. At the heart of his argument is the contrariety between day and night, light and dark. On the one hand, the sixteenth century witnessed an intensification of the association of the night with evil – “Night, thou foule mother of annoyaunce sad / Sister of heavie Death, and nourse of Woe”, as Edmund Spenser put it. In part this derived from the excited religious atmosphere. While Hans Sachs hailed Martin Luther for waking humanity from the darkness of superstition, Thomas More repaid the nocturnal insult by identifying Lutherans with the dark night of heresy. Closely linked to confessional strife was the intensification of disputes over witchcraft. The witch-hunter’s manual Malleus Maleficarum of 1486 had paid little attention to the night; a century later the night was well and truly diabolized. The Devil was now believed to be responsible for all “phantoms of the night”, especially those resulting from sorcery, so witchcraft confessions typically focused on two nocturnal acts – the diabolic pact, often consummated sexually, and the Witches’ Sabbath, also a riot of sexual licence. Peter Binsfeld, the suffragan Bishop of Trier, explained in 1589 that after his expulsion from Paradise, the Devil became dark and obscure and so performed all his foul deeds at night. Christian disapproval of the night is as old as the New Testament. Unsurprisingly, St Paul’s epistles equate darkness with evil, as does John’s Gospel – “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness”. However, there was another albeit less obtrusive theological tradition advocating a path leading to God that was not brilliantly lit. Especially influential was Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the fifth-century Syrian thinker, who proclaimed: “I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light!”. Those words are taken from his treatise The Mystical Theology and in the early modern period, too, it was the mystics who valued darkness. To the fore were two sixteenth-century saints – Teresa of Avila (1515–82) and John of the Cross (1542–91). In his poem “Dark Night”, John praised his subject in language eerily anticipating the second act of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: “Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved!”. The only light that John of the Cross trusted was the light that burned inside himself, in his heart. It was always those who preferred personal introspection to institutional dogma who found the dark side congenial. In his “Hymn to Christ” of 1619, John Donne wrote: “Churches are best for prayer, that have least light; / To see God only, I go out of sight: / And to ’scape stormy days, I choose / An everlasting night”. Koslofsky draws on what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of the devotional literature of the period to demonstrate the popularity of this sort of belief. The benign image of the night also appealed to Protestants persecuted by Catholics and vice versa, for it was the time best suited for clandestine gatherings. And of course there was a biblical text at hand to lend support – John 3:1–3 – which tells of Nicodemus, who “came to Jesus by night”. Eventually the Catholic Church caught up, introducing new nocturnal practices, such as the devotion of the Forty Hours and lay processions during Holy Week. Immensely popular, they played a prominent role in the public piety of the seventeenth century. The former commemorated the forty hours between Christ’s death and resurrection and necessarily lasted through at least one night. The public prayers and processions in darkness made “the site [of the devotion] more venerated through this clear dark obscurity”, in the paradoxical words of one advocate. It was the secular authorities, however, who made most use of ceremonial chiaroscuro. This is very much the domain of Alewyn, who wrote that the shift from street to court and from day to night represented “the sharpest break in the history of celebrations in the West”, although Koslofsky has plenty to add on his own account. In the sixteenth century, he points out, the main media of royal representation were the jousts and tournaments held in the daytime, such as the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the Anglo-French spectacular of 1520. By the time of Louis XIV, all the major events – ballets de cour, operas, balls, masquerades, firework displays – took place at night (a major exception, of course, was hunting, about which Koslofsky has nothing to say). When was the “art of illumination” discovered in the Holy Roman Empire? asked a Saxon writer in 1736, and concluded that it must have been towards the end of the previous century. The kings, courtiers – and those who sought to emulate them – adjusted their daily timetable accordingly. Unlike Steele’s friend, they rose and went to bed later and later. Henry III of France, who was assassinated in 1589, usually had his last meal at 6 pm and was tucked up in bed by 8. Louis XIV’s day began with a lever at 9 and ended (officially) at around midnight. The ladies of his court – and plenty of the men too – adapted their maquillage to take advantage of artificial lighting to draw attention to their rosy cheeks, white bosoms, jet black eyebrows and scarlet lips. As with so much else at Versailles, this was a development that served to distance the topmost elite from the rest of the population. Koslofsky speculates that it was driven by the need to find new sources of authority in a confessionally fragmented age.We found it pleasant to be able to go, after midnight, to the far end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain More directly – and convincingly – authoritarian was the campaign to “colonize” the night by reclaiming it from the previously dominant marginal groups. The most effective instrument was street-lighting, introduced to Paris in 1667, Lille also in 1667, Amsterdam in 1669, Hamburg in 1673, Turin in 1675, Berlin in 1682, Copenhagen in 1683, and London, where private companies were contracted to provide the service, between 1684 and 1694. This had little to do with technological progress, for until the nineteenth century only candles and oil lamps were available. Most advanced was the oil lamp developed in the 1660s by Jan van der Heyden, which used a current of air drawn into the protective glass-paned lantern to prevent the accretion of soot, and made Amsterdam the best-lit city in Europe. In one of the many well-chosen illustrations in the book, a nocturnal street scene from Leipzig in 1702 shows a row of van der Heyden lanterns allowing mixed couples to promenade, friends to recognize and greet each other, and even one solitary individual to read a newspaper. At the end of the street is the reassuring sight of a nightwatchman, now