Two for thought

From the New York Times. I never knew that ducks could sleep with one eye (and half a brain) open! Maybe I should try too!

Down for the Count

By CARL ZIMMER
Published: November 8, 2005

In a laboratory at Indiana State University, a dozen green iguanas sprawl tranquilly in terrariums. They while away the hours basking under their heat lamps, and at night they close both eyes - or sometimes just one. They lead comfortable lives pretty much indistinguishable from any ordinary pet iguana, except for one notable exception: the bundles of brain-wave recording wires that trail from their heads.

A team of scientists at Indiana State would like to know what happens in the brains of the iguanas when the lights go out. Do they sleep as we do? Do they shut the whole brain down, for example, or can they keep one half awake?

These scientists in Terre Haute hope the iguanas will also help shed some light on an even more fundamental question: why sleep even exists.

"Sleep has attracted a tremendous amount of attention in science, but we really don't know what sleep is," said Steven Lima, a biologist at Indiana State. Dr. Lima belongs to a small but growing group of scientists who are pushing sleep research deep into the animal kingdom. They suspect that most animal species need to sleep, suggesting that human slumber has an evolutionary history reaching back over half a billion years.

Today animals sleep in many different ways: brown bats for 20 hours a day, for example, and giraffes for less than 2. To understand why people sleep the way they do, scientists need an explanation powerful enough to encompass the millions of other species that sleep as well. "One of the reasons we don't understand sleep is that we haven't taken this evolutionary perspective on it," Dr. Lima said.

Sleep was once considered unique to vertebrates, but in recent years scientists have found that invertebrates likes honeybees and crayfish sleep, as well. The most extensive work has been carried out on fruit flies. "They rest for 10 hours a night, and if you keep them awake longer, they need to sleep more," said Dr. Giulio Tononi, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin.

The parallels between fruit flies and humans extend even to their neurons. The two species produce, during part of the night, low-frequency electrical activity known as slow-wave sleep. "The flies surprised us with how close they were in many ways," Dr. Tononi said.

Discovering sleep in vertebrates and invertebrates alike has led scientists to conclude that it emerged very early in animal evolution - perhaps 600 million years ago. "What we're doing in sleeping is a very old evolutionary phenomenon," Dr. Lima said.

Scientists have offered a number of ideas about the primordial function of sleep. Dr. Tononi believes that it originally evolved as a way to allow neurons to recover from a hard day of learning. "When you're awake you learn all the time, whether you know it or not," he said.

Learning strengthens some connections between neurons, known as synapses, and even forms new synapses. These synapses demand a lot of extra energy, though. "That means that at the end of the day, you have a brain that costs you more energy," Dr. Tononi said. "That's where sleep would kick in." He argues that slow waves weaken synapses through the night. "If everything gets weaker, you still keep your memories, but overall the strength goes down," he said. "The next morning you gain in terms of energy and performance."

Dr. Tononi and his University of Wisconsin colleague, Dr. Chiara Cirelli, present this hypothesis in a paper to be published in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews. Dr. Tononi believes it can be tested in the future, as scientists document sleep in other animal species. "It would be a very basic thing that would apply to any brain that can change," he said.

It has been almost 600 million years since human ancestors diverged from those of flies. As those ancestors evolved, their sleep evolved as well. Human sleep, for example, features not only slow-wave sleep, but bouts of sleep when the eyes make rapid movements and when we dream. Rapid eye movement, or REM sleep, as it is known, generally comes later in the night, after periods of intense slow-wave sleep.

Other mammals also experience a mix of REM and non-REM sleep, as do birds. Sleep researchers would like to know whether this pattern existed in the common ancestors of birds and mammals, reptilian animals that lived 310 million years ago. It is also possible that birds and mammals independently evolved this sleep pattern, just as birds and bats independently evolved wings.

Answering that question may help scientists understand why REM sleep exists. Scientists have long debated its function, suggesting that it may play important roles in memory or learning. In the Oct. 27 issue of Nature, Jerome Siegel, a sleep expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, argues that REM does not play a vital physiological role like slow-wave sleep. He points out that brain injuries and even medications like antidepressants can drastically reduce REM without any apparent ill effect.

"People who don't have REM sleep are remarkably normal," Dr. Siegel said. "There's no evidence for any intellectual or emotional problems." So why do mammals and birds have REM sleep at all? "The best answer I can come up with is that it's there to prepare you for waking," Dr. Siegel said. "When the important work of sleep is done, REM sleep just makes you as alert as you can be while you're asleep." One advantage to being alert but immobile is that you may be better able to escape a predator.

