![]() Torpor is a type of mini-hibernation where an animal’s body temperature and metabolism drop significantly in order to conserve energy. Some species of hummingbirds can even sleep while hovering in the air. ![]() During this state, they can appear to be asleep, but they can quickly become alert if they sense any danger. Hummingbirds sleep while perching, but they do so in a state of reduced consciousness known as torpor, where they lower their metabolic rate, body temperature, and heart rate to conserve energy. Torpor allows them to sleep for long periods of time, sometimes up to 14 hours per day. Hummingbirds sleep in a variety of positions, including hanging upside down from a branch! During torpor, hummingbirds can lower their body temperature and heart rate to conserve energy. Instead, they enter into a state of torpor. So, how do humming birds sleep? It turns out that hummingbirds do not actually “sleep” in the traditional sense. ![]() They are the smallest birds in the world and can fly at speeds of up to 60 miles per hour! Hummingbirds also have a very high metabolism and need to eat constantly throughout the day. “The zebra finch can replay and strengthen the pattern during sleep.Hummingbirds are fascinating creatures. “In contrast to the prevailing idea that it learns by making moment-to-moment adjustments, we think the bird stores the song production pattern and reads it out at night,” Margoliash says. So Margoliash concludes that sleeping is critical for the birds to rehearse their tune. Those patterns are absent, however, when the bird is awake, not singing and is listening to a recording of its own song. “I have very dedicated graduate students but so far no one has volunteered.”īy tracking the activity of single neurons in the birds brains, the researchers saw that the cells fire in the same patterns when the bird is singing and when it is sleeping and listening to its own song. “You just can’t put a hole in someone’s head,” he says. Scientists studying people’s brains during sleep can only dream of such intricate monitoring. The wire then fed pulses reflecting the neurons’ activity to a recording device. ![]() He did this by stringing a microwire inside the birds’ brains so they were near specific neurons. ![]() Margoliash was able to track the activity of individual neurons while the zebra finches were both awake and sleeping. Stickgold suspects that sleep deprivation may play a big role in learning problems and even in brain disorders - such as Alzheimer’s disease - that occur later in life.Īn important difference between sleep studies with humans and birds is how closely scientists are able to monitor the brain. “Practically all the experiments coming out to date say that your mother is right - that you need sleep before you train and learn and, most importantly, after you train and learn,” says Robert Stickgold, the Harvard psychologist who conducted the Tetris study. Nearly all reported they were dreaming about the computer game.īy replaying the day’s events in dreams, scientists argue, the brain is able to coalesce information it has taken in during the day and make sense of it. Later, when the subjects went to sleep, they were awakened throughout the night and asked to reveal their dreams. In another study, also published in Science, people learned how to play the computer game Tetris. One study found that groups of neurons in rats fire the same patterns while the rats negotiate a maze wide-awake and then while they slumber. Recent experiments in humans and rats have demonstrated a strong correlation between learning and sleeping. ![]()
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