Hi there, it's Matt here and welcome back to the podcast and welcome back to

another of those special episodes called Sleep is Bloody Remarkable.

And today I'll be telling you about the bloody remarkableness of sleep deprivation rather than a lack of sleep and in a way that you may not be expecting.

To set some context, what we've discovered over now many decades of research

is that almost every species will suffer catastrophic impairment in both the brain and the body

due to either total or chronic partial long-term sleep loss.

But did you notice that I said almost every species and not every

species because there is a small handful of utterly remarkable,

totally befuddling cases

were this devastating impairment of a lack of sleep does not happen.

And it's something that the US government sees as a matter of national security and it has spent sizable taxpayer dollars investing in.

I'll explain that last part a little bit later. But keep in mind here the following fact. Human

beings are one of the few species that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no adaptive benefit.

Cough, cough, binge watching Netflix resulting in something that we call sleep procrastination. We don't see any

other species so flagrantly skimping on their sleep other than human beings. But there are some very rare situations, some very infrequent situations

where an animal will limit their sleep or even go entirely without sleep and this happens in response

to extreme environmental pressures or challenges. Starvation is one such example because if you

place an organism under conditions of severe famine under conditions of

severe starvation they will stay awake for a longer period of time.

In other words, they will start to limit the amount of sleep that they get.

And the reason is because they will start to forage for food in a larger

perimeter distance than is normal, because otherwise food has become scarce in the normal perimeter.

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