关于微笑主题英语演讲稿（精选18篇）
Hello, ladies and gentlemen. It’s great to be here. First of all, thanks for your coming. Tonight, what I am gonna talk about is innovation. Who can tell me what is innovation? We all know that, since 1978, China has been through the greatest changes brought by the reform and opening-up. So what we can see from the reform and opening-up? The power of innovation. That’s why I am here. I am here to show you my Chinese dream.
I want to talk about the future and how we're going to win it. If we want to make innovation. But firstly, we should make sure that China is a place where we can make it if we try, where we can go as far as hard work and big dreams will take us. We understand that it’s not going to be a cakewalk, this competition for the future, which means all of us are going to have to do our best. We are going to have to win the future by being smarter and working harder and working together. Innovation is the spirit of our country, the motive force for our country’s prosperity.
Hello everyone! My name is Wei Xiuying. I’m a student from Zhen’an Middle School. I’m from Class 3 Grade 8. I’m shy but there is always a smile on my face. At school, I have some good habits. For example, I read books every day, I often play sports. My favorite sport is ping-pong. Because I really like Ding Ning. She can play it very well. I often play it with my classmates at school in the afternoon. It is interesting.
Our school is very nice. First, there is a beautiful garden in our school. It has a lot of flowers and trees. The flowers are colorful and smell good. The trees are green and you can have a rest under the tree. Second, there is a big playground in our school too. We can play basketball, play badminton, run and so on. It is healthy for our mind and body to play sports. Third, there is also a dining hall in our school. We can have meals there and the food tastes delicious. The teachers are very friendly to us. They usually help with our study. Although they sometimes are strict, they just want us to get good grades. I love my classmates too. Because they can make me laugh and I can learn a lot from them. They often bring out the best in me.
In a word, I love my school!
Thank you for your listening.
"Protecting the environment,is everybody's business." Every time I go in the busy streets,always see some throw on the ground of dazzling things:the packing bag of brightly colored,the crush cigarette end,didn't chew clean apple and roll into a mass of waste everyone so don't speak hygiene,our beautiful home will become what look like?Spring outing,a lot of students litter the lawn or on the road.I asked them:"you didn't bring garbage bags?" They a face of vacant:"bag is used to hold snacks,why put on garbage?" Look at these throw away rubbish inside and many didn't eat "many fish","but beak","chips",I feel very distressed,parents pay for what they love to eat,so let them throw?Before lunch,I go to the bathroom,he found a faucet of the "huahua" alone flow "tears"!Is everyone who so careless?And forgot to turn off the something says so:if it's not cherish water resources,then the earth up the last drops of water will is one of the y time the water think about this sentence,will also have to forget to turn off the tap?"Protecting the environment,is everybody's business." Not only of an empty talk,but every little bit in our daily r throw a waste paper to save every drop of water,the classmates,cheer,starts from me,from now to start,let us together to be the earth mother's environmental protection small guardians
If you're middle-aged and your memory's not what it used to be, check thebathroom scale, researchers warned, suggesting overweight people tend to scoremore poorly on tests of memory than their thinner peers do.
The findings suggest that a heavier weight in middle age may mean a higherrisk of dementia later in life.
Reporting in the journal Neurology, the researchers speculated that higherrates of cardiovascular disease or diabetes might help explain the link. Butit's also possible that substances produced by fat cells, such as the hormoneleptin, have direct effects on the brain.
The study compared mental abilities to body mass index (BMI), a
measurement of weight in relation to height used to define overweight andobesity. A BMI of 25 or more indicates overweight, and 30 or more is obese.
The study also investigated the relationships between BMI and cognitivefunction in 2,223 healthy men and women between the ages of 32 and 62 in Francethrough the use of four cognitive tests.
The study found a higher BMI was associated with lower cognitive test scores.Results from a test involving word memory recall show people with a BMI of 20remembered an average of nine out of 16 words, while people with a BMI of 30remembered an average of seven out of 16 words.
Dear classmates,
Every one of us, rich or poor, should at least have one or two good friends. My friends will listen to me when I want to speak, will wipe my eyes when I cry, will take care of me when I am sick, and my friends will go together with me side by side through this journey of life.
