> People already live in different altitudes, ie with vastly different amounts of rock between themselves and the bits of the earth that produce her magnetic field. It's not really the same thing. Construction and especially the high content of charged metal (whether it's power conduits or plain old frame) may make a considerable difference.
You forgot to mention whether they slept near shakra-aligning crystals or not. That may make a considerable difference. And I may be a 10,000 year-old alien.
>I may be a 10,000 year-old alien.
That would be so disappointing, I've been picturing you as Mickey's assistant in Fantasia :)
And every time I hear about an optimum, I think of the Bathtub Curve. As I imagine the curve, I use a real bathtub. Where is the water deepest? At the drain, which is typically just under the faucet. Where is the optimal place to sit? Well, pretty much anywhere except there, because "deepest" (an optimum) isn't enough to accurately gauge "best place". But even if you can swing the faucet out of the way... where is th…
18C is more like the maximum OK temperature. But then I also gotta sleep without PJs when its that hot. Still a blanket for comfort. Best sleep from my experience? It's usually about 5C at the thermostat, which is farthest from the window, by the time I wake up. And that's likely because it's in the basement, which is a typical NA basement, so you have the uninsulated and below the frost line basement wall there. The…
>18C is more like the maximum OK temperature.
For you, and that's kind of my point. For me, my preferred temperature would be about 28C with no blanket or a light sheet. Something like 18C can be tolerable with blankets for me, but it's certainly not "maximum comfort", even with blankets. There is too much variation and too many things that wouldn't be controlled for, like number/thickness of coverings, and other such things. Having some "best" universal temperature is just not something generalizable like this.
My boy when very young (just months) went thru a phase where in the middle of the night he would suddenly sit bolt upright, swivel his head to scan the room, and then conk out again. This was not caused by noises. I found this reassuring and slightly amazing, that he is wired to do his part as a nighttime lookout.
Assuming you are not jesting, I am not certain I would qualify that behavior as any indication of being wired for some sort of nighttime patrol duty based on those details alone.
Not jesting! And, point taken. But it made me wonder. It was intentional (within the limits of intentionality for an infant) and repeated.
I asked if there's abundant evidence for monophasic sleep in historical writings. Or do we just assume it was monophasic, because there's not much written about sleep either way?
You were asking for historical backing. Sleep is definitely abundantly mentioned in historical writing, while segmented sleep is not. I take the absence of the latter as historical backing.
A single block of sleep is a relatively new behaviour, I suspect partially driven by the availability of cheap sources of light and heat. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
This is a contentious theory with little actual historical backing. Most likely people have been sleeping in one block since forever.
Pages 341 to 414 of size 8 font denoting the manuscripts that he sourced from would disagree with you.
You were asking for historical backing. Sleep is definitely abundantly mentioned in historical writing, while segmented sleep is not. I take the absence of the latter as historical backing.
no offense, but it just sounds like you don't understand local maxima in high dimensional spaces. a suboptimal trait evolving that still provided an overall population benefit (via survival or reproduction) with further improvement close to impossible without a multitude of large changes is literally just a local maximum in that high dimensional space that maps traits to whatever success metric you're measuring. the…
Perhaps not no, please enlighten me, where is my lack of insight? Edit, thanx for the addition. Perhaps my issues with looking at it as "local maxima in high dimensional spaces" (even though we think of minima usually, as in a marble will find the minimum in a landscape with gravity pointing down, sorry I'm a biologist) is that with every mutation and every change in environment the landscape changes (so basically wi…
... In fact, because te landscape is so dynamic and can sometimes change within 1 to a few generations, having a brain as the primary store for behavior/customs/models/information is super advantageous compared to using DNA, as the brain is a flexible neural network and can adapt much, much quicker. No doubt this is why we are successful (ie, a dung beetle will die trying to push a stuck piece of dung, because the behavior is hard-coded and it cannot model the world and model solutions to encountered problems, and it therefore cannot pas solutions on to future generations, as we can. Perhaps a dung beetle will someday mutate to alter it's behavior when stuck, but you can see how suboptimal the whole process.)
>“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.
>while us in the west have to sleep at a specific time to fit our schedules.
This does seem to work great at group level. Considering we're in a competitive setup and all that.
I also recognize I personally benefit from others having this schedule. It would quickly go sideways if the firefighter felt like he wanted to sleep a bit more, or the police officer didn't really feel like it whenever is an emergency.
I think you're correct, but only if you add "for a given environment". It's good to develop the ability to store super efficiently fat when you're a Pacific Islander and food is scarce, but this advantageous trait becomes a liability with modern and plentiful (junk) food . see thrify gene hypothesis; I know it's not a good explanatory theory but it's a good illustration of my point
Sure, the form of the function being maximized will usually depend on the environment.
That was kind of my initial point... there are far too many permutations that alter what you want to maximise to consider this as a good option right now. Environment, gene-environment interactions, epigenetics, polygenecity, pleiotropy, etc, etc.