. . . just links from HayYoo.com and DanKostecki.com
According to Popular Science –
The annual switch to daylight saving time (DST) is the hour that launched a thousand angry articles. And honestly, this is one of the few events that actually warrants them. DST, in addition to not actually being invented by America’s favorite founding father Benjamin Franklin, is mostly a terrible idea.
The basic use of the Glow is pretty straightforward. You turn it on by flipping it over, and it fills your room with warm LED light. The light then dims to darkness over a 45-minute period — as Chief Product Officer Jeff Chapin put it, it’s “mimicking the setting of the sun and it helps you get sleepier as it dims into lower and lower amplitudes.”
First of all, dolphins don’t sleep in one long chunk like humans or other mammals. Instead, they take 15 to 20 minute naps throughout the day and night. But the biggest factor in dolphin sleep is their brain doesn’t rest all at once like humans’ do. “Scientists have discovered that instead of ‘falling asleep’ and entering an unconscious state like humans, a dolphin rests one hemisphere of its brain at a time,” Belden explains. “So while one hemisphere is resting, the other is still active so that the dolphin can be sure to open its blowhole above the water.” Whichever brain hemisphere is active, the opposite eye will remain open. This is good for both swimming to the surface to breathe and for keeping a look out for predators. As Belden puts it, “Dolphins literally sleep with one eye open.” It’s impossible to know what sleeping with just half your brain at a time would feel like, and dolphins can’t exactly explain it to us. But Belden says that scientists speculate it might be sort of like daydreaming or meditating.
Seems quite reasonable. I know several people who can spend the entire day in such a state.
The Winnipeg FreePress reported –
People with higher IQ’s are more apt to be nocturnal night-owls. Those with lower IQ’s tend to restrict their activities primarily to daytime. People who prefer to go to bed early, and who are early-risers, demonstrate “morningness,” whereas those whose sleep patterns are shifted later demonstrate “eveningness.” Researchers say eveningness tends to be a characteristic of those with higher IQ’s. According to Kanazawa, ancestral humans were typically diurnal, and that a shift towards more nocturnal activities is an “evolutionarily novel preference” of the type normally found in more intelligent individuals, demonstrating “a higher level of cognitive complexity” in the practitioners.
This report from PsychologyToday makes complete sense to me.
Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late. A previous study found that evening people are smarter than morning people. In a new paper, Kanazawa replicates the finding and provides a theoretical grounding. Because the nocturnal lifestyle allowed by electricity didn’t exist 10,000 years ago, we must now rely on general intelligence to override our early-to-bed instincts.
I’ve always thought that there was something wrong with early birds. ScienceNow reports that genetics may explain those poor unfortunates.
Don’t hate those people who are perky and efficient after only a few hours of sleep. They can’t help it. New research suggests that a genetic mutation may explain why some people sleep less.
As a late riser, I’ve always suspected this to be true. Now, there is a study that agrees.
Smug early birds take note: Night owls actually have more mental stamina than those who awaken at the crack of dawn, according to new research. “It’s the late risers who have the advantage, and can outperform the early birds,” said Philippe Peigneux, a professor of clinical neuropsychology at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium, who along with co-author Christina Schmidt published the counterintuitive findings in the latest issue of the journal Science.
According to Mental_floss –
DUMMR.com 