This reminds me of, in some other post, when you spoke about how we all believed that cell phones take down airliners and swimming 30 minutes after eating will make you drown -- but it's not true. Then you compared it to the war in Iraq. Gods that was a brilliant post.

Two words: Refer Madness

First I learned that sunshine was good for me.
Then I learned that sunshine was very bad for me, and I should wear lots of sunscreen whenever I was outdoors.
Now I've learned that sunshine is once again good for me and sunscreen is bad because it's full of cancer-causing chemicals and blocks the vitamin-D I need to be healthy.

Sigh.

Anyone who takes drugs is a loser, and should thus be avoided.

That's really hilarious--your comment-bot nixed the name of the hospital--it's "Hitchc--k," the same name as Alfred the film director. It's a hospital in New Hampshire, not an obscenity.

Actually, sleep need is individual, and you can be trained to a certain extent.

I interned briefly at the Sleep Research Center at Mary !$%*!$%*! hospital. The doctor in charge told us a story of a woman who came in for treatment of insomnia. It turned out her natural sleep need was 2 hours and 45 minutes a night. It was the lowest normal sleep need the Center had ever encountered. She also had been brainwashed to believe that 8 hours is "normal," so, all her life, she had been lying in bed, wide awake, for the extra 5 hours and 15 minutes every night. Despite this, she functioned perfectly normally, had no ill health effects, and was never tired during waking hours. She just believed she had "chronic insomnia."

He said that once they'd determined her real sleep need, the case was very simply to solve. He just told her to get up after 2 hours and 45 minutes and do something useful with her time.

8 hours is merely an average. Normal sleep needs in individuals can run from the woman above to more than 11 hours a day. (Some people do "sleep" longer than that, but it's usually a condition requiring treatment.)

What's more, 8 hours was only the average in about 1950. It's been going down steadily for hundreds of years. In the 19th century people got something like 9 hours on average, and now it's close to 7 hours. (I didn't look up actual numbers.)

Interesting. Is this more of the usual "bait" attempts? ;)

This deduction isn't quite correct. The linked article says that people who routinely sleep more than 8 hours a day are more likely to have problems with obesity/depression. You go on to conclude that it is acceptable to get less than 7 hours of sleep a day, when this isn't actually the same concept.

Obesity/Depression is closely coupled with oversupply of physical needs, since supplying yourself with physical needs releases pleasure compounds in the brain. Therefore, an adult who gets 9 hours of sleep every day day, for example (Or anyone who gets more sleep than they physically need) is more likely to be depressed, lazy, or have similar issues, and is likly to continue in the future. Someone who goes to bed at 11:05 instead of 11:00, contrarily, is simply missing a schedule (perhaps getting home late), and is not indicitive of an underlying problem. This represents a different issue, and does not represent a proper bell curve, which the cited article suggests; people who get any oversupply of sleep immediately incur problems, whereas people who get almost not enough sleep encounter almost no problems unless the deficiency is drastic indeed (less than 5 hours)

Similarly, people who get more food than they physically need on a regular basis is likely to have an eating disorder, however this does not mean that starving and/or anorexic people need to get less food. Ingesting 1,999 calories a day, one probably won't notice a difference, however continuing to eat, for pleasure, long after you have been "full", signifies deeper psychological issues that need to be dealt with to prevent onset of obesity. So someone who eats after they are full represents a different problem entirely than someone who isn't finished yet at the end of their food.

Since any correlation measurement between these two very different problems would have to take into account a nonlinear relationship, it would be unwise to assume getting 6.5 hours sleep would be similar to getting 8.5 hours sleep. In fact, the article itself suggests such a ramp effect.

Uhmm ... I am sure that you where proud of only about 5 hours of sleep.
Hope there is an study that says that people who change habits as soon as they read about some habit study live longer (if they don't lie) :-).

Something about growing hair on palms was definitely a falsehood. "God kills a kitten every time anyone !$%*!$%*!$%* is hard to prove one way or another unless you are God's mother.

If you set out a bowl of balsamic vinegar and a bowl of honey, the vinegar will attract more fruit flies.

http://xkcd.com/357/

Hooray science!

I wish this was true. I don't doubt it but whenever I try to wake up after less than 8 hours sleep I just can't do it. And if I do my eyes burn all day. I think it's different for everyone.

http://thisdevilsworkday.wordpress.com/

Don't pick a career based on what pays the most, but rather pick one that involves doing something you like. It's just stupid. I don't hate my job, but I need to make about 3 or 4 times as much to live comfortably. I'd rather live comfortably.

I had a teacher who told me that we went to the moon to get diamonds. But I knew that was bull from the get-go. Incidentally, the teacher looked exactly like a mixture between Mr. Rogers and Steve Urkel (he seriously did).

The one thing I thing I was taught however that I believed for a while is that when a scientist says something, I should automatically listen to them. Scientists are just as full of crap as the rest of us. I think my body knows better how much sleep I need, among other things, than some guy in a lab coat.

I'd say the one thing I was told as a child that IS good advice is "don't carelessly eat wild berries or mushrooms." Probably a good one to have ingrained in your brain.

I just love that there's a mushroom called the Death Cap, and another called the Destroying Angel. ouch.

I was told that hot dogs were made from bull foreskin and cow nipples....wait, I think that's true, never mind...

Um... your conclusions about sleep don't quite follow from the article. The study looked at 6.5-7.5, 8 or more, and less than 6.5 hours of sleep per night. So the category that caught those who get 8 hours also includes those who get 9, 10, 11, etc. hours. It's entirely possible that 8 is quite healthy, but when you group it with people with other sorts of sleeping problems, and laziness problems, you jump to the wrong conclusions.

It would be interesting to see the results if they also had 7.5-8.5 as a category.

When I was a kid
they told me that
just writing one
sentence on a sheet
of paper was a waste.
But now we've got the
internet and that's not
true anymore.

As I child I learnt that in this crazy mixed-up world in which we live, sometimes a boy frog and a girl pig can make it work.