To Uni-Hemisphere Sleep, Perchance to Dream

For thousands of years various cultures have done many different things to mark the passage from childhood to adulthood. Some are simple ceremonies and others cause many different parts of my body to tighten and my stomach to get queasy just having them described. I am very grateful the culture in Hutchinson, Kansas circa 1975, as I entered adolescence, did not require ritualistic scarification to be considered an adult; otherwise I would be a bearded, pot-bellied, gray-haired eighth grader still today.
As is often the case with the human race it seems to me this “now you are a man” stuff has been made more complicated than it needs to be. As a father of three and a former child myself I can easily point to the moment when children cross the line into maturity. It is when they start to sleep, voluntarily.
I fully realize toddlers cannot spell but they seem to think “nap” is a four letter word. The energy expended every day in this country by parents trying to cajole, beg, trick, force, and coax kids to just lie down and go to sleep far surpasses anything T. Boone Pickens ever dreamed of. If we could harness that domestic renewable resource the chant would go from “drill, baby, drill” to “naptime, baby, naptime”.
Recently I learned a bunch about sleep, a subject very dear to my heart. Every animal does it, but there are big differences in how. The reason for the various methods used by different animals in order to get sleep is simple, death. One scientist stated it is dangerous to sleep and if natural selection could have gotten rid of it it would have.
Think about it. You are a happy little mallard blithely napping on the shore of a happy little pond. When a happy (and hungry) little fox, who is very much awake, comes strolling by. Suddenly the happy duck is a happy meal without the toy.
Well, I learned mallards can sleep with one eye open. They actually rest one half of their brain at a time. Each eye is connected to the opposite hemisphere in the brain so the duck places itself in a group with other sleepy ducks. Some ducks watch one direction and different ducks watch the other way. This gives one half of the brain a right good snooze. Then they switch sides and the other half sleeps.
Another one of the many animals who does this “uni-hemisphere” sleeping is the dolphin. These animals live under water a good deal of the time. They also need to breathe air. They also need to sleep. Because of all of these factors a dolphin cannot go into complete sleep. They have to keep one half of their brain going at all times or they would drown.
Truthfully, I had never considered the fact that dolphins are conscious breathers. Unlike us they have to make a distinct decision to breathe. It requires thought. The obvious joke would be to say it is a good thing there aren’t any blonde dolphins, but luckily I would never make the obvious joke.
Smarter than me scientist guys explained that man can sleep with both eyes shut and truly go unconscious to the world around them because we do not have the predation risk most animals have. This started a long time ago when we would go into caves and hide from saber toothed tigers and continues today when we go into condos and hide from predacious sub-prime mortgage lenders.
This uni-hemisphere sleeping intrigues me. I love sleeping. I never get as much as I would like to get. Yet everything I do does not require my full attention. If I could sleep like a dolphin I would love to. There are meetings I have attended that I could easily grasp the content with one cranial hemisphere tied behind my back.
One last tidbit about sleep. It appears sleep is integral to learning. No, I am not suggesting kids sleep in class, even though I had a couple of social studies teachers who seemed to be trying to induce unconsciousness. As we sleep the brain gets “washed”. All the clutter from the day’s activities, important and trivial, is eroded. This leaves the ones which were most prominent still standing and the others all but unnoticeable.
Therefore the special maneuver you learned while playing Mortal Combat XXIX: The Revenge of the Torn Spleen for five hours remains fully remembered and the thirty minute discussion in school about Gandhi is washed away like crumbs off a plate. Wait a minute, that can’t be good.