Penguin survives on 4-second microsleeps – times a day | Hacker News Reader

Penguin survives on 4-second microsleeps – times a day

nature.com

69 pointspseudolus30 comments

I listened to a story about this on NPR and a scientist came on and basically said “in no way should you compare this to sleep that happens in humans, they are not at all similar” - kinda got the feeling that he was a bit annoyed by the reporting on this because it inevitably would draw all these false parallels.

And rightly so.

First, penguins are birds. Birds are not mammals. Even some mammals like dolphins have very different sleep patterns (dolphins sleep one hemisphere at a time and can still swim up to take a breath while sleeping).

We don't exactly know the last common ancestor of birds and mammals, but it is theorised it happened about 220 MYA.

It was so far back in the past, Earth only had one large landmass and the dinosaurs did not yet even appear.

Second, birds have tens of millions of years of evolution doing things like flying non stop for days. There would be a lot of selective pressure to evolve birds that are good at being able to do micro sleep without crashing down.

Yea just listened to it again and the researcher said: “this is not related to human physiology, and this won’t tell us more about the function of sleep.”

The link is here for those interested: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/01/1198908746/these-penguins-tak...

Title is busted -- maybe "Penguin survives on 4-second microsleeps 10k times per day"

why not “thousands of times” like the original?

At first thought - 4-second reboot sounds great! But at "more than 10,000 times" it's more like a bootloop.

Yeah 40,000 seconds is ~11 hours of sleep!

Sounds like starfield for me.

Penguins must be running a fancy JDK with guaranteed max latency garbage collection. Or is it Erlang?

That's a nice life hack... if you are a penguin.

Need to try this!

But probably difficult to emulate this 4s sleep 4.5s awake cycle in meetings. My family wouldn’t be too pleased either.

You need to get everyone on-board this schedule, family and colleagues. And hope that the awake cycles are synchronized? Come to think of it, how are the penguins communicating, seems like there would be a considerable packet loss?

I'm imagining the impossibility of holding a meeting like this, and it's hilarious. Although, there's probably a smarter species somewhere out there that would look at our attention spans, and how we hold our meetings today, and would die laughing.

And look at their National Geographic equivalent, commenting on how cute it is that we can, very awkwardly, build complicated structures despite the severe handicap in attention span and communication.

I'm proud of us

If you do, please don't drive during that period!

It's ok. My car has Full Self Driving.

How is that different from blinking?

Do you blink for four seconds at a time?

When I'm annoyed or stressed

I'd be more than annoyed if I had to watch the kids for months naked in the middle of Antarctica's perpetual night surrounded by neighbours with no walls.

These guys are widely considered the most well-dressed of the entire animal kingdom and here you are claiming "The Emperor Penguin has no clothes."

Can you replace a night's sleep with many long blinks?

If you are sleep deprived in a meeting that seems to happen.

Hey now, some of us are just slow blinkers with heavy eyelids that take a few hours to toggle.

Does your brain turn off while you are blinking?

You know, there is a difference between having eyes closed and sleeping.

> You know, there is a difference between having eyes closed and sleeping.

Tell that to my boss!

what happened to the title?

Looks like auto-editing (of titles), e.g. "Thousands of People..." would be simplified to "People..."

For the Penguin!

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