Unraveling the evolutionary determinants of sleep

By W. Joiner. 2016

176 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Despite decades of intense study, the functions of sleep are still shrouded in mystery. The difficulty in understanding these functions can be at least partly attributed to the varied manifestations of sleep in different animals. Daily sleep duration can range from 4–20 hrs among mammals, and sleep can manifest throughout the brain, or it can alternate over time between cerebral hemispheres, depending on the species. Ecological factors are likely to have shaped these and other sleep behaviors during evolution by altering the properties of conserved arousal circuits in the brain. Nonetheless, core functions of sleep are likely to have arisen early and to have persisted to the present day in diverse organisms. This review will discuss the evolutionary forces that may be responsible for phylogenetic differences in sleep and the potential core functions that sleep fulfills.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Deep Generative Dual Memory Network for Continual Learning (2017, background): “9 Under review as a conference paper at ICLR 2018 (a) (b) Figure 8: (a) Training time for DGDMN and DGR on TDigits, (b) Accuracy curves for DGDMNalternative without STM on Digits. and never been lost Joiner (2016). In fact, most organisms with even a slightly developed nervous system (centralized or”
The jellyfish Cassiopea exhibits a sleep-like state (2017, unknown): “To our knowledge, our finding is the first example of a sleep-like state in an organism with a diffuse nerve net [7,8], suggesting that this behavioral state arose prior to the evolution of a centralized nervous system.”