Hi there it's Matt here and welcome back once again to the podcast now it probably

comes as no surprise to learn that I find sleep to be the most beguiling and

flat-out fantastic thing in the world.

And part of that lover fur is just down to the sheer number of

inconceivably astonishing facts that sleep offers so every now and then I'm going to release an episode called

Sleep is bloody remarkable and in each of these short episodes I'll describe some of the extraordinary feats of

slimmering remarkableness that there is in this field of sleep research.

The first of those today is half-brain sleep. Now I once mentioned something about this at the start of a

podcast interview a while ago and to this day I still receive emails about it and I thought were better

to start than double clicking on this thing called half-brain sleep. Now our story starts with

dolphins and whales which are in a class in the animal kingdom that we call

cetaceans and they are a splendid example of half-brain sleep.

Actually the technical term for this phenomenon is called unihemispheric sleep meaning that one of the two

hemispheres which when put together make up the full sphere that we call the

brain one half of the brain, one side of it, one hemisphere

will actually be asleep whilst the other is awake.

Now I don't mean just somewhat awake sort of partially drowsy and

partially awake I mean fully completely wide awake, while the other side is very fully, very completely

in deep non-rem sleep. Indeed, when you've watched those incredible BBC series by Sir David

Attenborough who is one of my absolute idols in terms of being a communicator, a narrator, and gosh his voice just

has lovely pannash about it.

But when you've seen those programs, particularly things like the blue planet,

...