Amazing Effects of Sleep (And Lack of it) | PBS BrainCraft Video

In her latest video Vanessa mentions Z, a 24-year-old guy who claims sleep is a habit that can be broken. After 9 days straight of being awake, Z composed the following poem. The researchers said “It is the best evidence we have that offers definite proof of lack of impairment of higher mental functions at the end of the vigil.”

This is taken from page 8 of the study:

On the last day of the experiment Z composed the following verse directed to two of the women who had assisted in the observation during the experiment. The verse, together with his explanation of the first two lines, is as follows :

“F unctions that hamper and gifts that requite
M ust, by their nature in women unite.

 R eckless compounding of accent with flush
A ttacks like a limen, basic in hush
A ttacks in the crystal, survives in the light
R ecoils and assembles ‘twixt mystic and trite.

N ew fashions go leering, old modesties blare
I comin the springtime, their tortoise shell dare :
O ver insistence, and collect what you may
E voke pleasures of night to sustain in the day.
Northward the lust and the yearning conspire
S weet south, how delightful sensed form to attire.”

“The rim is composed of a woven acrostic of the two names. The first couplet sets the general theme, that women and possession are not an unmixed blessing, that the fact that as women they must require things of men that set the men from the progressive work they as men set themselves, that moreover the women might be finer things if the racial needs that lurk in their smiles and frowns, supplenesses and awkwardnesses did not compel them, their own insight lacking, to demands of this delaying sort. The hampering and the functions thus are on several levels of operation, and poetry, to the proper reader conveys much of this, more besides, and epitomizes the fact in addition.”