Home | Blog | About | Contact

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

Sleep, Lifestyle of the Rich and Weightless

Juvenilized brains exuberate and snooze. But snoozing threatens the enrichments that exuberance produces.

Neotenous extraterrestrial brains, synaptically enriched, like those of young children, can only predispose their bearers to act like kids. This would suggest that native extraterrestrials will be physically active. But, despite their rambunctiousness, young children, particularly preschoolers—those youngsters whose brains exhibit the greatest density of synapses and population of neurons—tend also to spend time at the opposite end of the activity spectrum. They sleep a lot.

The extraterrestrial lifestyle seems likely to be one of acrobatic choreography punctuated by long naps. On Earth, a typical three-month-old human brain 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, curled up in the fetal position, seems likely to emerge as a preferred recreation. 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, the cycle being accompanied by an increase in the need for sleep.

If extraterrestrials follow the pattern, and while away their days snoozing, the question arises as to who will mind the store. Silicon chips already manage industrial-control functions in some cases more reliably than even the most capable human beings. In a few decades digital circuitry has become an indispensable decision-support tool for countless enterprises. And as silicon crystallizes around urbankind into an artificial life-support bubble, it shows itself to be a material partner with whom human beings seem destined to become increasingly symbiotic.

The technological utopia of abundant leisure imagined by twentieth-century futurists still might come to pass. But it will be in the context of an extraterrestrial solar economy in which energy costs constitute a negligible fraction of the overall economic burden. An abundant solar-energy economy, made possible by lunar silicon, and an evolved form of the technologies that already automate industry could bless our extraterrestrial descendants with more prosperity, managed and maintained by digital servants, than they will care to stay awake for.

The Impoverishments of Sleep?

But the prospect of endemic drowsing would seem to impose an upper limit on the brain-enriching potential of weightlessness. Evolutionary biologists propose that sleep evolved as an adaptation specifically because it conserves energy by minimizing movement. In doing so, it also minimizes the chances of becoming preyed upon when one is not oneself preying. For this reason, because it minimizes physical activity, sleep in large doses might frustrate activity-driven neurological enrichment. It would seem to set the stage for a descent into neurological impoverishment.

The prospect of dedicating the lion's share of a lifetime to sleeping carries ambiguous implications. It might seem that consciousness would diminish in quality as it became squeezed by a growing proportion of unconsciousness.

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 adult brains. 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 brain-wave monitoring 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 the situation:

"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 the circadian (day/night) cycle being as artificial in space as gravity, native extraterrestrials are likely to jettison it 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 forego engineering day/night cycles into the colony environment. Such an ecological tuning could only 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 largely through technological symbiosis, they might need to attend to very little, by terrestrial standards.

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

NEXT > Lucid Dreams, the Great Awakening

Enter your search terms Submit search form   web starlarvae.org starlarvae.blogspot.com		Social Media = Social Mediocrity: rue or alse?

Text Copyright ©2004-2012 Advanced Theological Systems. All Rights Reserved.