Where Human Sleep Went Wrong

I think people in HN (and in general) have to remember the central axes of evolution before digesting this kind of article. I've already seen comments like it's "odd that no species has ended up evolving a continuous maintenance system" and "sleep has a higher opportunity cost in humans" in this comments section.

This is a common, but poor framing of evolution. Remember: the only real rule with evolution is "did this evolutionary change mean they survived / reproduced more"? Evolution is not a local or global maxima solving function. I find this kind of attempt at interpreting selection common with engineers, programmers, etc.

> Most importantly, when we measured their circadian function directly, small-scale communities had much higher amplitude circadian rhythms than global north populations, which I think is why they report being happy with their sleep even though it’s more fragmented.

This could explain why I feel more rested when I wake up if I take glycine before going to bed, even though I don't sleep more.

>“No way. They’re partying all night.” But they can, because there’s no top-down pressure to go into the office at 8 a.m. They’re free to catch supplemental sleep as needed throughout the 24-hour period.

This feels like the key point to me. These societies follow their body and go to sleep when they are tried, while us in the west have to sleep at a specific time to fit our schedules.

>18 degrees Celsius is considered optimal for sleep depth

I'm instantly skeptical of anyone making universal statements like this, because they're certainly not true for everyone, and having looked into these and similar (f/x "ideal room/office temperature"), are based on many entangled assumptions. Most of the time I expect it's just people making after-the-fact justification for doing (or imposing) what they most prefer.

>the Hadza uniformly reported high satisfaction with their sleep.

And why wouldn't they? This is (presumably) the only kind of sleep they know.

This interview feels weird to me, maybe because there's lots of places where I'm thinking there's an obvious idea that isn't raised.

Like, it seems obvious to me that sleep has a higher opportunity cost in humans than most other animals. So naturally there's more evolutionary pressure in humans to sleep more efficiently.

Is this actually true? Dunno! But it was really weird that it doesn't get brought up.

> Some emerging research suggests Earth’s magnetism matters, as well. Being barefoot on the ground versus 30 stories high in a downtown skyscraper puts you in a completely different magnetic environment.

Really? My instinctive reaction to this statement is that it's quackery. Would be very interested to see headlines appear about this if it's true.

More fragmented sleep, with people talking in the night, etc. I guess that's different from the low, unnatural, rumbles of cars and aeroplanes the majority of people have to put up with.

A nap is the same as sleep, but we don't do this. Any correlation to our southern american friends and their siestas?

The article title is "Where human sleep went wrong" but then the entire article is about how we sleep the best we ever have, we have the most high quality sleep, and all the fearmongering about sleep is basically wrong.

> Sleep is critical to human functioning, and yet, we sleep fewer total hours than any other ape, and are still arguably the most evolutionarily successful of the primates

> humans are weird outliers—we’re the shortest sleeping primates, yet we pack in the most REM sleep relative to this short duration

Isn't that sort of the point? Sleep is a detrimental necessity and the more efficient an organism is in needing less of it, the more effective it can be because it simply has more time to get ahead of the others?

It's still very odd that no species has ended up evolving a continuous maintenance system that can run while conscious, the benefits when hunting other animals that need sleep would be enormous, so there has to be significant evolutionary push for it. I suppose the single hemisphere sleep some marine mammals do is part of the way there, but it is at most a lazy workaround. Practically all other organs have evolved to run 24/7 for up to a century without a single break, what makes brains so universally different?

> untangle what he calls the sleep paradox: Sleep is critical to human functioning, and yet, we sleep fewer total hours than any other ape

Instead of going to Tanzania you could’ve asked a sleep scientist. Sleep length has no known correlation to brain size and is known for drastic within family variation. What’s more sleep has a high within species variation too, some sleepers can survive 4 hours, others need 8. Collectively we used to sleep 9 hours in the 20th century, but it appears shorter sleep is fine too. TLDR: no one has any idea why sleep length varies and he won’t find his answers in antrophological studies in Tanzania, though luck, buddy