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Let Teenagers Sleep In

nytimes.com

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Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#311

Post by DenisM »

Zak wrote: post #310
DenisM wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they functioned just fine on lark schedule.

I'm sure that's true for certain values of "just fine". Would you notice, however, if to the extent such things could be quantified, on average, students were falling 10% short of their potential? 20%? Would you notice a 10% increase in mild to moderate mental health issues within the student population? We're not talking about differences so dramatic an untrained observer would notice a problem. Your observations ar…

Fair enough. I was thinking more about modern-day adult owls with their "look at me, I can't function without coffee, ha-ha" jokes. 10-20% degradation wouldn't be visible that way, especially given that people came in with huge academic variance already and there is no baseline to work with.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#312

Post by FabHK »

pfranz wrote: post #252
curun1r wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to believe like you do. What I believed to be my natural schedule--what I naturally gravitated to--was the nite-owl 1am to between 9-10am or so sleep schedule. In school, I always felt sleep deprived when I had to wake up around 6. But I recently spent the better part of five months going to bed at 9:30pm and waking up at 4:30am. Despite getting less sleep overall, I've never felt as well rested or alert throu…

I heard one theory that in general older people wake up earlier and younger people stay up later as a way that a group of people could watch the village 24/7. I can confidently say that multiple years of waking up early as a high school student did nothing to make me a morning person. 10-15 years later I find it more difficult to sleep in to 12-1pm when given the opportunity. As a kid, I seem to remember my grandmoth…

> [so] that a group of people could watch the village 24/7

Matthew Walker alludes to this in his book on sleep; however, in his description it's not so much older vs younger people, it's just genetic differences that make some people sleep earlier and some later, with a fairly stable 60/40 or so distribution. Thus, the "dangerous" period (where everyone sleeps) gets reduced from 8 hours to, say, 3 hours.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#313

Post by FabHK »

pdpi wrote: post #203
dpatrick86 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6:30AM is just some other city's 11:30AM... the difference in between is just light exposure, food consumption, and activity (the three big zeitgebers). Unless you think you'd never resynchronize after moving across the world, it's pretty obvious that your wake and sleep time would have to be a lot more malleable than you suggest.

I think you’re missing the point. At least I do resync to new locations. Just not the way you think. I used to travel from London to the Bay Area for work with some regulatity. The first few days were amazing, because the combination of westwards jet lag plus night owl meant that I was getting to the office nice and early every day. As the jet lag went away, and I started to acclimate to the timezone, it usually took…

Flying west is great. The flights east are brutal.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#314

Post by FabHK »

waterhouse wrote: post #199
lnanek2 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There actually have been studies of primitive tribes and cultures where it was showed that they just didn't realize pregnancy happens from a single man's sperm, so children were considered the entire tribe's or to have multiple fathers (with actual language terms for the various fathers). There's also some cultures where men first slept with men while growing up before settling down with women due to thinking sperm w…

But evolution happens whether or not the creatures in question understand evolution or even heredity. (In fact, if they know nothing about it, that makes it easier for evolution to do its thing without interference.) The legendary "shape of the human penis designed to pull out the sperm of other men who have recently had sex with the same woman", if it worked, would do very well evolutionarily in the first kind of cu…

Exactly. If jealousy and mate-guarding behaviour evolved in some males, it might spread whether or not they understood what was going on or what the mechanisms are.

One could look at the animal kingdom to get more insight on this, though of course there is such huge variety there that it drives home the point that "it's complicated."

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#315

Post by FabHK »

randomdata wrote: post #157
wmeredith wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pure conjecture until the commenter posts some sources. Now I feel patronizing pointing it out, but you don’t have to stay up late to have sex. I think this is modern cultural norms being propped with pseudo science.

> but you don’t have to stay up late to have sex. That doesn't mean that having a 'late night' trait wasn't advantageous to mating. For example, when humans started pair bonding, infidelity may have been more common among those who could sneak out under the cover a darkness while their partner was asleep, spreading that trait further than those who remained monogamous. It is easy to think of many possible reasons why…

Also, when your jobs are a) finding berries and hunting mammoths and b) having sex, it is not implausible that doing a) during the day and b) during the night gives you more reproductive success than vice versa.

It is fun speculation, but still, OP's self-assured "this is so trivial" tone was not called for.

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#316

Post by Corrado »

FabHK wrote: post #313
pdpi wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re missing the point. At least I do resync to new locations. Just not the way you think. I used to travel from London to the Bay Area for work with some regulatity. The first few days were amazing, because the combination of westwards jet lag plus night owl meant that I was getting to the office nice and early every day. As the jet lag went away, and I started to acclimate to the timezone, it usually took…

Flying west is great. The flights east are brutal.

I'm an early riser and I always hated flying West. At 4:30am (local time) I was up and ready to go before anyone else in the office was even thinking about getting up. And since I didn't usually have keys or a way to get into the office my morning was wasted waiting on everyone else to arrive. Flying East is easy (for me). :)

Re: Let Teenagers Sleep In

#317

Post by FabHK »

Corrado wrote: post #316
FabHK wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flying west is great. The flights east are brutal.

I'm an early riser and I always hated flying West. At 4:30am (local time) I was up and ready to go before anyone else in the office was even thinking about getting up. And since I didn't usually have keys or a way to get into the office my morning was wasted waiting on everyone else to arrive. Flying East is easy (for me). :)

Fair enough! I'm a night owl, so flying west brings me closer to the "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" crowd...
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