Dolphins Can Sleep One-half of Their Brain At a Time Say Researchers 139
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the evolution in multi-core computing is something nature has already figured out. Dolphins will sleep one core while the other remains vigilant, running background tasks necessary for survival. From the article: 'The scientists wrote: "From an anthropomorphic viewpoint, the ability of the dolphin to continuously monitor its environment for days without interruption seems extreme. However, the biological, sensory and cognitive ecology of these animals is relatively unique and demanding. If dolphins sleep like terrestrial animals, they might drown. If dolphins fail to maintain vigilance, they become susceptible to predation. As a result, the apparent 'extreme' capabilities these animals possess are likely to be quite normal, unspectacular, and necessary for survival from the dolphin's perspective."'"
why is this new? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is known long ago... this is also an adaptation because dolphins breathing is not a reflex, so half the brain has to be always awake to remember breathing.
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I'm pretty sure there's a joke in there somewhere.
Re:why is this new? (Score:5, Funny)
Joke in there somewhere. (Score:4, Funny)
Only a half brain operating? I know people who...
...drive like that.
...talk like that.
...code like that.
...make decisions at Microsoft like that.
...decide to buy Apple products like that.
and so on...
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That would not be fair seeing as Rush only has half a brain.
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Not news... (Score:3)
This is known long ago... this is also an adaptation because dolphins breathing is not a reflex, so half the brain has to be always awake to remember breathing.
In fact, here's [nationalgeographic.com] a 2009 article in National Geographic on the exact same topic from 2009. It was not the first, either.
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Wrong headline (Score:5, Informative)
The news is that they can stay awake for 15 days at a time. Scientists have known for 30 years that dolphins can sleep with one hemisphere.
Re:Wrong headline (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wrong headline (Score:5, Funny)
Hell, that's better than your average software developer!
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... tested a dolphin named Say ...
Steven Wright: I named my dog "Stay". He gets confused whenever I call him: "Come here, Stay."
So. Don't name your pets after verbs - or children: "Stand up, Neal..." (Am I a Noun or a Verb?)
Re:Wrong headline (Score:4, Informative)
BFD. Hell, Rick James used to do that twice a month.
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That's nothing (Score:4, Funny)
Republicans have been doing that for years.
*rimshot*
Re:That's nothing (Score:4, Funny)
Republicans, hell. I'm a hippie, and most of my brain is asleep most of the... What were we talking about?
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Marquis de Sade was political, non?
Republicans have brains? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Finally! (Score:1)
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A GM trait I'd be interested in acquiring.
For a moment there I thought you were talking about General Motors, and I was intrigued by the prospect that after decades of being half asleep at the wheel they might have produced something people are interested in acquiring. False alarm.
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Already known? (Score:3)
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Yeah. My first thought was "doesn't everyone know this already?"
Here's a site with data sources in 1990 that explain this:
http://www.dolphinear.com/data/dolphins.htm [dolphinear.com]
"news"
Yeah.
Evolution (Score:2, Interesting)
The real question is: Why is sleep needed in mammals in the first place? We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning. It's been investigated my the military for quite some time now.
Evolution says the reason for sleep is that it improves a creature's ability to adapt... but what does sleep adapt us for? Why the downtime? Even here wit
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't explain why Dolphins didn't just turn sleep off, since they are warm and active throughout all time. Was it just so fundamental to the brain architecture that the segmenting was needed, or is sleep providing something else that dolphins still need?
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That doesn't explain why Dolphins didn't just turn sleep off, since they are warm and active throughout all time. Was it just so fundamental to the brain architecture that the segmenting was needed, or is sleep providing something else that dolphins still need?
Bingo. The one question that everybody missed, because they were too busy making jokes or talking about Dolphins to realize that this evolutionary development can shed a lot of light on our own. Don't mod this up, no siree, we like our science dumbed down and sprinkled in apple sauce here! deeeerp. :(
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Informative)
We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning.
Link please, otherwise I'm calling bogus. The official world record for going without sleep is 18 days.
Look up 'Fatal Familial Insomnia' in which death follows (as best as anyone can tell) from lack of sleep.
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And that 18 days was in a rocking chair competition, not exactly a cognitively demanding task, and one with lots of opportunities for microsleeps.
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Those drugs can keep you alert for extended periods, but then you need an inordinate amount of recovery time for the missed sleep and performance never seems as good as normal. The increased uptime, as it were, isn't free. Yes, I've studied some brain chemistry with regards to drugs such as modafinil.
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
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Related to that, while we sleep we apparently learn by essentially reliving those memories thousands of times. One of the best things you can do after learning something new is take a good nap.
People tend to think of sleep as a point that the brain is "turned off" but that's not accurate at all. It is an alternate method of functioning, and vital to how we operate. I saw this as someone who has a lot of trouble sleeping and I know first hand what a long term lack of sleep can do to a person. I sleep so ligh
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So dreaming is those night-time batch jobs that reorganise your database indexes, defrag your files, clear out soft deletes and all that shit?
I always felt a bit like a mainframe.
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We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning.
What drugs are those, exactly?
