[ELI5] Why can other species sleep with their heads up but we can’t?
In: Biology
Our brain prevents us from doing so. Look up images of decerebrate posturing.
A horse stands up and has its head up to sleep because its brainstem (primitive brain) has a code that makes its muscles in its arms and legs and neck extend.
Humans also have that primitive program encoded into their brainstem. Evolution of brains in mammals doesn’t take a lot of code away, it just writes new code on top of it. Your cerebral cortex, the top of your brain, has new code that is constantly overriding that horse-standupwhenyousleep program.
You don’t use it anymore because you’re a bipedal organism with 2 legs so why would you want a program that makes all 4 extremities extend. The primitive program can start running again when your cerebral cortex stops working due to severe brain damage.
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