介绍:
Matt Walker是哈佛医学院的教授，目前在加州大学伯克利分校担任人类睡眠科学中心主任，他主要研究人类睡眠。Matt表示缺乏睡眠的人不仅难以吸收新的知识，记忆力也会变差。而且睡眠不足，也会增加患各种疾病的概率。甚至有研究发现：睡眠越少，生命越短！
Thank you very much. Well, I would like to start with testicles.
非常感谢你。好吧，我想从睾丸开始。
Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more.
每晚睡5个小时的男性睾丸明显小于睡7个小时或更长时间的睾丸。
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.
此外，经常每晚睡四到五个小时的男性将有一个睾丸激素水平，这是一个10岁以上的人。因此，就健康的关键方面而言，缺乏睡眠将使男性年龄增长十年。我们看到由于睡眠不足导致的女性生殖健康受到同等损害。
This is the best news that I have for you today.
这是我今天为您提供的最佳新闻。
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.
从这一点来看，它可能只会变得更糟。我不仅会告诉你睡眠时发生的奇妙美好事物，还会告诉你当你没有得到足够的，无论是对你的大脑还是对你的身体都会发生的令人担忧的坏事。
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.
让我从大脑以及学习和记忆的功能开始讲起，因为我们在过去十年的研究发现，在你学习完后，应该睡觉，以按下新记忆的保存按钮，这样才不会遗忘。
But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning 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.
但是最近，我们发现在学习之前你也需要睡眠，来准备好自己的头脑，就像是一块干海绵，准备好开始吸收新的知识。没有睡眠的话，大脑的记忆回路就像是被堵塞住了，而你将不能吸收新的记忆。
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.
让我向你们展示一下数据。在这个研究中，我们测试了这么一个假设，即熬夜到底是不是不错的做法。我们招募了一组被试，然后将其分为两组：睡眠充足组和睡眠不足组。
Now the sleep group, they're going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, we're going to keep them awake in the laboratory, under full supervision. There's no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it's miserable for everyone involved.
睡眠充足组的被试可以睡够八个小时，而睡眠不足组的被试则在实验室中，在全程监控下，不断地被我们叫醒。顺便说一句，他们没有小睡或咖啡因的支持，所以确实很痛苦。
And then the next day, we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity. And then we're going to test them to see how effective that learning has been.
第二天，我们把这些被试放进MRI扫描仪，让他们试着学习一整列的新知识，同时记录下他们的大脑活动情况。然后，我们测试他们，来看看他们的学习到底有没有效。
And that's what you're looking at here on the vertical axis. And when you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant, 40-percent deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.
这就是你们所看的纵轴。当把这两组被试比较时，你们可以发现没有充足睡眠的大脑在储存新记忆的能力上有40%的显著差距。
I think this should be concerning, considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now. In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing it miserably -- 40 percent. And we've gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities.
我觉得这一发现令人担忧，考虑到我们的受教育人群在睡眠上正在经历的事情。事实上，说的具体些，就是学生在考试中得高分和考砸了之间的差距——40%。我们进一步研究大脑中到底哪里出错产生了这种学习障碍。
And there's a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain, called the hippocampus. And you can think of the hippocampus almost like the informational inbox of your brain. It's very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them. And when you look at this structure in those people who'd had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity.
在大脑的左侧和右侧，有着这么一块区域，叫做海马体。你们可以把海马体想象成大脑的信息收件箱。海马体很擅长接收新的“记忆文件”，并保留这些文件。当你们观察那些睡了一整晚的被试的海马体时，我们看到的是许多健康的与学习相关的大脑活动。
Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually couldn't find any significant signal whatsoever. So it's almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox, and any new incoming files -- they were just being bounced. You couldn't effectively commit new experiences to memory.
但是在那些睡眠不足的被试身上，我们基本上找不到任何明显的信号。这就好像睡眠不足关闭了记忆收件箱，任何新进的文件——都被退回了。你不能有效的将新的经历转化为记忆。
So that's the bad that can happen if I were to take sleep away from you, but let me just come back to that control group for a second. Do you remember those folks that got a full eight hours of sleep? Well, we can ask a very different question:
这就是假如我剥夺你的睡眠时，会发生的糟糕事情，但容我稍微讲一下对照组。你们还记得那些睡够了八个小时的被试者们吗？我们可以问一个非常不同的问题：
What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep when you do get it that restores and enhances your memory and learning ability each and every day? And by placing electrodes all over the head, what we've discovered is that there are big, powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep that have riding on top of them these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles.
让你每天睡眠时恢复和提高你的记忆力和学习能力的生理质量是什么样的？通过在头部放置电极，我们所发现的是，在睡眠的最深阶段会产生巨大而强大的脑电波，这些脑电波之上会有我们称之为睡眠纺锤波的壮观的电活动爆发。
And it's the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves that acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night, shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain, and therefore protecting them, making them safe.
正是这些深度睡眠脑电波的综合作用，在夜间起到了文件传输机制的作用，将记忆从一个短期的易受遗忘的存储库转移到大脑中一个更永久的长期存储库，因此得以保存它们，使它们不至受损。
And it is important that we understand what during sleep actually transacts these memory benefits, because there are real medical and societal implications.
重要的是，我们要了解在睡眠中究竟是什么在发挥这些记忆的作用，因为这对医学和社会都有实际的影响。
And let me just tell you about one area that we've moved this work out into, clinically, which is the context of aging and dementia. Because it's of course no secret that, as we get older, our learning and memory abilities begin to fade and decline.
让我告诉你们我们已经把这项研究转移到临床的一个领域，即衰老和痴呆。因为随着我们变老，我们的学习和记忆能力开始衰退和减弱当然并不是什么秘密。
But what we've also discovered is that a physiological signature of aging is that your sleep gets worse, especially that deep quality of sleep that I was just discussing. And only last year, we finally published evidence that these two things, they're not simply co-occurring, they are significantly interrelated.
但我们也发现的是衰老的一个生理特征是你的睡眠质量变差了，尤其在我刚才谈到的深度睡眠质量中。仅仅在去年，我们最终发表了证据表明这两件事，它们不是简单的同时发生，它们是显著相互关联的。
