The simplest of slumbers
science.org
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FTA
Edit: I also think that this is why you get tired when you sleep too much, your subconsciousness will run exhausting mental training when your consciousness is asleep so sleeping when your subconsciousness is alert makes you more tired.
It does seem rather coincidental that we sleep for 7-9 hours, which is the majority of the dark time, during which wakefulness would only expend energy with little gain (thinking of apes instead of modern humans)
And an interesting comment of someone on FB:
Hydra
Hydra have a diffuse neural system
But no brain to speak of
A simple creature echoing older, more primitive forms
They doze off, so we've found
Using familiar chemistry
To slumber every four hours
When I sleep I descend like a bathysphere Down through layers of earlier incarnations
Dipping below the surface
Leaving the airy light of consciousness behind
To enter the involuntary dream world of Freud and Jung
Deeper still then dreams themselves disperse
Slipping away like darting fish
Leaving me reptilian, autonomic, just breath and pulse
But there's further to go - into the abyssal dark
To reach my fundamental hardware
Where I am the hydra
Supporting evidence: horses sleep 2 hours, cats sleep 16, and even humans vary widely in how much sleep they need. That's hard to explain if all of it is fundamentally necessary, but easy to explain if the precise length is irrelevant for biological purposes and that the length was determined by outside factors e.g. how much this species stands to gain from remaining in a low-power state.
I remember reading about polyphasic sleep and how it supposedly was great to win more time.
It seems to have slowly petered out over time.
I wonder what other health fads are there. It would make a good docu to follow someone like Supersize me! But doing all those health fads together for some time.
Sales? What’s there to sell if you recommend polyphasic sleep? Or just harvest attention of clueless morons and act as some health guru?
Such a weird phenomena, and so common, I feel moronical for not understanding what drives it.
My biggest complaint was the feeling of time being seamless. My six sleeping periods were all of the same length, so I sort of lost the feeling of a concrete 'yesterday' or 'tomorrow'.
I say this as I’m about to do 48 hours with 10 hours of sleep, but I’m doing this to hit a really cool deadline, and I’m not under the illusion that this is sustainable.
What deadlines are really cool? Just curious, sorry.
Biphasic sleep is still quite popular but it tends to be framed as taking a nap rather than as a 24-hour sleep regimen.
That's right! here in the warmer and highly humid states of Mexico (mainly in the Yucatan peninsula) the Siesta is very popular. A lot of people sleep between 3pm and 5pm (when the heat and humidity are higher) and wake up early in the morning around 5pm . I never got used to sleep siesta, as always woke up groggy.
- H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds
> Will the orange sponges be the next creatures to stun the sleep skeptics? Maybe not right away. Joiner and Rouse couldn’t keep their sponges healthy long enough to carry out reliable experiments. After months of fits and starts, they paused the work to rethink the set up. Then, COVID-19 hit and shut the experiment down. Joiner doesn’t have the staff to start it back up. But another sponge may step in instead to show that even the simplest animals truly sleep. In emails, Itoh coyly referred to his lab’s work on these simple creatures. Mum’s the word for now, it seems. “These are ongoing projects,” he wrote. “Please look forward to them.”