"The ability of some animals to put half their brain to sleep at a time, called unihemispheric slow wave sleep in researcher parlance, was first described in bottlenose dolphins in the 1970s. In this phenomenon, one half of the brain shows the large, slow brainwave patterns indicative of sleep while the other half shows the small, fast waves that occur when the brain is awake on something called an electroencephalogram, which measures electrical activity in the brain."
"While sleep for humans may seem straightforward - lie down, close eyes, count sheep - how it works is quite mysterious, even to the experts who study it. Why do we need to sleep at all? And what evolutionary advantage could our eight hours of unprotected snoozing give us? Looking to the wider animal kingdom only complicates matters. Most animals sleep - and in all sorts of strange ways that, on the surface, are quite baffling."
Humans commonly enter a full-brain sleep state by lying down for extended periods, but many other species display diverse sleep adaptations that reduce vulnerability. Unihemispheric slow wave sleep lets one brain hemisphere produce slow sleep waves while the other maintains wake-like activity, measurable with an electroencephalogram. Marine mammals and some seabirds can therefore rest while swimming, monitoring for predators, or even flying. These varied strategies reveal that sleep functions and evolutionary pressures differ across species and prompt questions about why consolidated, unprotected sleep evolved in some animals but not others.
Read at Inverse
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