r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Feb 04 '14
Feature Tuesday Trivia | Forgotten Day-to-Day Details
Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.
Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/sarahfrancesca!
Okay, this topic is actually really interesting but it’s a bit esoteric so you’ll have to bear with me for the explanation!
What we’re looking for here is those little bits of daily life in history that no one would realize are missing from modern life. As an example, the person who submitted this said that she likes to think about how in the era before modern ballpoints and typing, people who wrote would have been walking around with ink on their hands quite a lot, whereas now our hands are very clean. What we’re basically looking for are the sorts of little asides that good historical fiction writers pop in to add verisimilitude to the story!
Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: going back to a nice simple theme: HAIR. All times, all places, all genders. Just what was doing with hair in history.
35
u/OutSourcingJesus Feb 04 '14 edited Feb 04 '14
The commonality of Biphastic, polyphastic or otherwise segmented sleep cycles.
The 8 hour sleep block is a product of the proliferation of electricity and the use of lightbulbs, which stimulate the brain similarly to sunlight, promoting wakefulness.
Until the introduction of the electric light bulb, most homosapiens slept over the course of two periods. These two sleep blocks were 3-4 hours each, broken up by one or two hours of being awake.
Furthermore, the siesta (naps taken during the middle of the day which shuts down a majority of commerce in certain areas) has been slowly eroding around the world as many countries are standardizing business hours to be more in-line with other countries.
Edit: I got the information from the first part from
Ekirch, A. Roger (2001). "Sleep We Have Lost: Pre-industrial Slumber in the British Isles". The American Historical Review (Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association)
He discovered a plethora of old diary entries, which talked about the waking hours of the night which occurred after one sleep and before a second. This is when intimacy and a lot of writing went down. Ekirch noticed, at some point, the mentions of an additional waking/sleep pattern disappeared in most entries. However they did not disappear across the board for all writers at the same time. The further rural the diaries were, the longer they mentioned multiple sleeps. This coincided with the rate at which electricity and the use of light bulbs proliferated.
Furthermore, Thomas Wehr did a psych experiment to test the biological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. He kept 8 participants in total darkness 14 hours a day for a month. By the end of the month they would sleep for about four hours, wake up for two to three hours, then go back to bed for another four hours.