Had Napoleon not been an insomniac, sleeping only four hours a night, might Waterloo have had a different outcome, changing forever the history of the world? Such might well have been the case, according to studies in the expanding field of sleep research. According to an Indiana University team, getting in even 39 winks instead of the idiomatically prescribed 40 can adversely affect your resting heart rate (RHR) and impair efficiency the following day. The study, involving 557 participants and spanning 2,55,000 sleep sessions, found that even a minutes delay in going to bed resulted in a higher RHR, creating an increased stress factor. A related finding by British researchers established that shortening your shut-eye inhibits the capacity for divergent thinking.

One of the best endorsements for this conclusion was Einstein who reportedly not only got in 10 hours worth of sound slumber every night but, as a bonus, fit in a couple of short siestas during the course of the day, thus suggesting a variant of the E=MC2 formula, wherein E stands for Enlightenment, M for Morpheus, and C for Catnap squared.

Divergency of thinking was also displayed by Bernard Shaw when, importuned by a tyro dramatist to attend a staging of his first play, the Irish dramatist dozed off in the middle of the performance. Admonished by the younger man that he had been invited to give his opinion of the play, and not to sleep, Shaw replied, Sleep is an opinion.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Being in the Land of Nod gets nod of approval from scientific and other quarters: Life as a bed of dozes - Economic Times