Ian Oswald (born 1929) is a retired sleep researcher. Trained as a psychiatrist at Maudsley Hospital and later moved to Edinburgh as a senior lecturer. He was awarded a Beit Memorial Fellowship to undertake training in sleep research at St. Bartholomew’s Medical School. Very soon, he began to be regarded a pioneer and soon he was awarded a higher doctorate (DSc) by the University of Edinburgh at the age of 33. He continued with his pioneering research and soon produced many texts including Sleep, which is regarded as a classic. He was appointed chairman of his department and retired in 2004.
He is married to Kirstine Adam. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Ian_Oswald In 1969, Ian Oswald proposed the body restitution hypothesis, postulating that “REM sleep rebound may indicate increased protein synthesis in the brain. ” He believed that brain repair occurs during REM sleep and that NREM sleep exists for bodily restitution ( ). Kristin Adam concurred with Oswald’s theory citing the observation that “rates of protein synthesis or of mitotic division are higher during the time of rest and sleep” as evidence for restitution ( ).
In 1978, Jim Horne reviewed the biological effects of total sleep deprivation in humans and discounted the body restitution hypothesis. However, he proposed a CNS or cerebral restitutional role for human sleep. In 1985, Horne revisited the effects of total sleep deprivation in humans again and concluded that it results in impaired homeostatic control, especially thermoregulation, which is significant in small mammals but has a minor role in humans. He proposed that only a certain portion of a night’s sleep is essential to the brain, with the remainder being optional ( ).
Ray Meddis also disagreed with the restitution hypothesis, proposing instead the immobilization theory, i. e. , sleep keeps the sleeper out of harm’s way, in 1975. He wrote that sleep “does not supply any unique physiological benefit. The major benefits gained from sleeping would then accrue only indirectly through the advantages of increasing the efficiency of rest-activity cycles” ( ). As evidence for his theory, he cited several short sleepers reported by H. S. Jones and Ian Oswald in 1968 ( ) as well as several others he identified who claimed to need only 15 min of sleep per day.
Noteworthy is the report of Jones and Oswald that describes people who slept fewer than 3 hr a night. In contrast to Meddis, for the Jones and Oswald subjects all-night EEGs were obtained for at least seven consecutive nights. They tended to be very busy people who were not particularly disturbed by their sleeping habits. They were quite productive with the extra time they had and did not seem to suffer any deleterious consequences of their diminished sleep times. Claims about extremely short sleep or the complete lack of sleep require careful checking.
The Scottish sleep specialist and psychiatrist Ian Oswald recently reported the case of a man who claimed not to have slept at all for the preceding ten years. The man traced his sleeplessness back to an automobile accident, and he had received large payments in compensation for this “impairment of his health. ” During an investigation of his condition in a sleep laboratory, where he spent several days accompanied by his wife, he did in fact sleep for a total of only twenty minutes. But by the fourth day he was obviously so sleepy that he could hardly keep his eyes open. After managing to keep himself awake the following night until 6 A.
M. , he finally fell asleep and snored loudly until his wife woke him two and a half hours later. Even then he insisted on going back to sleep. This was a clear case of a short sleeper who, wanting to make some profit out of his disability at the insurance company’s expense had successfully feigned total sleeplessness over a period of years. Apart from such false claims, however, verified instances of extremely short sleep can be found. Henry Jones and Ian Oswald examined two healthy Australian men, thirty and fifty-four years old, who claimed to need only three hours of sleep a night.
Both held full-time jobs and appeared to lead active lives. The six to seven nights they spent in the sleep laboratory under observation confirmed that both slept an average of less than three hours per night. More than 50 percent of this time consisted of deep sleep (stages 3 and 4); REM sleep, which occurred soon after the onset of sleep, made up about 25 percent. In the early 1960s the Scottish psychiatrist and researcher Ian Oswald observed that barbiturates reduce the total amount of REM sleep.
In his experiment the percentage of REM sleep dropped from the normal 20-25 percent to 10-15 percent of sleep time. After the drug was discontinued, a “REM sleep rebound” occurred, as in the next few nights the subjects’ REM sleep rose well above the normal values (i. e. , up to 30-40 percent). It was thought then that the occurrence of REM sleep is a prerequisite for the restorative or refreshing effects of sleep. This opinion, not confirmed by later experiments, led to a further conclusion: namely, that the suppression of REM sleep caused by most sleeping pills had especially negative consequences.
Pharmaceutical companies in those days outdid each other in claiming that their product did not influence REM sleep at all or, at least, that it influenced it less than their competitors’ pills did. Careful investigations soon showed that sleep-inducing drugs had a suppressive effect not only on REM sleep but on deep slow-wave sleep as well. This reduction of deep sleep was often observed, being especially noticeable after the administration of benzodiazepines. But unlike the case of REM sleep, the discontinuation of a benzodiazepine does not lead to a rebound of deep sleep; instead, there is a gradual return to the baseline level.
Reference:
Adam K. Sleep as a restorative process and a theory to explain why. Progr Brain Res 1980; 53:289-306. Horne JA. Sleep function, with particular reference to sleep deprivation. Ann Clin Res 1985; 17:199-208. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Oswald. Two cases of healthy insomnia. Electroenceph clin Neurophysiol 1968; 24:378-80. Meddis R. On the function of sleep. Anim Behav 1975; 23:676-691. Oswald I. , 1969. Human brain protein, drugs and dreams. Nature; 223:893-897.