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TED英语演讲稿：我们为什么要睡觉

简介：一生中，我们有三分之一的'时间都在睡眠中度过。关于睡眠，你又了解多少?睡眠专家Russell Foster为我们解答为什么要睡觉，以及睡眠对健康的影响。

What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.

Now, there is a sound -- (Alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.

Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.

"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it -- the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2] (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist.

But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang. (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps."

What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.

Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so therefore it's -- Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain.

Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay. (Laughter)

The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of

Okay. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.

Ihave spent the last years, trying to resolve two enigmas: why is productivity so disappointing in all the companies where I work? I have worked with more than 500 companies. Despite all the technological advance – computers, IT, communications, telecommunications, the internet. Enigma number two: why is there so little engagement at work? Why do people feel so miserable, even actively disengaged? Disengaged their colleagues. Acting against the interest of their company. Despite all the affiliation events, the celebration, the people initiatives, the leadership development programs to train managers on how to better motivate their teams. At the beginning, I thought there was a chicken and egg issue: because people are less engaged, they are less productive. Or vice versa, because they are less productive, we put more pressure and they are less engaged. But as we were doing our analysis we realized that there was a common root cause to these two issues that relates, in fact, to the basic pillars of management. The way we organize is based on two pillars. The hard—structure, processes, systems. The soft—feeling, sentiments, interpersonal relationship, traits, personality. And whenever a company reorganizes, restructures, reengineers, goes through a cultural transformation program, it chooses these two pillars. Now we try to refine them, we try to combine them. The real issue is – and this is the answer to the two enigmas – these pillar are obsolete. Everything you read in business books is based either two of the other or their combine. They are obsolete. How do they work when you try to use these approaches in front of the new complexity of business? The hard approach, basically is that you start from strategy, requirement, structure, processes, systems, KPIs, scorecards, committees, headquarters, hubs, clusters, you name it. I forgot all the metrics, incentives, committees, middle offices and interfaces. What happens basically on the left, you have more complexity, the new complexity of business. We need quality, cost, reliability, speed. And every time there is a new requirement, we use the same approach. We create dedicated structure processed systems, basically to deal with the new complexity of business. The hard approach creates just complicatedness in the organization. Let’s take an example. An automotive company, the engineering division is a five-dimensional matrix. If you open any cell of the matrix, you find another 20-dimensional matrix. You have Mr. Noise, Mr. Petrol Consumption, Mr. Anti-Collision Propertise. For any new requirement, you have a dedicated function in charge of aligning engineers against the new requirement. What happens when the new requirement emerges? Some years ago, a new requirement appeared on the marketplace: the length of the warranty period. So therefore the requirement is repairability, making cars easy to repair. Otherwise when you bring the car to the garage to fix the light, if you have to remove the engine to access the lights, the car will have to stay one week in the garage instead of two hours, and the warranty budget will explode. So, what was the solution using the hard approach? If repairability is the rew requirement, the solution is to create a new function, Mr. Repairability. And Mr. Repairability creates the repairability process. With a repairability scorecard, with a repairability metric and eventually repairability incentive.That came on top of 25 other KPIs. What percentage of these people is variable compensation? Twenty percent at most, divided by 26 KPIs, repairability makes a difference of 0.8 percent. What difference did it make in their action, their choices to simplify? Zero. But what occurs for zero impact? Mr. Repairability, process, scorecard, evaluation, coordination with the 25 other coordinators to have zero impact. Now, in front of the new complexity of business, the only solution is not drawing box es with reporting lines. It is basically the interplay. How the parts work together. The connection, the interaction, the synapse. It is not skeleton of boxes, it is the nervous system of adaptiveness and intelligence. You know, you could call it cooperation, basically. Whenever people cooperate, they use less resources. In everything. You know, the repairability issue is a cooperation problem. When you design cars, please take into account the need of those who will repair the cars in the after sales garage. When we don’t cooperate we need more time, more equipment, more system, more teams. We need – when procurement, supply chain, manufacturing don’t cooperate we need more stock, more investories, more working capital. Who will pay for that? Shareholder? Customers? No, they will refuse. So who is left? The employees, who have tocompensate through their super individual efforts for the lack of cooperation. Stress, burnout, they are overwhelmed, accidents. No wonder they disengage. How do the hard and the soft try to foster cooperation? The hard: in banks, when there is problem between the back office and the front office, they don’t cooperate. What is the solution? They create a middle office. What happens one years later? Instead of one problem between the back and front, now have to problems. Between the back and the middle and between the middle and the front. Plus I have to pay for the middle office. The hard approach is unable to foster cooperation. It can only add new boxes, new bones in the skeleton. The soft approach: to make people cooperate, we need to make then like each other. Improve interpersonal feelings, the more people laike each other, the more they will cooperate. It is totally worng. It even counterproductive. Look, at home I have two TVs. Why? Precisely not to have to cooperate with my wife. Not to have to impose tradeoffs to my wife. And why I try not to impose tradeoffs to my wife is precisely because I love my wife. If I didn’t love my wife, one TV would be enough: you will watch my favorite football game, if you are not happy, how is the book or the door? The more we like each other, the more we avoid the real cooperation that would strain our relationships by imposing tough tradeoffs. And we go for a second TV or we escalate the decision above for arbitration. Definitely, these approaches are obsolete. To deal with complexity, to enhance nervous system, we have created what we call the smart simplicity approach based on simple rules. Simple rule number one: understand what others do. What is their real work? We need go beyond the boxes, the job description, beyond the surface of the container, to understand the real content. Me, designer, if I put a wire here, I know that it will mean that we will have to remove the engine to access the lights. Second, you need to reinforce integrators.