"Mr. Personality" <affable.TakeThisOut@no.com.invalid> wrote in message news:<230920030031103172%affable@no.com.invalid>...
> Some experiments have shown that subjects denied clocks and light from
> the outside settled into a 42-hour day -- 22 hours awake and 20 asleep.
> That ratio of sleep to wakefulness seems excessive, because a) nobody
> can sleep for 20 hours straight, and b) people who remain awake for two
> or three 24-hour days sleep only for 12 or 14 hours afterward. It
> seems, however, that the natural human wake/sleep cycle is not 24
> hours, but more like 30 or 32. Nobody has explained why this cycle
> doesn't match the planetary day, or even come close.
Actually there was an explanation and it turned out to be wrong.
The original explanation was that the clock that controls the
sleep/wake cycle of *diurnal* creatures (more active in day) runs
long; the clock that controls the nocturnal creatures runs slow. It's
true that if you put rats in the dark all the time they start going on
like a 22-hour schedule. (And by the way, I think that original
experiment may have been discredited, because all the research I've
heard of says the clock is more like 26 hours for humans. So we're
really from Bajor?
) We appeared to have two clocks-- one that's
very rigidly 24 hour that controls some unconscious activities like
the digestive system and the temperature cycle, and one looser one
that controls sleep/wake. (This is the cause of jet lag, by the way;
when your sleep/wake is desynchronized from your temperature cycle you
get messed up.)
Now, while this may or may not explain some things, what they've found
out since is that humans are so sensitive to light, the presence of
artificial light acts as a zeitgeber ("timegiver"-- it's the word for
a thing that sets your biological clock). It's the artificial light
that keeps those people up. Actually, in an environment where the
light is very, very dim, people sleep on a 24-hour cycle. It seems
that artificial light can extend the human sleep cycle to 26 hours or
so. (Beyond that would stretch it.)
> All higher life forms sleep because their brains require it. Brains
> use more energy than the bloodstream can deliver. The energy stored in
> the brain is depleted while awake and can be restored only during
> sleep. (Brain energy is stored in the glial cells.) This is why
> brains start malfunctioning when a person is tired. People
> hallucinate, they forget simple things, they slur their speech, vision
> is affected.
Actually, I'm afraid this is completely untrue. Brains are just as
active while asleep as awake (sometimes moreso); the need for sleep
has *nothing* to do with your brain running out of energy. Here's what
we do know.
- Birds and mammals need to sleep. I think perhaps reptiles as well.
Insects and fish do not.
- All mammals dream. Not sure about birds.
- Dreaming appears to be related to memory processing and may occur as
a side effect of the brain storing and indexing the day's memories,
but we're not sure.
- A human who goes 14 days without sleeping will die. In rats this
appears to be caused by a total shutdown of the immune system. In
humans we have never seen it under controlled experimental conditions
for obvious reasons-- it happens only to people under torture-- so we
aren't sure exactly why.
- A neurotransmitter builds up in the brain (I think it is called
GABA) during the wake cycle. This neurotransmitter seems to exist
solely to shut down the brain and make it go to sleep. High levels of
this transmitter cause the symptoms you mention-- hallucinations (this
actually tends to be caused by micro-sleeps dropping straight into
dream state), bad memory, poor judgement, poor eye-hand coordination,
irritability, and so on. Sleep cleans the transmitter out of the
brain.
- The drug modafinil (sold as Provigil), prescribed to narcoleptics
for 10 years, turns out to be able to block sleep in normal people
with NO APPARENT SIDE EFFECTS. Okay, they may turn up ten years from
now, but currently there are people taking modafinil to stay up as
long as three days with no significant impairment. Modafinil works by
blocking GABA from binding to neurons. So, without GABA in the brain,
the brain continues to function.
- However, during sleep the body and brain perform many important
activities. People who chronically lack sleep have impaired insulin
performance (thus are more likely to get diabetes, get fat, or both),
depressed immune systems, and if they are children, growth impairment.
Memory impairment is also likely given what we know about the use of
REM sleep. So taking a drug that overcomes the short-term effects of
sleepiness does not necessarily substitute for being asleep.
- Dolphins sleep with one half of their brain at a time because they
can never stop swimming, lest they sink-- they need to go to the
surface to breathe every half hour or so. In the case of Star Trek it
is easy to imagine an alien doing the same thing.
As far as Star Trek fan fiction goes, I would say that humans could
realistically be depicted adapting to as long as a 28-hour day, but 24
is probably ideal. Since humans appear to be the dominant species of
the Federation (and Vulcans, the second Feddie species, probably have
much greater control over their bio-clocks and can adapt to anything),
I would guess that on starships, a day is 24 hours. On any planet
between 20-28 hours where there is a high population of humans, the
day is planetary day (and stardates are used to cross-reference across
the galaxy; the stardates are probably based on Earth solar.) If a day
is less than 20 hours or more than 28, the humans will have to create
an artificial 24-hour standard, *but* if there are aliens living
native to that world the humans' time will just have to be desynched
from the aliens' time.
Given that in Trek all humanoid life shares a common origin, it is
probable that the original seeders of humanoid life kept almost all
their species on planets with between a 20-28 hour day or so, since we
never hear about incompatible clocks. One exception might be the
Denobulan homeworld (why would a species evolve that sleeps only once
a year if it has a normal length day?) Only nonhumanoid aliens are
likely to originate from worlds with extremely different day lengths,
at least in Trek.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
>> Stay informed about: Standard Federation day 
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