Samson, associate professor of anthropology, University of Toronto, and author of Our Tribal Future (2023), explains that sleep alternates between stages of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM). NREM repairs tissues while the body itself (heart rate, breathing, brain activity, muscle tone) slows down. During REM sleep, dreams occur while the body consolidates memory and learning, but muscles are temporarily paralyzed, perhaps to prevent the animal from acting out the dream. Many modern humans sleep alone, but sleep has been a communal affair throughout history, he astutely observes. \u201cIn the nineteenth century, bed-sharing began to fall out of fashion,\u201d Samson writes. \u201cSocial commentaries argued that sharing a bed polluted the air and undermined social respect, making it not only unhygienic but also immoral.\u201d Doctors warn against sleeping with an infant, but all traditional cultures do it. The author draws on fieldwork in Tanzania, where he learns from the Hazda, \u201cone of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes on earth.\u201d Could an answer lie, Samson writes, in \u201ca deep, restorative \u2018paleo-sleep\u2019\u2014similar to the health benefits touted by the paleo-diet?\u201d After all, inadequate sleep is wildly unhealthy, leading to disorders from diabetes to obesity, Alzheimer\u2019s, heart disease, cancer, and infertility. It turns out that Homo sapiens became the shortest-sleeping primate to walk the earth. Humans sleep an average of six hours and 47 minutes; all primates stay awake less, with the owl monkey getting a \u201cwhopping seventeen hours\u201d of shut-eye. As evolution reduced our sleep time, REM sleep actually gained a little; we\u2019re sleeping less and dreaming more. Is this a mark of the creativity that led to civilization? <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Samson, associate professor of anthropology, University of Toronto, and author of Our Tribal Future (2023), explains that sleep alternates between stages of rapid eye movement (REM) and non-REM (NREM). NREM repairs tissues while the body itself (heart rate, breathing, brain activity, muscle tone) slows down. During REM sleep, dreams occur while the body consolidates memory […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6384,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6383"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}