Humans evolved to get better sleep in less time
Insomniacs take heart: Humans get by on significantly less sleep than our closest animal relatives. The secret, according to a new study, is that our sleep is more efficient.
Insomniacs take heart: Humans get by on significantly less sleep than our closest animal relatives. The secret, according to a new study, is that our sleep is more efficient.
Evolution
Dec 14, 2015
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For the first time, researchers have discovered that birds can sleep in flight. Together with an international team of colleagues, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen measured the brain ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 3, 2016
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Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and the University of Lausanne have discovered that the sleeping patterns of baby birds are similar to that of baby mammals. What is more, the sleep of baby birds appears ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 2, 2013
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Researchers at the Department of Ethology at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, have measured the sleep of the dog's wild counterpart, the wolf, for the first time. Their new study was published in Scientific Reports.
Plants & Animals
Jul 11, 2022
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A team of researchers from several institutions in Hungary has found that dogs, like humans, very often have sleep problems after experiencing emotional difficulties. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society ...
(Phys.org) —Researchers at The University of Queensland have discovered that, like humans, flies sleep in stages of different intensities.
Plants & Animals
Apr 19, 2013
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Researchers report December 22 in the journal Current Biology that the more time reindeer spend ruminating, the less time they spend in non-rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. EEG recordings revealed that reindeer's brainwaves ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 22, 2023
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Reptiles have a brain area previously suspected to play a role in mammalian higher cognitive processes, and establish its role in controlling brain dynamics in sleep.
Plants & Animals
Feb 13, 2020
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Researchers from the Sleep Team at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center (CNRS/INSERM/Claude Bernard Lyon 1 University/Université Jean Monnet), together with a colleague from the MECADEV research laboratory (CNRS/Muséum ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 11, 2018
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75
It's a question that keeps some scientists awake at night: Do spiders sleep?
Plants & Animals
Aug 8, 2022
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Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is a normal stage of sleep characterized by rapid movements of the eyes. REM sleep is classified into two categories: tonic and phasic. It was identified and defined by Kleitman and Aserinsky in the early 1950s.
Criteria for REM sleep includes not only rapid eye movements, but also low muscle tone and a rapid, low voltage EEG -- these features are easily discernible in a polysomnogram, the sleep study typically done for patients with suspected sleep disorders.
REM sleep in adult humans typically occupies 20-25% of total sleep, about 90-120 minutes of a night's sleep. During a normal night of sleep, humans usually experience about 4 or 5 periods of REM sleep; they are quite short at the beginning of the night and longer toward the end. Many animals and some people tend to wake, or experience a period of very light sleep, for a short time immediately after a bout of REM. The relative amount of REM sleep varies considerably with age. A newborn baby spends more than 80% of total sleep time in REM. During REM, the activity of the brain's neurons is quite similar to that during waking hours; for this reason, the sleep stage may be called paradoxical sleep. This means that there are no dominating brain waves during REM sleep.
REM sleep is physiologically different from the other phases of sleep, which are collectively referred to as non-REM sleep (NREM). Vividly recalled dreams mostly occur during REM sleep.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA