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Chronobiology

The human sleep project

To establish the true role of sleep, researchers must gather real-world data from thousands, even millions, of people, says Till Roenneberg.

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Correspondence to Till Roenneberg.

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Roenneberg, T. The human sleep project. Nature 498, 427–428 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/498427a

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Comments

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  1. I am ready to volunteer as a subject of this research right now.

  2. Sleeping is always an exhilarating topic and puzzles me a lot since I was a high school student. I really want to be a volunteer right now,maybe you can taste the link for collecting data here. I like this topic.

  3. I am very interested in this project, sleeping occupies nearly half of our lifetime and puzzles me a lot since I was a high school student.I really want to be an volunteer right now, maybe you can send the link here, then we can take part in this exhilarating research.

  4. This is an excellent endeavour, and I am particularly glad to see the inclusion of ecological light exposure measurements. Separately from the sleep outcomes, there is evidence that daily light exposure influences other behavioural and health outcomes, but knowing what doses various groups commonly receive are is difficult. If the devices used were correctly calibrated, this would add valuable information for other lighting researchers. Adding some simple self-report measures to a questionnaire (even on a subsample) would provide rich data to that community. (Having some melatonin and cortisol assays on a subsample would be nice too.)

  5. I also would like to volunteer.

  6. The proposed study of Roenneberg is superb. But it doesn't really get at the question of how much sleep humans need, because it's endpoint is just normal sleep length. This is like determining how much food people need by looking at caloric consumption, ignoring cultural tendencies toward obesity or famine, and unrelated to actual need. Roennenberg study would be vastly improved if subjects provided minimal information, for example, about obesity and diabetes (for endocrine functions), and illness frequency (for immune function), and even volunteered for a Web-based test of sleep-dependent memory consolidation!

  7. This is like determining how much food people need by looking at caloric consumption, ignoring cultural tendencies toward obesity or famine, and unrelated to actual need.

    This is an excellent endeavour, and I am particularly glad to see the inclusion of ecological light exposure measurements. Separately from the sleep outcomes, there is evidence that daily light exposure influences other behavioural and health outcomes, but knowing what doses various groups commonly receive are is difficult. If the devices used were correctly calibrated.

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