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Episode details

Radio 3,07 Jan 2015,45 mins

Sleep, Sleeplessness and Creativity

Free Thinking

Available for over a year

We spend nearly a third of our life doing it and we still don't really know why so Rana Mitter explores why we sleep with pioneering researcher into the body clock, Russell Foster; Matt Berry, actor, comedian and writer who wrestles with insomnia; Brigitte Steger who has explored Japanese and other global sleeping cultures and Katharine Craik, a renaissance scholar whose new opera project for children is called Watching...back in the 16th century the watching hours were part of a segmented sleep pattern which only disappeared with the industrial revolution. Producer: Jacqueline Smith.

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