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Like other marine mammals, seals sleep in water with half of their brain awake so that they can detect and escape from predators, as well as surface for air without fully waking. When they are asleep on land, both sides of their brain go into sleep mode.
In most animals, slow-wave sleep is characterized by high amplitude, low frequency EEG readings. This is also known as the desynchronized state of the brain, or deep sleep. In USWS, only one hemisphere exhibits the deep sleep EEG while the other hemisphere exhibits an EEG typical of wakefulness with a low amplitude and high frequency.
Unlike most animals, whales are conscious breathers. All mammals sleep, but whales cannot afford to become unconscious for long because they may drown. They are believed to exhibit unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, in which they sleep with half of the brain while the other half remains active. This behaviour was only documented in toothed whales ...
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Sleep can follow a physiological or behavioral definition. In the physiological sense, sleep is a state characterized by reversible unconsciousness, special brainwave patterns, sporadic eye movement, loss of muscle tone (possibly with some exceptions; see below regarding the sleep of birds and of aquatic mammals), and a compensatory increase following deprivation of the state, this last known ...
Despite their findings, the researchers still don't know "...why the brain only maintains an alert state in just one hemisphere – whether it's always the left or in alternation with the right ...
Whales often rest for periods of time under the surface in order to sleep in mainly horizontal positions, although sperm whales also rest vertically. [42] However, as they consciously need to breathe at the surface, they can rest only one-half of their brain at a time, known as unihemispheric slow-wave sleep.
Before he ended his life, Ryan Larkin made his family promise to donate his brain to science. The 29-year-old Navy SEAL was convinced years of exposure to blasts had badly damaged his brain ...