That’s very puzzling to me. Why do babies need so much sleep then? I assume memory consolidation is a central part of the learning process, is it not? Or do babies need to sleep a lot for other reasons than learning stuff? Of course what a baby’s brain goes through is pretty massive, but is it not the same (at least partly) as what an adult’s brain goes through when learning something, just at a different scale?
Human children learn a lot of things during the first year of life slower than other species. It’s possible that there are benefits to a certain learning speed.
Ok, I see. But I still don’t see why we need to sleep that much. It must have some other benefit then, and it cannot only be saving resources, as then babies should be able to trade sleep for food, no?
I checked, and it seems that land mammals’ babies also sleep more than gown ups, which would imply that learning slower than other species is probably not the reason why babies sleep that much. Interestingly, marine mammals’ babies seem to sleep less than grown ups.
Given that at the moment we don’t really understand why people need to sleep at all, I don’t think this is a strong argument for any particular claimed function.
That’s very puzzling to me. Why do babies need so much sleep then? I assume memory consolidation is a central part of the learning process, is it not? Or do babies need to sleep a lot for other reasons than learning stuff? Of course what a baby’s brain goes through is pretty massive, but is it not the same (at least partly) as what an adult’s brain goes through when learning something, just at a different scale?
It could be that babies sleep a lot because it’s not very useful for them to be awake for longer.
I don’t understand you; they have to literally learn everything.
Human children learn a lot of things during the first year of life slower than other species. It’s possible that there are benefits to a certain learning speed.
Ok, I see. But I still don’t see why we need to sleep that much. It must have some other benefit then, and it cannot only be saving resources, as then babies should be able to trade sleep for food, no?
I checked, and it seems that land mammals’ babies also sleep more than gown ups, which would imply that learning slower than other species is probably not the reason why babies sleep that much. Interestingly, marine mammals’ babies seem to sleep less than grown ups.
Given that at the moment we don’t really understand why people need to sleep at all, I don’t think this is a strong argument for any particular claimed function.
That makes total sense, true.