Dr. Lima and his colleagues argue in the October issue of Animal Behavior that sleep may have been profoundly shaped during evolution by the constant threat of predators. From this perspective, it is strange that animals would spend hours each day in such a vulnerable state. "It's so stinking dangerous to be shut down like that," Dr. Lima said.

It is possible to imagine an alternative way to let the brain recover: only put small parts of the brain to sleep at a time. But Dr. Lima and his colleagues present a mathematical model suggesting that shutting down the whole brain at once may actually be safer. "You may be better off just shutting down and sleeping all at once, and do it quickly," Dr. Lima said. "Even though you're fairly vulnerable while you're asleep, your overall vulnerability in a 24-hour period may be lower."

Birds appear to be able to defend against predators with a variation on this strategy. When they feel safe, they sleep with their entire brains shut down, as humans do. But when they sense threats, they keep half their brains awake. Dr. Lima and his colleagues have demonstrated this strategy in action with several bird species, including ducks.

"All we did was put our ducks in a row, quite literally," said Niels Rattenborg, a colleague of Dr. Lima's, now at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. "The ducks on the interior slept more with both eyes closed, and the ducks on the edge slept with one eye open. And they used the eye that was facing away from the other birds." To give each side of the brain enough rest, the ducks at the ends of the row would stand up from time to time, turn around and sit down again. This allowed them to switch eyes and let the waking half of the brain go to sleep.

The Indiana State team is now studying iguanas to see if they sleep with half their brains, as well. Previous studies have shown that lizards keep one eye closed for long periods of time, but it has not been clear if they have also been half asleep. Monitoring iguana brains with electrodes may give the scientists an answer. If reptiles and birds turn out to sleep this way, it may be evidence that it is an ancient strategy. It is even possible that the earliest mammals also slept with half a brain.

"It's possible that early on in mammal evolution they may have lost it for some reason," Dr. Rattenborg speculated. "It may have conflicted with other functions." On the other hand, some species of whales and seals sometimes swim with one eye closed while the corresponding hemisphere of the brain produces slow waves.

Scientists are still debating whether they are actually asleep in this state. If they are, that suggests that the ancestors of marine mammals reinvented half-brain sleeping. It may have re-emerged as an adaptation to life in the ocean, an environment where predators can come out of nowhere.

While humans and other land mammals may not be able to shut down half the brain, they may be able to cope with predators by adjusting their sleep schedules. Some studies on rats suggest that predators cause the animals to cut back on slow-wave sleep. People often react to stress in the same way. "Some of the changes we observe in people who are experiencing stress may be some of the same mechanisms in response to predators," Dr. Rattenborg said. "There are no lions sneaking up on them, but the daily stresses of our lives may activate this primordial response."

Dr. Tononi believes that studying animals may ultimately help doctors find more effective ways to treat such sleep disorders. "There are no good guidelines about what is satisfactory sleep, because there is no idea of what it does," he said. "Is seven hours of very light sleep O.K.? Or is deep sleep very important, or REM?" He added: "It might really be that you can do with less sleep as long as it's doing its job. That's why it's crucial to know what its job is."

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Now that evolutionary biology is being wedged out of schools, might physics, especially that quarky domain inhabited by cosmic strings, extra-dimensional possibilities and infinite multiverses, be next? After all, surely the quest for dark matter is as much a matter of mere inference as the reconstruction of vetebrate phylogeny from scattered bones?

Science and Religion Share Fascination in Things Unseen

By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
Published: November 8, 2005

Most of the current controversies associated with science revolve around the vastly different reactions people both within the scientific community and outside it have, not to the strange features of the universe that we can observe for ourselves, but rather to those features we cannot observe.

In my own field of physics, theorists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying mathematical beauty associated with a host of new dimensions that may or may not exist in nature. School boards, legislatures and evangelists hotly debate the possible existence of an underlying purpose to nature that similarly may or may not exist.

It seems that humans are hard-wired to yearn for new realms well beyond the reach of our senses into which we can escape, if only with our minds. It is possible that we need to rely on such possibilities or the world of our experience would become intolerable.

Certainly science has, in the past century, validated the notion that what we see is far from all there is. We cannot directly see electrons but we now know that material objects we can hold in our hand are actually, at an atomic level, largely empty space, and that it is the electric fields associated with the electrons that keep them from falling through our hands.

