Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown.

  • Brown, Haydn.
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Sleep and sleeplessness / Haydn Brown. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    THE CAUSES OF SLEEPLESSNESS SIMPLE CONDITIONS THE immediate cause of insomnia will be already inferred from a study of the nature of sleep. If a person be tired or sufficiently fatigued after a period of either activity or simple wakefulness he will sleep, provided there be no physically irritative, toxic, or psychic influences to prevent him. Sleep involves a cessation of both voluntary motion and intellectual activity ; when dreams take place portions only of the brain are active, while the will has ceased to regulate and control; when somnambulism takes place still further portions of the brain are active ; move- ments such as are made in the waking state, which would be under direction and control, are in somnambulism aroused reflexly by activity in those centres involved in a dream. Anything interfering with this cessation of voluntary motion and intellectual activity will prevent sleep. Fidgets will come into the mind of the reader at once—a disposition to keep the limbs and body moving—caused by toxaemia. Intellectual exercise before retiring to rest may be of such interesting or absorbing nature as to take possession of the brain and induce some repeti-