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Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

Natural question follows: can humans train ourselves to do the same as animals in water? Live a bi-phasic life where creative / analytical sides of brain each get to "sleep"?

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Probably nobody knows, but I guess these animals have an special adaptation to make bi-phasic sleep possible. I guess that to evolve it you only need to keeping an isolated human population for a few million years were you kill at random some of the one that are sleeping, to encourage swallow sleeping and later bi-phasic sleep. Another possibility is trying a genetic modification, but it's impossible with the current technology and knowledge, perhaps in the future ...

If you want to have a peek, you can read about the Wada Test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wada_test . (And somehow related https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain )

It would depend on how this evolved in the water mammals researchers have found this in. Maybe some land mammals do the same thing, we just have preformed this type of experiment on them yet.

If it does appear in humans, it'd probably be best to study those with extreme insomnia or people who claim to have very short sleep patterns (<2 hours a night) or maybe those who are narcoleptic (the other end of that scale).

So we need a volunteer to put the electrodes on the hippopotamus?

The character Kraiklyn in the Iain M Banks novel Consider Phlebas has had enhancements to his brain to be able to do this.

The creative / analytical dichotomy of the brain is a myth I'm afraid.

It is not the same thing, but some people learn to switch between analytical and creative activity. I am many more could, if they tried hard enough.. Of course, there’s no recipe for how to learn this sort of thing which makes it a lot harder.

True. I go through phases like this. For two whole weeks I will write (creatively) and draw, and then I usually find there is a day or two when I can't seem to do much of anything useful besides menial tasks and watching stupid videos. Then I go through another two weeks of analytical stuff-- reading, catching up on work (programming and mathy stuff), and doing planning for my writing. I can control it, if necessary in a day. The urge to do one thing or another is an intense "mood" for me (which, like I said, normally has a two-week period). This indicates some kind of synchronization, so if I want to switch I use musical triggers: airy, melodic music for creativity, and beat-heavy, algorithmic music for analytical activity. I only need to listen to the music for a few minutes to switch, and of course it sometimes doesn't work but I don't know of any other triggers. Possibly going out for a short walk could do it too? Meditation?

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