As students, we could share more time with our friends. The friendship in our young hearts is pure, fresh and simple. I often feel very lucky to have a lot of good friends. Especially when I had Justin as one of my best friends. Justin was my English teacher from the USA. I met him in 1996 when I was a student who could only speak very little English. Justin was a vivid young man with a bright smile on his face, and he always had his special way to make the class active and attractive. He taught us English by telling stories, playing games, singing songs, and even dancing. I could still remember very clearly that one afternoon when we fin-ished our class, we went to some other classes to sing songs for them, just like what people do in the states on Christmas Eve. It was so interesting and unforgettable. Justin was an excellent teacher, because he taught us not only how to study English well, but also the way to find out the beauty of the world and the way to be angels to others' lives. I know there was friendship and pure love in our hearts. Facing this valuable emotion neither nationality nor age was important, the real importance lay in faith, under-standing, and care. Justin is the best friend I have ever had, and I know I will cherish those days of staying together with him as the best part of my memory.
Friendship is a kind of treasure in our lives. It is actually like a bottle of wine, the longer it is kept, the sweeter it will be. It is also like a cup of tea. When we are thirsty, it will be our best choice, but when we have enough time to enjoy ourselves, it is also the most fragrant drink.
However, in this fast-developing modern society, the reality is not that. More and more people forget to enjoy the beauty of life and -the beauty of friendship. They work hard in order to gain a higher position, in the society and to earn more money for their work. Of course, we don't deny that it is important to find a bet-ter place in our lives, but we wish more and more people could pay a little more attention to themselves and their friends. All of us have to spare some time for personal lives. We have to find the chance to express our emotion and love. When staying with our friends, we can release ourselves completely. We can do whatever we want, we can laugh together, talk together, and even cry to-gether. I should say that being together with our best friends is the most wonderful moment of our lives.
As we know, we would feel lonely if we didn't even have a friend. But it doesn't mean we could depend on our friends all the time. There is a famous motto saying that “A friend is like a quilt with cotton wadding, but the real thing that keeps you warm is your own temperature.” It is really true. We have to work hard together with our friends, encourage each other and help each other. When we receive love and friendship, we should repay as much as we can.
Finally, let's pray together now that one day, all of us could find the person we want to find, and could enjoy a real beautiful friendship in our lives. Let's pray the flower of friendship be-tween our friends and us would always bloom brightly in our hearts.
We know it is difficult to learn English. My English is very good. I learnEnglish like this. I Listen to the teacher carefully and write the important points down on mynotebooks. After class I revise the lessons. Before class I prepare new lessonsto find out the questions. Then I will listen carefully in class. I also listen to the tape, and speak English with my classmates in theclassroom and on the playground. It’s to improve my listening and speaking. I keep a diary every day to practise my written English. Besides this, I often read English newspapers and magazines to enrich myknowlege on English culture. We will learn English well so long as we learn it hard.
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word, it is victory. Victory at all costs—victory in spite of all terrors—victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival. Let that be realized, no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that British Empire has stood for , no survival for the urge, the impulse of the ages, that mankind shall more forward toward his goal. I take up my task in buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. I feel entitled at this juncture, at this time, to claim the aid of all and to say, “Come then, let us go forward together with our united strength.”
我能奉献的唯有热血、辛劳、泪水和汗水。我们所面临的将是一场极为残酷的考验，我们面临的将是旷日持久的斗争和苦难。你若问我们的目标是什么?我可以用一个词来概括，那就是胜利。不惜一切代价去夺取胜利，不畏惧一切恐怖去夺取胜利，不论前路再长再苦也要多去胜利，因为没有胜利纠无法生存!我们必须意识到，没有胜利就没有大英帝国，没有胜利就没有大英帝国所象征的一切，没有胜利就没有多少世纪以来强烈的要求和冲动：人类应当向自己的目标迈进。此刻，我的精神振奋，满怀信心地承当起自己的人物。我确信，只要我们大家联合，我们的事业就不会挫败。此时此刻千钧一发之际，我觉得我有权要求各方面的支持。我要呼吁：“来吧，让我们群策努力，并肩迈进!”