And when we peer into the darkness of the night sky, within the size of the spot covered up by a dime held at arm's length, we now know that over 100,000 galaxies more or less like our own are hiding. And we know most contain over 100 billion stars, many housing solar systems, and around some of them may exist intelligent life forms whose existence may, too, remain forever hidden from us.

One hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began to unveil the hidden nature of space and time, and after working for another full decade he discovered that space itself is dynamic. It can curve and bend in response to matter and energy, and ultimately even the calm peace of the night sky, suggesting an eternal universe, is itself an illusion.

Distant galaxies are being carried away by an expanding space, just as a swimmer at rest in the water can nevertheless get carried away from shore by a strong current. Thus, it is perhaps not too surprising that when one approaches the limits of our knowledge, theologians and scientists alike tend to appeal to new hidden universes for, respectively, either redemption or understanding.

The apparent complexity of our universe has compelled some evangelists, and some school boards, to argue that the natural laws we have unraveled over the past four centuries cannot be enough on their own to explain the diversity of the phenomena we observe around us, including the remarkable diversity of life on earth.

For very different reasons, but still without a shred of empirical evidence, a generation of theoretical physicists has speculated that the four dimensions of our experience may themselves be just a grand illusion - the tip of a cosmic iceberg.

String theory, yet to have any real successes in explaining or predicting anything measurable, has nevertheless become a fixture in the public lexicon, and the elaborate and surprising mathematical framework that has resulted from over three decades of theoretical study has been enough for some to argue that even a thus-far empirically impotent idea must describe reality.

Further, it has now been proposed that the extra dimensions of string theory may not even be microscopically small, which has been the long accepted mathematical trick used by advocates to explain why we may not yet detect them. Instead, they could be large enough to house entire other universes with potentially different laws of physics, and perhaps even objects that, like the eight-dimensional beings in a Buckaroo Banzai story, might leak into our own dimensions. I wouldn't bet on their existence, but the fact that such potentially infinite spaces could exist and still be effectively hidden in our world is nevertheless remarkable.

Whatever one thinks about all of these ruminations about hidden realities, there is an important difference - at least I hope there is - between the scientists who currently speculate about extra dimensions and those whose beliefs cause them to insist that life can only be understood by going beyond the confines of the natural world. Scientists know that without experimental vindication their proposals are likely to wither. Moreover, a single definitive "null experiment," like the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887 that dispensed with the long-sought-after ether, could sweep away the whole idea.

Religious belief that the universe is the handiwork of an all-powerful being is not subject to refutation. This sort of reliance on faith may itself have an evolutionary basis. There has been talk of a "god gene": the idea of an early advantage in the struggle for survival for those endowed with a belief in a hidden patrimony that gives order, purpose and meaning to the universe we experience.

Does the same evolutionary predilection lead physicists and mathematicians to see beauty in the unobserved, or unobservable? Does the longstanding human love affair with extra dimensions reflect something fundamental about the way we think, rather than about the world in which we live?

The mathematician Hermann Weyl was quoted as having said not long before he died, "My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful, but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful." Mathematicians, artists and writers may choose beauty over truth. Scientists can only hope that we do not have to make the choice.

Lawrence M. Krauss is a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University. His latest book is "Hiding in the Mirror."

Comments

[Mr Wang]

While under hypnosis recently (my first time), I had REM. A lot of it. As I wasn't asleep, I was conscious of it - however, it was all involuntary. Interesting, isn't it? I believe REM shows the unconscious mind at work (in a very active state), without the obscurations of the conscious mind (which has gone to sleep / been hypnotised).

On your 2nd article, I often suspect that a fundamental cause of disagreement between the two schools of thought is that in the first place, they do not have a common understanding of the word God. There is no point discussing or debating the question "Does God exist? Did he/it/she create the universe?" when in the first place, the common understanding of the word "God" is not there. You would all just be on different frequencies.

[budak]

Wah! hynopsis! Why har, if I may ask? How did you know you had REM? Is it like those rare dreams when you are truly lucid? And why are you still up hours after your bedtime??:P

[monkey]

speaking of dreams i had the most bizarre one
so when my eye makes rapid movement
it means im not getting good sleep tonight *cries*

[Mr Wang]

I was with a professional hypnotherapist. Hypnosis is quite common in psychotherapy and has many applications - for instance, it is routinely used to help people with phobias; addictions (smoking, alcohol); lack of self-confidence; post trauma stress disorders (eg victims of sexual abuse); lack of self-confidence etc.

For me, we were doing something slightly more exotic. I was exploring my past lives. :) Wacky, isn't it.