click here for author biography   In a small corner office lit with streaming sunlight, Carol Worthman spins an unexpected story. Dressed in muted blues and grays, adorned by pearls and large, circular glasses, Worthman projects the very image of academia. Yet, Worthman’s tale slowly chips away at the stereotypical persona of professorship that she initially portrays. As a post-doc conducting preliminary research in East Africa—6,500 feet above sea level and surrounded by a small family of six children—Worthman realized how inadequately her American middle-class upbringing prepared her for how the rest of the world sleeps.     “It was the rainy season and I couldn’t get out—there wasn’t, like, a Motel 6 around the corner,” Worthman begins. Invited to stay the night with friendly strangers, Worthman found herself without her nighty and toothbrush, wet and ‘ucky’ and uncomfortable. “It seemed like the longest night I ever had…there I am, piled on the mat with mom and surrounded with what seemed like an infinite number of snot-nosed little kids and this nursing baby,” continues Worthman.  The baby boy holds a particular place in Worthman’s memory, whose gender was clarified when she was awakened during the middle of the night. “The sound of piss hitting the wall and running down was just like, I’m never going to make it through this,” Worthman concludes. Yet, Worthman did survive to continue her doctoral research and graduate with a PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard in 1978. Since then, she has returned to the memory of her field experience and its fundamental distinction from the western ideal of where (in a dark room upon a plush bed), when (for eight straight hours in the evening), and with whom (alone or with a spouse) we sleep. Through research collected from rural Egyptian villages and fellow ethnographers, Worthman is investigating whether the idealized, western notion of sleep contributes to the modern plague of sleep-related disorders. In a recent paper and upcoming book, Worthman argues that the notion that “you lie down and sleep in a solid block or else you have a sleeping disorder,” makes little sense when compared to the wide range of sleeping patterns practiced and environments occupied by people around the world.   Humans are adapted to seamlessly slipping from sleep to awareness. Back when avoiding wild animals and conserving heat were critical concerns, sleeping in groups around a single fire provided necessary protection from the elements. Therefore, argues Worthman, the modern medical trend of diagnosing anything that departs from the western ideal of a good night’s rest as a sleeping disorder makes little sense when viewed from an evolutionary perspective. Worthman was awakened to the lack of globally-oriented sleep research by a simple question posed by Ronald E. Dahl, a pediatrician at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “One day [Dahl] called me up,” relates Worthman, “and said, hey Carol, you’re an anthropologist, and you’re always saying to take the big picture. So, I’m trying to do that and I’m thinking what do anthropologists know about sleep?” The phone call brought on a moment of gestalt—“All my field experience and my neuroscience training collided head on and it was like oh my gosh anthropologists have ignored a third of people’s lives,” explains Worthman, “It was one of those moments where you feel pretty dumb for what you never thought about, which is what anthropology is supposed to do—it’s supposed to slug us over the head with that recognition of the variation we haven’t paid attention to.” Upon recognizing the lack of sleep research that looks beyond brain-based studies conducted in controlled sleep laboratories, Worthman picked up the phone and began posing the same simple question to colleagues worldwide. Many shared her sentiment that learning to sleep while conducting field research is the hardest part of adjusting to a new culture. Yet, few could elaborate on any systematic study they conducted or knew of on sleep.   Worthman’s conversations led to the co-authoring of a paper comparing the western mode of sleep with the diverse sleeping conditions humans’ experience. Worthman writes, “In this study, western sleep practices stand out as unusual.”  Westerner’s unusual sleeping patterns could have serious health implications. While acknowledging that “we’re not going back to the Stone Age,” Worthman believes that researching sleep from a global and evolutionary perspective could reshape how people view sleep disorders. In understanding that human’s sleep patterns occupy a wide continuum of behaviors and environments, people whose sleep patterns do not fit the western norm would be understood as representing a particular place on sleep’s eclectic continuum. We would be less likely to blame the people who have a sleeping problem, Worthman explains, because “they’re somehow weak or living badly,” and be more likely to understand that “this is the cost of the way we’re living in the world today.” Worthman compares her vision of sleep to how some Americans are adopting more nutritious diets. As organizations such as the American Heart Association release findings that consuming high amounts of fat can lead to an increased chance of stroke, people are cutting fat from their diets. Just as people are choosing to eat less “chips and grease burgers,” says Worthman, “There are ways in which we might give people the choices to know that they could do some things differently that makes things better for them in the long run.” One area in which the sleep debate is already challenging the Western norm of eight hours of solitary sleep being a biological imperative is whether babies should sleep alone or with their parents. Worthman argues, “It’s a deep part of our moral structure that the parents have a highly sexual marital relationship. So, the parent bed has been sexualized—it’s not viewed as a child-rearing kind of scene, it’s more of a pair-bonding kind of scene. So, do we enforce that?” Worthman asks. “If parents are caught with their babies in their beds are we going to accuse them of child mistreatment? Or, do we see this as humans did this forever and ever and this might be a good choice because it makes babies feel more secure and regulate better metabolically?” While Worthman’s “good middle-class parents,” nurtured her independence by providing her with a baby bed in a separate room from infancy, she wonders whether such an arrangement is the best for children’s physical and mental development. Through her research, Worthman is attempting to ask such sleep-related questions that have previously been ignored by scientists. Central to her research is the question of whether the Western notion of sleep is ideal. For Worthman, “If you don’t ask the questions, and the research to evaluate the answers, you just assume that there is one right way to sleep. Then, it’s not surprising that we don’t have good answers to what the costs and benefits are to doing it one way or another.” If Worthman’s preliminary research proves true, the costs of Western sleeping patterns may be high—from insomnia and sleep apnea in adults to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) in infants. It appears that Worthman—who describes herself as “just a roving anthropologist that’s burst in upon the scene”—has discovered a question to keep scientists awake at night for years to come.