Reindeer sleep and eat simultaneously

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/reindeer-sleep-and-eat-simultaneously-saving-precious-time-in-the-short-arctic-summer-180983495/

by gmays • 3 years ago

153 61 3 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

roldie• 3 years ago

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

HumblyTossed• 3 years ago

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

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

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

Solvency• 3 years ago

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.

Eji1700• 3 years ago

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.

chch• 3 years ago

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/

lm28469• 3 years ago

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

ModernMech3• 3 years ago

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

qumpis2• 3 years ago

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

scrozart• 3 years ago

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

blowski• 3 years ago

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

ycombinete• 3 years ago

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.

IlliOnato• 3 years ago

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! :-)

verytrivial2• 3 years ago

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.

ssgodderidge• 3 years ago

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?

araes• 3 years ago

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.

monetus• 3 years ago

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.

tiahura• 3 years ago

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

lacrimacida• 3 years ago

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

thegabriele• 3 years ago

64 slices of american cheese?

xrd• 3 years ago

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

GypsyKing716• 3 years ago

So they are zombies.

rayrrr• 3 years ago

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

danans• 3 years ago

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

pugworthy• 3 years ago

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.

HL33tibCe7• 3 years ago

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

graemep• 3 years ago

With JS off everything looks normal and stays normal.

wombat-man• 3 years ago

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.

tqkxzugoaupvwqr• 3 years ago

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

leosanchez• 3 years ago

None of that happens with Firefox and ublock on Android

RangerScience• 3 years ago

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

johnny_canuck• 3 years ago

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

xuhu• 3 years ago

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

aendruk• 3 years ago

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.

harywilke• 3 years ago

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".

fouc• 3 years ago

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

perihelions• 3 years ago

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!

dylan6043• 3 years ago

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

ThePowerOfFuet• 3 years ago

* 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.

dylan6043• 3 years ago

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.

massifist• 3 years ago

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).

dylan6043• 3 years ago

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

alekseiprokopev• 3 years ago

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

verytrivial2• 3 years ago

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.

tomcam• 3 years ago

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.

fargle• 3 years ago

pretty sure i do too

Reindeer sleep and eat simultaneously

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