Tesla, Descartes and Sleep
Do sleep patterns have anything to do with intelligence? And is it a factor of success or failure in life?
Another tweet of Elon Musk caused quite a stir (again), in which he said, “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” While he talked about work hours, not sleep hours, his tweet made me revisit sleep-related topics, which is my favorite. As each of us has only 24 hours a day, the matter of sleep hours and work hours is always a zero-sum game, after all.
Judging from a variety of circumstances, Elon Musk doesn’t seem to be a big fan of sleep. I just learned that Nikola Tesla, his patron saint, only slept two hours a day. It’s a popular notion that early risers who sleep less than average have more chances to be successful in life. Many of the highest achievers including the world’s famous academic geniuses and successful entrepreneurs prove it.
However, it’s sometimes the other way around. The most noteworthy example is René Descartes. The French mathematician-cum-philosopher slept for 10 to 12 hours a day and got up at 11 a.m. or noon.
Descartes believed in the positive effects of sleep and idleness on his brain. For him, sleep is truly the “chief nourisher in life’s feast” as Shakespeare praised it in Macbeth. He also loved taking a walk and spent considerable time on conversations and correspondence with congenial friends and fellow intellectuals. Obviously, he didn’t work for many hours but his academic achievement is tremendous.
It would be only one reasonable conclusion that brains work differently and each has an optimum sleeping pattern.
So it’s hard to tell if a brainy high achiever sleeps less or more. Looking into other cases, you will only find that it varies. Thomas Edison thought that sleep is waste of life as his archrival Nikola Tesla did. (Edison’s sleep pattern is known as a “polyphasic sleep cycle”, with which he didn’t get any good night’s sleep at all but took multiple brief naps during the day. Similarly, Leonardo Da Vinci took a 20-minute nap every four hours.) Meanwhile, Albert Einstein slept for ten hours every day. Winston Churchill took a daily two-hour nap and often worked in bed.
Therefore, it would be only one reasonable conclusion that brains work differently and each has an optimum sleeping pattern. As Jeff Bezos recently said in The David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg TV, “There are a lot of kinds of smart.” (Bezos, the world’s richest man who was also academically smart when young, is also an advocate of 8-hour sleep. While he’s an early riser, he cherishes his “puttering time” in the morning and doesn’t schedule any meeting before 10 a.m.)
Going back to Descartes’ life, you may wonder if he kept his sleeping pattern as it was till the end. If it had been possible, Descartes would have lived happily ever after, achieving even more. But there was a tragic plot twist.
In 1649, Descartes was invited to be the tutor of Queen Christina of Sweden, who was an extreme morning person. He had to get up much earlier than he did in his whole life to give lessons to the queen of the winter land at 5 a.m. Descartes was soon taken ill of pneumonia and died in 1650.
Commemorating René Descartes, the genius and high achiever who knew the value of sleep, I’d like to finish this post with the following last words.
“I sleep, therefore I am (still alive).”
