Is Sleep Beyond Our Control?

ABSTRACT

Sleep is mysterious. It is ubiquitous and vital, yet its function remains unknown. There are, however, exceptions from the omnipresence of sleep: Birds that exhibit less sleep drive during migration; cetaceans and dolphins that sidestep the need for sleep by sleeping with one hemisphere at a time; frogs that do not seem to sleep at all; and strains of mice and fruit flies that sleep less than their wild-type counterparts. Moreover, new drugs have been discovered that combat the need for sleep in humans without the well known side effects of common stimulants. In the current review, the different ways of evading sleep will be examined. It will be argued that to understand how sleep can be controlled research efforts need to be extended to non-standard laboratory animals that exhibit different methods of evading sleep. Finally, it is argued that emerging clues point to increased membrane excitability as the common neural process used to execute seemingly different forms of sleep-evasion.