Today’s BBC website carries a fascinating article that challenges the commonly held view that an eight-hour period of continuous sleep is natural for human beings.

We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.
In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.
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