Reindeer sleep and eat simultaneously | Hacker News Reader

Reindeer sleep and eat simultaneously

smithsonianmag.com

153 pointsgmays61 comments

As the article mentions, between these reindeer sleeping while they eat and penguins sleeping for 4 seconds at a time, it's pretty amazing what we're learning about how animals sleep. I wonder if humans can ever learn to use these "other" means of sleep

Babies "dream feed", so maybe it's that we forget how to do things.

Or become physiologically incapable of it. But that might just be “forgetting.”

As a recent parent of a 3 month old the stupidity of our evolutionary design baffles me. Why do you have to laboriously teach babies to fall asleep, stay asleep, etc. Even in contact naps where they should theoretically feel absolutely safe and biologically cared for. The sheer amount of absolutely ridiculous life draining energy that goes into getting a baby to do basic primitive biological things is crazy.

> Why do you have to laboriously teach babies [basic survival things]

Because we are born prematurely. Our brain wouldn’t fit through the birth canal if we were born later with more basic skills baked in. So instead we finish a big part of our early development outside the womb.

Marsupials also use this tactic.

We changed a million things about our environment and a couple of those things turned out to be important.

An interesting thing is not all babies need to be taught this

Just put it out in the barn, it'll sleep. Or float it down the river if you think it's caused by demons. People didn't even name their kids for a year even 100 years ago.

Point is that modern child rearing isn't even similar to what we had 3-4 generations ago. The "weak" were weeded out. If you had to choose between the family surviving and dealing with a finicky newborn... compromises were made.

There's the "uber sleep" method or whatever it's called. Made the rounds in my circle of friends in like...2007ish?

Basically you force yourself to only take 4 15 minute naps a day. A utterly hellish thing to do, but eventually your brain figures out that you've decided to terrorize it and will instantly dip into REM the moment you fall asleep, and you'll wake up feeling rested and only need to sleep an hour a day.

I personally tried this for a bit and it kinda sorta works, but it's awful to get started, and the first time you sleep more than 15 minutes you're going to break the trend and revert, and who knows what long term effects it has on people.

Sleep in general is one of those really interesting areas of biology that we still don't get.

I was actually just talking about this yesterday!

That schedule I'd read about was the Überman schedule, where you sleep 20-30 minutes six times a day. Definitely a much more extreme form than most polyphasic sleep schedules. :)

I read a series of blog posts about it, probably around the same time as you did, and found them again [1] last night. I didn't actually read through it again, but if anyone's interested in reading more about someone's firsthand experience with it, could be a good classic read.

[1] https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

If I am on vacation or in some other relaxed environment, I will go into a state where I sleep 6 hours at night but also take a siesta or 15-minute to 30-minute nap in the middle of the day.

Can't find the study right now but these alternative sleep schedules absolutely destroy your growth hormone release, and probably a few other mechanisms

This is what I've read as well.

I can't remember where, but I was listening to a guy talk about his sleep disorder and one of the main symptoms he described was being able to instantly fall into REM.

this is a common symptom of narcolepsy, at least.

That might have been it. It seems that narcolepsy is also correlated with a deficiency in growth hormones.

Can this be used to treat acromegaly then?

In grad school I developed a sleep every other day lifestyle. Would not recommend.

Was it more productive, objectively speaking, than being consistent and not dealing with the constant drainage due to severely lacking sleep?

The logic was that I could have 36 hours uninterrupted, and then sleep for like 12, averaging 6 per 24 hours, which seemed reasonable.

It’s a recipe for burnout, but I did get a lot done. A good protocol for very tight important deadlines, but it took its toll.

Toll noticable only back in those days or even in the future?

Nothing but a deep forehead wrinkle :P

Sleeping in more than one long chunk of time is called polyphasic sleeping [0]. It's postulated that sleeping in one go is an industrial age phenomenon.

Anecdotal, but I embraced a mild form of this during college, using "Einstein naps" (brief naps ended just after dozing) for a recharge between my work day and night classes. I experienced nitably improved focus and less evening burnout.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

Many new parents know how invigorating a 10 second nap can be.

It's crazy how you go two, three months and then when you get four hours in a row you wake up feeling amazing, newly clear-headed, and knowing you got objectively bad sleep you wonder how messed up you were before.

Ha! My fondest memories were taking 5 minute naps with my first child.

Maybe it’s also a caffeine thing. When I’m off of caffeine I can take multiple daytime naps. They feel great and are very refreshing. When I’m drinking caffeine it’s hard enough just to get to sleep at the end of the day.

Another drastic example of animal sleep being very different from ours is dolphins. Dolphins sleep "one hemisphere at a time".

> Research has shown that dolphins are able to sleep with only half of their brain at a time, a phenomenon known as unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS). During USWS, one hemisphere of the brain remains active while the other hemisphere rests. This allows dolphins to continue swimming, surfacing for air, and avoiding predators while still getting the rest they need.

Try that! :-)

Ducks apparently do half-brain sleeping too. If I recall correctly it has something to do with sitting side by side, and that they can let the half on their brain not attached to the "look-out" eye rest.

