Dolphins Overcoming Sleep Deprivation.
Dolphins have a way for overcoming sleep deprivation. Sam Ridgway from the US Navy Marine Mammal Program explains that dolphins can actually send half their brains to sleep, while the other half is still awake. They can stay vigilant for sounds for days on end.
Ridgway and his team are testing two dolphins over a five day period to see how well they function after days without a break. The colleagues trained the dolphins to respond to a 1.5 sec beep randomly against a background of a 0.5 sec beeps every 30 seconds. The sounds were low enough so the dolphins could barely notice as they swam, but they spring into action whenever they heard the sounds.
Allen Goldblatt and Done Carder made a visual stimulus to test the vigilance of the dolphins while they were still listening to the repetitive beeps. They trained one of the dolphins to recognise two shapes with her right eye before training her to recognise the shapes with her left eye. Since half of her brain was asleep, the dolphin would only see the shapes through the eye connected to the conscious half of the brain. When they started training her left eye she already recognised the shapes even though her left eye had not seen them previously.
At the end of the 120 hour experiment they were as sharp as they were at the beginning. The scientists couldn’t find any physical signs of sleep deprivation. After five days they were in much better shape than the scientists.
The author was Kathryn Knight.
May 3,2009 Science Daily
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2009/05/dolphins-sleep-with-half-their-brains.html
Did you find this article interesting? Why or why not?
Do you think you can overcome sleep deprivation?
Uncategorized | Comments (4)4 Responses to “Dolphins Overcoming Sleep Deprivation.”
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Wow, I find that dolphins are very intelligent and the fact that they can have half of their brains alseep is just amazing. Dolphins can actually, in theory, be smarter than humans. I don’t think that I would ever be able to overcome sleep deprivation. It seems like a hard task to overcome.
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Yes, I think that the fact that dolphins can send half or their brain to sleep is pretty cool. The fact that they can do that and still get adequate sleep is also interesting, I think. I wish I could do that!! I would be able to stay up later and not be tired the next day. That would make life easier…But no. I don’t think that as humans we can overcome sleep deprivation. We need our sleep.
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I think this article is intersting and I had no idea that they could send half of their brian to sleep.
No I can not overcome sleep deprivation. I need my sleep to fuction right and well.
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Dolphins are very inteligent mammals. So i thnk that reading this artical just proves to us how inteligent they really are! If they are doing this one day, what amazing things will they be doing in the future? And I agree with Alyssa. Humans could not overcome a sleep deprivation.
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