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You omitted to enquire as to where one might procure them.
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Evolution says the reason for sleep is that it improves a creature's ability to adapt... but what does sleep adapt us for?
Most creatures don't live long enough to have a need to adapt as an individual, but they adapt as a species over generations.
Humans probably have the greatest need to adapt as individuals. Every day:
You have to be able to adapt because society ensures that someone is constantly moving your cheese [wikipedia.org], and in return for this, you as an individual get to live longer than wild animals do.
One theory [wikipedia.org] about why we need to sleep is that we need to filter out all the crap from the stuff we need to save. During REM sleep the neurons are subjected to spontaneous, chaotic activity, strengthening memories whose neuronal substrate is already sufficiently established, and disintegrating those that are weaker. Ever built a sandcastle by the water line at the beach? The walls that are not tightly packed get washed away when the water hits them, but the ones that are tightly packed survive and seem to actually be strengthened by the encounter. In a way, that's what REM sleep may do for our memories. Without that, it's all just an unstable jumble, and you can't adapt to all the crap in your life without the clarity to know what day it is or where the heck you're supposed to be.
Re:Evolution (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know what gay marriage, the FDA, mail-order girlfriends, and violations of space-time causality, and sandcastles by the beach have to do with the importance of sleep... but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that having read your post, you are a case study in what happens when someone doesn't get any. Please man, go to bed. The internet, such as it is, will not want for a missed opportunity for you to post to slashdot.
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Yeah those drugs work great until suddenly everyone around you is a cop, and you can't get the ants out from under your skin.
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We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning. It's been investigated my the military for quite some time now.
Moving on, in completely unrelated news, there's also been a huge spike in mental health problems in currently deployed US soldiers. Officials say this is perfectly normal and nothing to be concerned about. Now for a word from our sponsor. Sleep-No-Mor(Tm), one capsule a day and those eight wasted night hours are yours again!
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I've asked myself the same question, and one night the answer came to me in a dream.
Too bad I forgot the dream so now I still don't know.
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In terms of evolution I could see the initial advantage of sleep, is a period of time of reduced activity to allow us to conserve energy better. You stay awake every day you will need an additional food and water to keep going, in scarce areas animals who slept got an advantage of needing less food, compensating for the extra energy it takes to keep them warm blooded.
The next advantage is the fact to sleep we often need to be in a safe area. So we build or find safe areas to keep predators at bay. So the a
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The real question is: Why is sleep needed in mammals in the first place?
I've always wondered that myself, and not just in mammals. Sleep seems to be counter-evolutionary; when you're asleep, you're helpless.
We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning.
That is incorrect, as I saw firsthand in 1974 when I was stationed in Thailand in the
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On a scale of 1 (store clerk) via 7 (engine mechanic) to 10 (jet pilot) I presume you were somewhere near zero (dishwasher), or you wouldn't be here.
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I was a driver, flightline in Dover and Utapao, motor pool in Beale.
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Sleep has no effect on "ability to adapt" at all.
It just might. I find that I need more sleep when I enter a new situation or environment (for example, starting work at a new location or school, moving to a new place to live).
Douglas Adams was right! (Score:2)
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We are indeed inferior to dolphins, brain-wise. Makes you wonder what the mice can pull off!
Depends on whether you're talking about Pinky or The Brain.
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They already created the Earth, what else do you want?
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minor_characters_from_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Frankie_and_Benjy_Mouse)
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And so was Iain M. Banks, who had a minor character in Consider Phlebas who'd got gene-modified to do this (he had both halves of his brain awake for 8 hours, then left half for 8 hours, then right half for 8 hours). Wonder if he'd heard about this dolphin thing at the time (others say this isn't really news...)
we've known this for decades... (Score:2)
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brain vs. body (Score:2)
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Does that mean that a body doesn't need sleep - only the brain? Or have their bodies adapted in some special way that ours hasn't?
I'm 49 and I have stayed up for 36 hours straight, at work (system programmer/admin), several times this year alone. Even after 10 hours of sleep I feel like crap the next day with headache and lethargy, like I'm dehydrated or *really* hung over (though I'm neither). My body has otherwise felt fine.
I thought I read/heard/saw (like on Discovery Channel) that the brain uses chemistry during waking periods that can only be replenished during sleep periods. If so, this would explain a lot, especially peopl
Developers developers developers developers (Score:1)
This is also how Steve Ballmer gives keynotes
A Must-listen: RadioLab, "One Eye Open" (Score:1)
http://www.radiolab.org/2007/may/24/one-eye-open/ [radiolab.org]
porpoises mentioned 7:30 but it's all fascinating
Big deal. (Score:2)
Big deal.
I perfectly of that.
am capable doing too .
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Do The Dolphins Know They're Half Asleep? (Score:2)
Perhaps we could have the dolphins vote on our behalf next month. And if they elect a dolphin, it might not be such a bad thing, so long as their choice is 35 or older and born within U.S. territorial waters. We won't care what color dolphin they choose. Think of all the money we'd save collectively by not donating to campaigns that are just going to scream garb
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I have to tell my wife about this. (Score:4, Funny)
So do birds. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is old "news". (Can we call it "olds"?)