Everybody will meet all kinds of difficulties during their lives, of course, they are willing to accept success, but the fact is that no one can win all the time, they will meet failure now and then. Fail is an unpleasant thing to face, people treat fail a bad thing. While for me, I think we can learn from failure and be a better man.
Everyone is afraid of facing failure, because failure brings them the sense of frustration. When facing failure, people choose to avoiding talking about it, they feel that they will be looked down upon by others. Indeed, no one likes to failure anything, they want to be successful all the time.
If people change their idea about failure, they can see the positive side. There is an old saying that failure is the mother of success, which means that people will learn from failure and make preparation for the success. So failure is not that hard to face, if people take right attitude towards it, they will gain success soon.
In a word, failure is not a bad something, it can bring success, only if people treat it right.
good afternoon，ladies and gentlemen!
i’m very honored to stand here and give you a short speech! to begin with ,i want to ask a question everybody dream a good dream last night? actually ,today i want to talk about dream with you. of course, what i want to talk is not a dream you have last night,but a dream—— about life.
everyone has dreams about life, different dreams at different life stage,and we need dreams to support us. dreams are like the stars we never reach in the sky,but like most mariners(水手),we can chart our course by them. with the dream,we have a direction,with a direction, we were no longer the dream, there is hope,with hope, we have the strength to fight.
i have a dream: to be a doctor.，because doctor may relieve the pain of patients. may let the human change the health. at the same time, i believed that, those who help others may be able to obtain joyfully. therefore, i hoped in the near future ,i might be a doctor.
but i know，life is tough,and there are always ups and downs, maybe we fail in the way to our aims,and we may feel depressed ,whenever at this time, the dream in our heart can always comfort us, encourage us ,and support us to move ahead .
Ladies and Gentlemen , Good afternoon! I’m very glad to stand here and give you a short speech. today my topic is “youth”. I hope you will like it .
I want to be a teacher when I listen to my teacher carefully. I think I can be a teacher when I grow up. I can help many students learn things well. I can play with my students, too. So we are good friends. I want to be a doctor when I see many doctors save their patients. To be a doctor is really great. I think I can be a doctor when I grow up. Then I can help many people out of danger. I will be the happiest girl in the world. I want to be a reporter when I watch TV every evening. We can get lots of important information from them. They make the world smaller and also make us happy. I would like to be a reporter when I grow up. And I can learn a lot about China and the other countries around the world. I can meet many superstars as well. I have lots of dreams. I think my dreams can come true one day, because there’s an old saying “where there is a will, there is a way.”
Hello,everybody !it is my great honor to be here to share my idea with y,I will talk something about DREAM——A word that has changed the world.
“What do you think is the word that has really changed our world ”
When I was asked about this question for the first time ,without thinkingit too much ,a word flash into my mind ——DREAM ,le more or lessdream about different things ,to be a teacher ,a doctor ,a scientist ,abusinessman and so on these people who have dreams should be respected,because Dreams make the world go around grow great by our bigmen are great dreamers in their yone has a dream ,and everythingstarts as one’s daydream.
Martin Luther king had a desired for a future where blacks andwhites would coexist harmoniously as speaking the way he did,heeducated,he inspired,he informed not just the people there,but people throughoutAmerica and unborn pushed forward the pace of American blacksociety towards the racial equality .
Thomas Edison had a dreamed of a lamp that could be operated byelectricity,began where he stood to put his dream into action,and despite morethan ten thousand failures,he stood by that dream until he made it a physicalreality!And today,his dream lights up the world at night.
Walt Disney had a ,in itself,wasn't unusual -- he was dreamed of making the first animated feature film,and of building anamusement park that parents could enjoy right along with their Disneyempowered his dream and today,Disneyland,Disney world and Disney theme parksattract around the world thrill millions of visitors each and every year.
John edy had a wanted to land a man on the moon and returnhim safely to earth so as to restore faith in the American way of edy empowered his dream and 8 years later Neil Armstrong stepped on theface of the moon landing certainly gave Americans new foundconfidence.
