IV. 閱讀測驗：16％，每題 2 分
WHEN Doug Hollan arrived on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for his anthropology
dissertation fieldwork in a rice farming village, his Toraja neighbors wanted to take turns
sleeping with him and his wife. The rural Toraja almost never sleep alone. They sleep in
wood frame houses with little furniture and flimsy room dividers, and they sleep on the floor
together in groups, sharing blankets and huddling close for warmth. And so the Toraja have
“punctuated” sleep. They wake often as others turn and get up in the night, or when a child
calls out or another adult can’t sleep and starts to chat. Mr. Hollan never heard anyone
complain about this.
Many years after he returned from Toraja, Mr. Hollan became a psychotherapist and
opened a practice in Los Angeles. Most of his clients have voiced discomfort, at some point
or another, with their sleep. They do so even though they have what you might imagine would
be the perfect conditions to sleep soundly. They have private darkened rooms that they share
with at most one person and, often, expensively manufactured beds that minimize disturbance
to the other person when one gets up in the night. His clients want to make sure they get seven
or eight hours of continuous sleep, and when they try to sleep but they can’t, they get upset.
They are not alone. The National Sleep Foundation reports that more than one in five
Americans has difficulty falling asleep almost every night, and a 2013 Centers for Disease
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Control and Prevention study found that about 4 percent of adults in the United States had
taken a prescription sleeping pill in the previous month.
This obsession with eight hours of continuous sleep is largely a creation of the electrified
age. Back when night fell for, on average, half of each 24 hours, people slept in phases. In “At
Day’s Close,” a remarkable history of night in the early modern West, Roger Ekirch writes
that people fell asleep not long after dark for the “first sleep.” Then they awoke, somnolent
but not asleep, often around midnight, when for a few hours they talked, read, prayed, had sex,
brewed beer or burgled. Then they went back to sleep for a shorter period. Mr. Ekirch
concludes, “There is every reason to believe that segmented sleep, such as many wild animals
exhibit, had long been the natural pattern of our slumber before the modern age, with a
provenance as old as humankind.”
In traditional non-Western societies like the Toraja, what happens at night really matters.
People pay close attention to their dreams, and because they are awakened more often, they
have more opportunity to remember them. “Thanks to these continuous disruptions,” he
writes, “dreams spill into wakefulness and wakefulness into dreams in a way that entangles
them both.”
【題組】42. Which of the following statement is NOT TRUE?
(A) Mr. Hollan is a paleontologist whose specialty includes anthropology.
(B) The eight hours of sleep daily is an obsession in modern society.
(C) The idea of segment sleep is believed to be wired in humans’ biological pattern.
(D) Not heavily influenced by western culture, Taraja makes a perfect destination for
anthropological research.
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