ICYMI🕯: First Dusty Dots is up. For centuries, people slept in two shifts and woke in the middle of the night, and nobody thought it was strange enough to explain. 

A 1992 NIH study put modern men in a long dark night and their sleep split in half on its own. They measured the hours his subjects spent awake and found elevated prolactin, the hormone tied to meditative states. They described it as calm.

The archives, the experiment, and why "noon" used to mean 3pm.

FULL STORY: https://open.substack.com/pub/thedailydots/p/the-night-wasnt-broken-what-preindustrial?r=5pecuy&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true