Thank you very much.
Well, I would like to start with testicles.
(Laughter)
Men who sleep five hours a night
have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more.
(Laughter)
In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night
will have a level of testosterone
which is that of someone 10 years their senior.
So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade
in terms of that critical aspect of wellness.
And we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health
caused by a lack of sleep.
This is the best news that I have for you today.
(Laughter)
From this point, it may only get worse.
Not only will I tell you about the wonderfully good things
that happen when you get sleep
but the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don't get enough,
both for your brain and for your body.
Let me start with the brain
and the functions of learning and memory,
because what we've discovered over the past 10 or so years
is that you need sleep after learning
to essentially hit the save button on those new memories
so that you don't forget.
But recently we discovered
that you also need sleep before learning,
and now to actually prepare your brain,
almost like a dry sponge
ready to initially soak up new information.
And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain
essentially become waterlogged,
as it were,
and you can't absorb new memories.
So let me show you the data.
Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis
that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea.
So we took a group of individuals
and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups:
a sleep group,
and a sleep deprivation group.