Today we looked at the first evolutionary theory of sleep - that of energy conservation. This says that sleep is for energy conservation, but there are various problems with the theory and we spent a long time discussing these. It's probably the case that sleep evolved for a variety of reasons, that differ across species, and no-one theory will satisfactorily answer the question of why we sleep.
The key studies supporting this study (Zeppelin & Rechtschaffen, and Allison & Cicchetti) are correlational only - so very difficult to prove cause and effect.
The powerpoint on evolutionary theories of sleep is here - we haven't finished it all yet - there is more to come!
No comments:
Post a Comment