Pass me my little guy!

I was going to call this post The Science of Sleep, but I'll spare my loyal readers.

Nature has an article about research that suggests that the more social you are, the more sleep you need. The experiment, performed with fruit flies, had 2 groups of our favorite drosophs, 1 set of them being born and thrown into groups of other flies, the other set all being isolated.

They found that they all slept the same amount of time at night. However, during the day, the isolated ones had 15min power naps, whilst the more social ones would nap for about an hour.

I don't see the big deal, as everyday experience would tell us that the more social you are, the more running around you're doing, and the more tired you're gonna be.

Luckily, the nerds heard my objection, and instituted a control group: "the researchers also tested flies deprived of their sight and sense of smell. In these flies, which still flew around but could not socialize, there was no difference in sleep patterns between socialized and loner groups."

So they think that all of this goes back to how we store memories, and what the real need for sleep is all about.