- ๐ถ Do different types of music influence sleep?
- ๐ก๏ธ How does temperature affect sleep patterns?
- ๐ And what happens when sleep is disrupted โ how does the body recover?
These questions emerged from an inquiry process led by eighth-grade students as part of a Sleep Citizen Science project. The students analyzed their own sleep data alongside data from adolescents across Israel, identified patterns and potential relationships, and formulated research hypotheses.
They then moved to an additional scientific practice: a controlled biological experiment. Through analysis, the students identified patterns, variability, and potential relationships, and on this basis formulated hypotheses that they sought to examine through an additional scientific practiceโa controlled biological experiment. Fruit flies serve as a model organism for the study of human sleep due to similarities in the genes responsible for the biological clock. The students visited our fly laboratory at the Technion, separated males from females, placed flies into capillary tubes, and then into a dedicated monitoring system that tracks activity levels and enables the identification of periods of sleep and wakefulness.
The flies were subjected to different treatments in accordance with the research questions: some were maintained at different temperatures, others were exposed to classical music or trance music or to varying sound intensities, and in some cases, sleep was deliberately disrupted. In addition, the students prepared fly food and, for an additional experiment, cooked diets with varying protein-to-carbohydrate ratios.
We are currently awaiting the monitoring results, and in the coming weeks, the students will conduct an in-depth analysis of the collected data. Based on these analyses, they will construct models to explain, represent, and describe the phenomena they investigated.