Supposedly when you see a row of birds standing on a cable, all the ones in the middle are asleep, and the two on the end have half a brain awake so that their outside eye is paying attention.
More recent result is that even in humans, 'asleep' isn't a boolean proposition. Different parts of your brain may go to sleep at different times. Sometimes leads to "normal" sleepwalking, sometimes to horrid behavior because the impluse-suppression part is asleep and most of the rest isn't. See the overview article in a recent issue of Scientific American. (Current or previous issue, IIRC.)
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Re:So do birds. (Score:4, Insightful)
And anyone who thinks that the brain is inherently capable of only doing one thing has never driven long-distance.
Has *anybody* never had that experience where you are driving along thinking and then suddenly realise you've just navigated the past 20 miles, through traffic, round corners, through junctions, with gear-changes, etc. without remembering doing so?
Your brain is more than capable of doing those tasks - and alerting you to problems just as quickly as when you're concentrating on the task - in the background without you knowing. (What scares me most about them is not the fact that it happens, but that I assume I stopped at red lights, followed traffic signs, didn't ram someone off the road, etc. and have to quickly recall events that I seem to have taken no conscious part in!)
I've also had the (strange) privilege of knowing someone with multiple-personality-syndrome. This is extremely similar - one personality is at the fore but the others are there, in the background, observing events and doing things, just out of mind at that moment. In fact, in MPS, it's just a more pronounced version triggered by certain psychological problems (lots of abuse cases, lots of a very particular type of psychiatric therapy that seems to "trigger" MPS in vulnerable individuals - and is STILL practised in the one part of America where most MPS cases come from!).
Your brain is not a single thing. It's a collection of billions of things, each with their own job. They group and work together but they also can separate off (otherwise you would have to "think" about how to move your arm rather than just passing it off to a group of brain cells that do that all day long) and even divide your consciousness in two in perfectly ordinary people with no mental health issues.
And, like others have said, have you never had that thing late at night where you wake up because of an odd (and quiet) sound despite the fact that every other night you slept like a baby. How do you think that works? The brain is always awake, in some fashion, it's just a matter of whether it decides something is a threat or not (otherwise every predator would just wait until your were asleep because you'd be an easy target), and then "presses the emergency button" to get the rest operational very quickly.
The dolphin thing is well-known. And any idiot with a cat knows that it doesn't really "sleep" for 18 hours a day, it's always aware and very, very rarely in an actual complete sleep (for the first time in 12 years, I manage to "scare" my cat the other day because it was completely, 100% asleep and didn't hear me come in, didn't feel me approach, until I stroked its fur - I actually thought it was dead, it was so deep in sleep).
And every driver will tell you that they have driven on a kind of "automatic pilot" including some of the most complex observation, judgement, quick-reaction and motor skills that the average person will perform in a day, while they were thinking about what to have for dinner.
Humans are animals. Animals have brains. Brains are a collection of groups of cells that, by their very nature, are inherently malleable, ever-changing and independent. It's no shock that dolphins can do this. What's more interesting is that humans seem to have lost the ability/need to do this so much.
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Every time I drive home from the bar I wake up the next morning with this feeling.
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Has *anybody* never had that experience where you are driving along thinking and then suddenly realise you've just navigated the past 20 miles, through traffic, round corners, through junctions, with gear-changes, etc. without remembering doing so?
I have even felt this happen when I commute to work. I have crossed two streets, taken the train, walked into work, while the last I can really remember is leaving home (or something I did before leaving home). I have had this happen often enough that I joke that I can commute blindfolded to work.
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That's nothing... (Score:1)
That's nothing... There are plenty of people on the NY Thruway who can do this and drive at the same time!
You Know Where This is Going Right (Score:2)
Dolphins are jerks! (Score:2)
And this explains how they have so much time to be jerks; although I could be thinking of porpoises.
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could not agree with you more. as much as i respect their intelligence [discovery.com] and creativity [world-science.net] and all that ...
but they are still the worst [aardvarknyc.com] monsters [slate.com] on the planet ... ok, well besides us.
and just because i can't find an article about dolphins raping humans does not mean that it doesn't happen. you have been warned
Attention editors (Score:2)
Meetings.. (Score:2)
Dolphins Can Sleep One-half of Their Brain At a Time Say Researchers
Why would an intelligent species like dolphins have invented meetings?
obligatory Onion reference (Score:1)
Snooze News (Score:2)
This is old news. It was discovered long ago. Not only that but they found this about ducks before that. Even some humans do this, more among males perhaps due to greater division of functions due to later maturation and greater corpus callosum separation.
News that matters? Maybe.
News that is timely? Not so.
Hey, guess what? (Score:2)
Giraffes have long necks, and diney-sowers is all dead!
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Whats really amazing is that, despite the claims that the right is the party of hate, it always seems to be the left calling us names.
Stay classy slashdot.
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It's a fact that dolphins are Republicans?
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Ive seen some nasty things coming from both sides on other sites comments sections , but the majority that I have seen on slashdot has been from the left.