Dream --- A word that has changed the world Yes ,I would say so ,wouldn’tyou
Youth is a special life relay station ,the growth with the worry ,the lifefeeling become aware happily with the dream ,collected a unique youth melody inhere .
We as we decide and choose,so are our lives e end,forming our own destiny is what ambition is most importantly,You are the one you choose to be.
It is easy to waste our lives ,our days ,our minutes is easy to existthan living hold fast to your dreams,For if dreams die,life is abroken-winged bird,That cannot fast to your dreams,For when dreamsgo,life is a barren field,Frozen with snow.
Stress comes in all shapes and size, and has become pervasive, it seems to penetrate everything and everybody, it's hard to get through a day without hearing or reading something about stress. Some doctors refer to stress as some kind of new plague. However, numerous surveys confirm that the problem has progressively risen since the 1980s. Why all the disorder? After all, stress has been around since Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, Stress is an unavoidable consequence of life. Without stress, there would be no life. However, just as distress can caw disease, there are good stresses that balance this, and promote wellness.
Increased stress results in increased productivity--up to a point. However, this level differs for each of us. It's very much like the stress on a violin string. Not enough produces a dull. harsh sound. Too much makes sharp, annoying noir, or causes the string to snap. However, just the right degree can create magnificent tones. Similarly, we all need to find the proper level of stress that promotes optimal performance, and enables us to make harmonious music. Good health is more than just the absence of illness. Rather, it is a very robust state of physical and emotional well being that acknowledges the importance and inseparability of mind/body relationships. In the next program. I hope you will join me in the pursuit of learning how to exploit stress, so that it can work for you. and make you more productive, rather than self-destructive.
In that faraway village, small mountain village ... ..." Ears suddenly echoed the" mother's kiss" this song, my heart cannot calm, reminds me of the great maternal love.
A mother's love is like a tired work well, when you are weak and feeble, a few bites refreshed; motherly love like helpless when hands, when you don't know what to do, just hold on its difficulties will be smoothly done or easily solved; maternal love as the sun in winter, when you cold despair, as long as bathed in the warmth of love, all the disappear in smoke in a moment. A mother's love is like a pastoral poem, remote, pure, and elegant light; a
mother's love is like a deep love song, melodious, lead a person to endless aftertastes; motherly love is like a landscape painting, quiet and beautiful, tranquil and elegant. The maternal love is a growing Yanyinqipan children; maternal love is concerned about their children before bed anxious; motherly love is drifting continuously miss the Earth children; maternal love is the sons and daughters of life concomitant joke.
When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.
当我九岁的时候 我第一次去参加夏令营 我妈妈帮我整理好了我的行李箱 里面塞满了书 这对于我来说是一件极为自然的事情 因为在我的家庭里 阅读是主要的家庭活动 听上去你们可能觉得我们是不爱交际的 但是对于我的家庭来说这真的只是接触社会的另一种途径 你们有自己家庭接触时的温暖亲情 家人静坐在你身边 但是你也可以自由地漫游 在你思维深处的冒险乐园里我有一个想法 野营会变得像这样子，当然要更好些 (笑声) 我想象到十个女孩坐在一个小屋里 都穿着合身的女式睡衣惬意地享受着读书的过程
(Laughter)
(笑声)
Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.
野营这时更像是一个不提供酒水的派对聚会 在第一天的时候呢 我们的顾问把我们都集合在一起 并且她教会了我们一种今后要用到的庆祝方式 在余下夏令营的每一天中 让“露营精神”浸润我们 之后它就像这样继续着 R-O-W-D-I-E 这是我们拼写“吵闹"的口号我们唱着“噪音，喧闹，我们要变得吵一点” 对，就是这样 可我就是弄不明白我的生活会是什么样的 为什么我们变得这么吵闹粗暴 或者为什么我们非要把这个单词错误地拼写 (笑声) 但是我可没有忘记庆祝。我与每个人都互相欢呼庆祝了 我尽了我最大的努力 我只是想等待那一刻 我可以离开吵闹的聚会去捧起我挚爱的书
But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.
