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The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 3. Space Brains

Sleep, Lifestyle of the Rich and Weightless

Juvenile brains exuberate and snooze, though snoozing threatens the enrichments that exuberance produces.

Neotenous extraterrestrial brains, synaptically enriched, like those of children, can only predispose their bearers to act like kids.

This conclusion suggests that native extraterrestrials will be as rambunctious as their terrestrial counterparts. But young children, particularly preschoolers—those youngsters whose brains exhibit the greatest population of neurons and density of synapses—despite their rambunctiousness tend also to spend considerable time at the opposite end of the activity spectrum. They sleep a lot.

That is, the extraterrestrial lifestyle might take shape as one of long naps punctuated by acrobatics. A terrestrial three-month-old human brain typically spends most of its day sleeping, about 14 hours; a middle-aged brain sleeps about 7.5 hours per day; and a septuagenarian brain sleeps only about 6 hours in 24. For neotenous extraterrestrial brains, drowsing seems likely to become a preferred pastime. Punctuated by rambunctiousness.

Studies of teenagers confirm the correlation between high synaptic density and the need for sleep. The dramatic physiological changes of adolescence include an explosion of new synaptic connections, followed by selective pruning, as also is seen in young children, the cycle being accompanied by an increase in time spent sleeping.

If extraterrestrials, with their juvenilized brains, follow this pattern, then the question arises as to who will mind the store. The answer seems likely to be silicon circuitry, which already manages industrial-control functions and within a few decades has become an indispensable decision-support and data-management tool for countless enterprises. As silicon-based technologies crystallize around urbankind, creating an artificial life-support bubble, these technologies reveal themselves to be material partners with which human beings, and their descendants, seem destined to become ever more intimately symbiotic.

The technological utopia of abundant leisure imagined by prescient futurists still might come to pass. A prosperous solar-energy economy and evolved technologies that automate commercial and personal life could bless humankind's extraterrestrial descendants with more leisure than they will have time to stay awake for. But the prospect of endemic drowsing—specifically, its paralysis—would seem to impose a limit on the brain-enriching potential of weightlessness.

The Impoverishments of Sleep?

Evolutionary biologists propose that sleep evolved as an adaptation, because, by minimizing movement, it conserves energy. In doing so, it also minimizes the chances of becoming preyed upon when one is not oneself actively engaged in predation. For this reason, because it would minimize physical activity, chronic sleep might frustrate activity-driven neurological enrichment. It would seem to set the stage for a descent into neurological impoverishment.

For this reason, the prospect of spending the lion's share of one's life asleep carries ambiguous implications for humankind's extraterrestrial descendants. Research suggests that brains clear out toxins during sleep, and this cleansing might help brains resist degenerative diseases. The process involves activating the brain's glymphatic system, a "plumbing" system that flushes out the spaces between brain cells during sleep. Research into glymphatic activity during sleep is summarized on the National Institutes of Health web site at http://www.ninds.nih.gov/news_and_events/news_articles/pressrelease_brain_sleep_10182013.htm.

Nonetheless, it would seem that a growing proportion of unconsciousness and of physical inactivity would impoverish the brain and thereby diminish consciousness.

But, on the other, other hand.

As different as the two states are, waking and sleeping occupy points on a continuum. And in infant brains the continuum is smoother in its transitions among states than it is in adults. In adults, the receptive and expressive functions of consciousness shut down nearly completely during sleep, producing a mode of experience profoundly different from waking. In infants, these functions—sensory receptivity and motor activity—don't shut down nearly as completely. This is according not only to EEG studies, but also to the common observation that sleeping infants can respond readily to stimulation. In The World of the Newborn, Daphne and Charles Maurer summarize:

"In adults, lights, clicks, and taps evoke only small responses [during sleep]. However, in the newborn, more or less comparable responses are evoked whether the baby is awake or sound asleep . . . . Hence it is very likely that a newborn’s sensory circuits are connected and functioning twenty-four hours per day."

From this and other observations, the Maurers conclude,

"Thus the baby can learn while he is asleep—learn to recognize a story read to him repeatedly, learn to expect the chiming of a clock, learn to expect to be fed. To a newborn, sleep is not a lessening or change of consciousness; it is merely muscular relaxation."

If this is the nature of infant sleep, then the sleeping and waking states would seem to be programmed to converge in the infantilized circuitry of space brains.

And with circadian (day/night) cycles in space colonies being as artificial as gravity, native extraterrestrials are likely to jettison them too. The distinction between the two kinds of minds—waking and sleeping—might itself be an artifact of living on a planet. The brains of humankind's extraterrestrial descendants might dispense with alternating between waking and sleeping. They might forgo day/night cycles in the colony environment and in doing so encourage wakefulness and sleep to converge into a more holistic, less differentiated, more juvenile consciousness. With their brains freed from the neurochemical oscillations of the day/night cycle, native extraterrestrials might enjoy a perpetual reverie in a new kind of subjective space. With their survival needs met through technological symbiosis, they might need to attend to very little in their environments, by terrestrial standards.

So, in a weightless population, will the stillness of sleep undermine the enrichments of neurological neoteny? Or, could a merging of waking and sleeping experience more than compensate for any squandering of gray matter?

NEXT > Lucid Dreams, the Great Awakening

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