Status Updates From Why We Sleep: Unlocking the...

"--- But it is largely limited to an individual. Unless creative, ingenious solutions can be shared between individuals through the emotionally rich, pro-social bonds and cooperative relationships that REM sleep fosters—then creativity is far more likely to remain fixed within an individual, rather than spread to the masses."

"Nevertheless, the superior emotional brain gifts that REM sleep affords should be considered more influential in defining our hominid success than the second benefit, of inspiring creativity. Creativity is an evolutionarily powerful tool, yes. ---"

Sleep, especially REM sleep and the act of dreaming, is a tenable, yet underappreciated, factor underlying many elements that form our unique human ingenuity and accomplishments, just as much as language or tool use (indeed, there is even evidence that sleep causally shapes both these latter traits as well).

"--- Observe any post-lunch meeting around a boardroom table and this fact will become evidently clear. Like puppets whose control strings were let loose, then rapidly pulled taut, heads will start dipping then quickly snap back upright."

"The practice of biphasic sleep is not cultural in origin, however. It is deeply biological. All humans, irrespective of culture or geographical location, have a genetically hardwired dip in alertness that occurs in the midafternoon hours. ---"

"---the state of wakefulness can often be? That is the true evolutionary puzzle here, not sleep. Adopt this perspective, and we can pose a very different theory: sleep was the first state of life on this planet, and it was from sleep that wakefulness emerged. It may be a preposterous hypothesis, but personally I do not think it to be entirely unreasonable"

"Many of the explanations for why we sleep circle around a common, and perhaps erroneous, idea: sleep is the state we must enter in order to fix that which has been upset by wake. But what if we turned this argument on its head? What if sleep is so useful—so physiologically beneficial to every aspect of our being—that the real question is: Why did life ever bother to wake up, considering how biologically damaging---"