ANDRZEJ KRAUZEStrange things happen in the night. Distant stars flicker above darkened towns. Nocturnal creatures prowl. Things go bump. And every night (if we’re lucky), we sleep through it all. But for all its ubiquity, for all its regularity, and for all the intimacy we feel toward a phenomenon that literally lays us flat every day of our lives, sleep is mysterious. It may, in fact, be one of the broadest biological enigmas left. We’re not entirely sure how other animals sleep, or even if they all do. We don’t know why any of us sleep. We know neither exactly how sleep benefits us nor how skipping it harms us. We don’t even have a clear definition of the process.
But as with many enduring scientific mysteries, there are intrepid researchers who seek to crack sleep open and understand its intricacies. This issue celebrates them.
Like early geologists scraping through the uppermost layers of the Earth’s crust, researchers in the relatively small field of sleep science are devising methods, technologies, and experimental designs that aim to lay bare what is undoubtedly a massive trove of game-changing discoveries lurking beneath the surface. From attempts to document the circadian rhythms of humans cut off from sunlight and temperature cycles in the depths of a Kentucky cave to modern optogenetic and molecular manipulations of the brain’s sleep centers, researchers have been probing into the brains and cells of snoozing humans and nonhuman animals, hoping to gain basic insights ...