Well, "eat" is used in a general way here to include "ruminating on cud". I would perhaps think that's more like "digest" than eat, so while interesting, to me it more says the rumination activity is more automatic than previously thought.

That reminds me of the plots of certain Seinfeld episodes where George or Kramer combine life functions that would normally be kept separate.

As far as the life function of considering new ideas, this lets them both "chewing on something" and "sleep on it" at the same time.

> While the animals chew their cud, they also enter a state of rest

Can you imagine if you could sleep anytime you started chewing gum?

Go to a restaurant, start munching down on a salad, and your eyes glaze over. Actually, having been to a lot of buffets, I think some people really do go into torpor.

I remember reading years ago about EEGs showing daytime cable TV viewers can lull into a relaxed state similar to people who are half asleep or meditating.

Makes sense. Chewing cud takes a long time.

On a vaguely related note: When I cradle a chicken it relaxes on my side and the eye closes. If I can peek over to the other side its eye is wide awake. This causes me to giggle uncontrollably, waking up the eye close to me.

If they can do that, who's to say they can't fly?

pretty sure i do too

Just thought I'd document my experience going onto this site:

* I load the page, everything looks normal

* suddenly a massive video advert appears at the top of the screen, taking up half the screen and shifting all the content down

* another video advert appears at the bottom of the screen, stealing another 10% of the screen

* I start scrolling: the top advert is sticky and covers up the article headline. I can now see nothing apart from a part of a reindeer's head

* I scroll some more

* Chrome pops up a box telling me that the website wants to know my location

* I scroll some more and encounter yet another inline advert. My screen is now almost entirely adverts

* I scroll some more and the inline advert becomes a mini-player in the bottom-right of the screen

* There are now 4 separate adverts on my screen, all videos

* I give up and leave the page

With JS off everything looks normal and stays normal.

yeah this works, but it is wild to think that this is what some people experience of the web if they have no knowledge of ad blockers or js blocker.

I use the content blocker Ka-Block in Safari iOS and see no ads.

None of that happens with Firefox and ublock on Android

None of the happens with Javascript turned off on the page (and the article is fully available)

Give Brave browser a shot - it blocks ads out of the box and the experience is just as described in your first point.

You can contact the website operators, but they will probably suggest you install an ad blocker so that the page loads correctly.

Thanks for the warning. To spare the next reader, here’s a direct link to the primary source—

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)...

—and the key quote from the abstract:

We studied sleep using non-invasive EEG […] Surprisingly, slow-wave activity decreased not only during NREM sleep but also during rumination. […] Reindeer spent less time in NREM sleep the more they ruminated. These results suggest that they can sleep during rumination. The ability to reduce sleep need during rumination—undisturbed phases for both sleep recovery and digestion—might allow for near-constant feeding in the arctic summer.

Welcome to the modern web. It sucks. See all the comments (well intended, but illustrative of how bad the default experience is): "Use this defensive technique to keep the hordes of hell from your experience".

I don't have this issue because I dump an extensive deny list of hosts into my /etc/hosts file from https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Here's a static screenshot for you,

https://i.ibb.co/FxXj6qf/example-1.webp

(scripts disabled (uMatrix) + reader mode + custom CSS)

If you take a little bit of ownership over your browser, IMHO the web experience has never been better than in 2023!

I thought you were going to provide a screen shot of the horror show, not the clean version. It really boggles the mind that someone could look at a site and see it as the GP describes, and say "yeah, that's about right". They really have to work hard to get it to that point, so it's not like an accidental "we didn't know what it would do when we included that JS from the ad tech company". That's a sociopath/psychopath/masochist level of lack of concern for your viewers

>* Chrome

Ah, there it is.

Try the same page with Firefox and uBlock Origin. It's night and day.

Friends don't let friends use Chrome.

I run my FF in deny everything mode, and then run uBlock on top of that. With that, the site was totally usable. For the lulz, I disabled uBlock. With a refresh, I could now see all of the space left by all of the elements, but even FF's deny mode prevented the ads from showing. It just left gray boxes covering up the content. First time I actually did that to see what FF was doing natively.

It's just like Blade Runner, where there's thousand ads everywhere, all trying to compete for the consumers attention. Now all we need is holographic ads that project from the screen and dance around on your keyboard (while your trying to type).

My favorite is still Starship Troopers "would you like to know more?" everywhere you look, but Minority Report's personalized annoyances after identifying you. Then of course, there's the Black Mirror's version of ads. Black Mirror is obviously more recent, but even back when some of this older stuff was created, pervasive advertising was already being made fun of. I wonder what Robert Heinlein or Philip K Dick would have thought of what we really have today

Now you will never know how the reindeer can sleep and eat at the same time.

Me too. Every morning there's a pile of junk food wrappers in my kitchen.

Do you have any recollection of snacking at night? If you don’t, you’re likely to suffer from a sleep eating disorder.

64 slices of american cheese?

You beat me to it and yours was better anyway. Drat.

So they are zombies.

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