> “I became nocturnal for about seven months,” Dr. Samson said. “It takes someone who wants to get their Ph.D. to be motivated enough to do that."

Really curious why he didn't just record video and watch it the following day, perhaps even playing back at 1.5x or 2x speed.

Interesting hypothesis. Whenever an article like this comes around, I'm reminded how little we really know about sleep. How did it start? Why is it necessary at all? Hopefully studying the sleep of other animals will reveal some of it's mysteries. For now, though, asking "Why do we sleep?" seems like asking "Why is water wet?".

Well, there was the "washes the brain" mouse study[1] a couple of years ago, which is at least suggestive.

1: http://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-slee...

We are the product of our environment, a spinning rock. Conserving energy during the inevitable night cycle has been found to be more successful than fighting it.

Not sure if this is intentional, but it took me 3 reads of that header to realize it did not say "descent night's sleep".

I am not a native speaker and 'descent' is not really on my active vocabulary but 'decent' is. So for me it took couple reads to understand what you meant. Looks my brain is looking for familiar pattern to match.