Interested in sleep has existed since the beginning of man. Scholars and historians have long described the effects of insomnia and other sleep disturbances. The first observation of a sleep disorder was recorded in 1880. From then, in the 1930's to the 1970's experiments were done on cats and dogs. Normal patterns of sleep were first discovered in 1935. Now, sleep has evolved into a highly researched field of science, with it becoming more popular and people becoming more aware of how dangerous bad sleep health can be.
My hypothesis is, age is a determining factor of sleep. When you are young, you sleep from anywhere to 3 hours of sleep to 10 hours of sleep. But as you progress, sleep becomes more abrupt with more arousals and harsher sleep patterns. Some of the factors that affect sleep as you get older are: as I have mentioned more arousals during sleep, loss of deep level sleep (this is the dream stage where sleep is the deepest, stage 3 and 4), the prefer-ability of an earlier bedtime and an earlier wake-up time, sleep apnea (to stop breathing and start back moments at a time, "snoring"), in some cases the inappropriate use of sleep pills, and usually more medical problems. These are just a few factors that affect sleep as you become older. In my study, I used three different subjects, a younger person, a middle aged person, and a person in there senior years. My hypothesis is basically that sleep, in some way will distort the sleeping pattern of the average person. As each sleep pattern is analyzed, the truth is apparently more obvious than I thought. The sleep pattern of young adults sees much deeper sleep, but middle aged doesn't see nearly as much, but the older adults see barely any. .
My explanation of this, is that which I have stated already, is that age is a determining factor of sleep. REM (rapid eye movement) is different as they get older, which is sleep all together.