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Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep

Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep

Paperback

Gifts & Stationery GeneralGeneral ReferenceGeneral Science

ISBN10: 1475722125
ISBN13: 9781475722123
Publisher: Birkhauser
Published: Nov 20 2013
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.09
Height: 0.65 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English
J ÜRGEN AscHOFF Very bad habit! Very bad habit! Captain Giles to Joseph Conrad who had taken a siesta. -Conrad: The Shadow Line On the Multiplicity of Rest-Activity Cycles: Some Historical and Conceptual Notes According to its title this book tries to answer the profound question of why we nap-and why Captain Giles was wrong in blaming Conrad for having napped. However, in this volume the term nap is not used in the narrower sense of an afternoon siesta; instead, emphasis is placed on the recurrent alternation between states of alertness and drowsiness, i. e., on rest-activity cycles of high er frequency throughout the 24 hr. In view of this focus, two authors (Stampi, in Chapter I, and Ball, in Chapter 3) rightly refer to the psychologist Szymanski who was among the first to describe polyphasic activity patterns. Hence, I consider it appropriate to open this foreword with a few historical remarks. At the time when Szymanski (1920) made the distinction between monophasic and polyphasic rest-activity patterns and sleep-wake cy- cles, respectively, not much was known about the mechanisms of such temporal structures. Although the botanists quite some time ago had demonstrated the endogenous nature of the monophasic sleep movements in plants, the hypothesis of an (still unknown) external driving force was favored by those who studied rhythms in animals and humans (Aschoff, 1990).

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