Opinion | AI offers help with insomnia, but is sleep overrated – or even an evolutionary mistake?
- A confessed night owl stays up mulling the question, as well as whether alcohol, napping, reading or yogurt help or hurt your chances of nodding off
Why can’t we be as efficient and well balanced as single-cell organisms, which stay at the same level of consciousness at all times in their anxiety-free lives? Whales can sleep with half their brains, and stay awake and aware with the other half. Bullfrogs are apparently sleep-free. Somewhere down the line some ancestor took a wrong turn.
And yet, having set off down this tiring path, how is it that so many of us are so bad at sleeping?
My AI friend disagrees with the suggestion that the need for sleep may be one of humanity’s top 10 greatest mistakes – an evolutionary path that’s supposed to switch us off for a third of our lives. It claims that my poor sleep is largely my own fault.
Discussing insomnia with my artificial friend sends it into a frenzy of bullet-pointed binary reassurance. Alcohol bad, peanut butter good; screens bad, books good; Greek yogurt with banana and almonds good, anxiety and deadlines bad; cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBT-I) good, day naps bad.
Around 1,300 years ago, the poet Li Bai wrote of raising a glass towards the moon in invitation, as all others had (presumably) headed off to the land of dreams. My paternal grandmother would raise her own glass – she went to sleep after a nightly brandy.
Our ancestors didn’t have a know-it-all AI friend to contend with, preferring instead the company of agreeable types, or perhaps they were at ease with solitude and their own personal time zones.