但是当我第一次把书从行李箱中拿出来的时候 床铺中最酷的那个女孩向我走了过来 并且她问我：“为什么你要这么安静?” 安静，当然，是R-O-W-D-I-E的反义词 “喧闹”的反义词 而当我第二次拿书的时候 我们的顾问满脸忧虑的向我走了过来 接着她重复了关于“露营精神”的要点并且说我们都应当努力 去变得外向些
And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them.But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.
于是我放好我的书 放回了属于它们的行李箱中 并且我把它们放到了床底下 在那里它们度过了暑假余下的每一天 我对这样做感到很愧疚 不知为什么我感觉这些书是需要我的 它们在呼唤我，但是我却放弃了它们 我确实放下了它们，并且我再也没有打开那个箱子 直到我和我的家人一起回到家中 在夏末的时候
Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it --all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of beingwas not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.
现在，我向你们讲述这个夏令营的故事我完全可以给你们讲出其他50种版本就像这个一样的故事-- 每当我感觉到这样的时候 它告诉我出于某种原因，我的宁静和内向的风格 并不是正确道路上的必需品 我应该更多地尝试一个外向者的角色 而在我内心深处感觉得到，这是错误的内向的人们都是非常优秀的，确实是这样 但是许多年来我都否认了这种直觉 于是我首先成为了华尔街的一名律师 而不是我长久以来想要成为的一名作家 一部分原因是因为我想要证明自己 也可以变得勇敢而坚定 并且我总是去那些拥挤的酒吧 当我只是想要和朋友们吃一顿愉快的晚餐时 我做出了这些自我否认的抉择 如条件反射一般 甚至我都不清楚我做出了这些决定
Safety is very important. We often hear people say “safety first”. As a middle school student, we should learn to protect ourselves from every possible danger. Here are some things I do. I hope you can follow them.
On your way to school and home. You should obey the traffic rules. You should walk on the right side of the road. Don’t ride your bike too fast.
During school, you can’t fight with each other. Don’t play with fire. Don’t bring knife to school. Don’t go out of school without your teacher’s permission.
In public places or campus, enough water plugs,extinguishing agents and emergency outlets should be set and prepared for unforeseen circumstances.
Above all,a series of precautions must be taken to guarantee the students' safety. Let's make the campus safe through our long-term unremitting efforts.
When George was thirty-five, he bought a small plane and learned to fly it. He soon became very good and made his plane do all kinds of tricks.
George had a friend. His name was Mark. One day George offered to take Mark up in his plane. Mark thought, "I've travelled in a big plane several times, but I've never been in a small one, so I'll go."
They went up, and George flew around for half an hour and did all kinds of tricks in the air.
When they came down again, Mark was very glad to be back safely, and he said to his friend in a shaking voice, "Well, George, thank you very much for those two trips in your plane."
George was very surprised and said, "Two trips?"
"Yes, my first and my last," answered Mark.
What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.
Now, there is a sound -- (Alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.
Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.
"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it -- the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2] (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist.
But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang. (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps."
What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.
Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so therefore it's -- Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain.
Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay. (Laughter)
The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of
Okay. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.
The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's, what, 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.
What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.
But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important.
Okay. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equiavlent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there, and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.
So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society, the aged, if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake." So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving.
One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the U.S., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. A hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters.
So when you're tired, and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that.
(Laughter)
If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. And of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Ah, well actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep, a biological mimic for sleep. It sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.
Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain.
Stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides.
So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep? So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips.
So most of us, of course, ask the question, "Well, how do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself.
What do you do? Well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies: Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber.
Okay. That's some facts. What about some myths?
Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.
We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that.
Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down.
And the fourth myth is, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well that's wrong at so many different levels. (Laughter) There is no, no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Okay. So for the last part, the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they're on anti-psychotics. It's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics.
So what's going on? Lots of groups, several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar, and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever. Their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed.
So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, which, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems.
Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent.
So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know that these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness.
So let me just finish. What I started by saying is take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions.
Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "Sleep is God. Go worship." And I can only recommend that you do the same.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)
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然而，因为我们用信用卡在网上支付，所以网上购物也是有风险的，我们可能会被不诚实商家骗。有时我们在网上买的东西的质量比我们想象的糟很多。
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