able to see and protect the respectable citizens. They were the great beneficiaries of the great illumination; the victims were those to whom the streets had belonged when darkness ruled – students, the young in general, servants, vagrants, prostitutes and drinkers. All those, in other words, who had prompted Milton to write: “when night darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons of Belial, flown with insolence and wine”. It was not a victory the authorities won easily (if indeed they ever did). The previous occupants responded with a Kristallnacht of lantern breaking, for which draconian penalties were inflicted – the galleys in France; amputation of a hand in Vienna (where twelve nightwatchmen were murdered between 1649 and 1720). Yet gradually European towns and cities became safer places when the sun went down, and this security promoted forms of social activity beyond whoring, brawling, gambling and drinking.As Koslofsky very reasonably argues, almost all the work on the public sphere has concentrated on locations and institutional forms, and has neglected time. Coffee houses were open all day, of course, but it was at night that they came into their own. As the London pamphlet Character of Coffee and Coffee-House claimed in 1661, “they borrow of the night”. Most served alcohol and many were frequented by prostitutes, but in general they served as respectable meeting places for the upper and middle classes. Moreover, as well as promoting a critical body of public opinion, they could also on occasion be the focus of more concerted political agitation. It was at the Turk’s Head coffee house in New Palace Yard at Westminster that James Harrington’s Rota Club met nightly in 1659–60 to discuss the future of the Commonwealth. Charles II tried to close coffee houses in 1675 for being “the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons”, a verdict echoed by the patrician town council of Frankfurt am Main in 1703 when taking action against their own political opponents. If educated urban men certainly benefited from this colonization of the night, it is much less clear how women fared. On the one hand, greater security encouraged them to go out at night. In 1673, Madame de Sévigné described an evening spent chatting with her friends until midnight at the home of Mme de Coulanges, after which she escorted one of the party home, even though this involved a journey across Paris. She wrote that “We found it pleasant to be able to go, after midnight, to the far end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain”, adding that the new street lighting had made this possible: “we returned merrily, thanks to the lanterns, safe from thieves”. In John Vanbrugh’s unfinished play A Journey to London (written in the early 1720s), Lord Loverule grumbles that his wife, Lady Arabella, was in the habit of staying out until the small hours despite knowing that he liked to retire at 11. She replies tartly that: “my two o’clock speaks life, activity, spirit, and vigour; your eleven has a dull, drowsy, stupid, good-for-nothing sound with it. It savours much of a mechanic, who must get to bed betimes that he may rise early to open his shop, faugh!”. Her husband’s further observation that early to bed and early to rise is healthy attracts the crushing rejoinder “beasts do it”. If these examples might seem to point towards emancipation, they refer only to aristocratic ladies with the means, the carriages and the self-confidence to roam about cities after dark. For the great majority, the new sites of nocturnal activity – the clubs, coffee houses, Masonic lodges and the like – were almost invariably “men only”. Only in Paris, where coffee houses boasted a distinctly aristocratic decor, could women expect a welcome. Elsewhere in Europe, the exclusion of women prompts Koslofsky to endorse Joan Landes’s verdict that “the bourgeois public is essentially, not just contingently, masculinist”. It was the lot of women to be relegated to the “private core of the nuclear family’s interior space”, as Habermas has put it.It was different in the countryside. Only where the witch-hunters had been especially busy was colonization achieved, and then only temporarily. It had always been the educated who had demonized folk beliefs, while the common people had made no automatic association between the night and evil or temptation. Particularly resistant, for example, in many parts of northern Europe was the “spinning bee”, a nocturnal gathering of women to exchange gossip, stories, refreshment and – crucially – light and heat, as they spun wool or flax, knitted or sewed. It could also be a site of courtship, as young men could be admitted to add spice to these gatherings. Indeed, an illustration from Nuremberg depicts a regular orgy under way, including a priest “taking care of the cook”.Repeated attempts to put a stop to spinning bees and other nocturnal activities got nowhere.As Koslofsky argues, the nocturnalization promoted by state power and a deepening public consumer culture was much less effective in the countryside, because what he also calls “a powerful combination of discipline and distinction” was much less in evidence than in the towns. The same could be said of the dark forces of the night. Street lighting had made life more difficult for criminals, but also for those who believed in ghosts, devils and things that go bump. Addressing an imaginary atheist in a sermon in 1629, John Donne invited him to look ahead just a few hours until midnight: “wake then; and then dark and alone, Hear God and ask thee then, remember that I asked thee now, Is there a God? and if thou darest, say No”. A hundred years later, there were plenty of Europeans prepared to say “No”. In 1729, the Paris police expressed grave anxiety about the spread of irreligion through late-night café discussions of the existence or non-existence of God. Craig Koslofsky has given so much in this consistently stimulating, cogently argued and elegantly written book that it might seem churlish to ask for more. There are only a handful of brief references to the changing ways in which the night is treated by artists, and nothing at all about architecture. Crying out for attention are the chiaroscuro creations of – say – the Tomé family at Toledo or the Asam brothers at Weltenburg. Nor is there even a mention of Edward Young’s hugely influential The Complaint, or, Night-Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, first published in 1742, which heralded another seismic shift in the way in which the night was viewed. It is earnestly to be hoped that Koslofsky will address these and other aspects of this endlessly fascinating subject in a second instalment.
 

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