You are here: Home Communications Pressroom News Professor Herman Pontzer’s Wake-Up Call: To Feel Rested in the Morning, Try Lowering the Thermostat at Night

Professor Herman Pontzer’s Wake-Up Call: To Feel Rested in the Morning, Try Lowering the Thermostat at Night

A groundbreaking new study, co-authored by Hunter anthropologist Herman Pontzer and published in the journal Current Biology, upends long-held beliefs about our nightly sleep.

Working with UCLA behavioral scientist Jerome M. Siegel and seven other researchers in the U.S. and South Africa, Professor Pontzer investigated the sleep patterns of the adult members of three surviving pre-industrial societies. Contrary to expectation, Professor Pontzer and his colleagues found that the members of those hunter-gatherer tribes, with no exposure to artificial light, sleep about as long as we do in our modern, electrified world. Unlike us, they are free of sleep deprivation and daily fatigue.

Because our hunter-gatherer brethren go to sleep not right after sunset but hours later – when the air grows cooler – the researchers also concluded that sleep may be regulated more by temperature than by light.

In a world plagued with insomnia and snooze buttons, the study is receiving widespread attention, with The New York Times, PBS, NPR and other news media reporting on its results. 

A Science magazine article on his study included Professor Pontzer reassuring conclusion: “The big story here is that [hunter-gatherer] sleep patterns are not so different from ours.”

Document Actions
HUNTER COLLEGE
695 Park Ave
NY, NY 10065
212.772.4000