Our necks don’t seem able to support the weight of our heads which is fair enough but I’d have thought that by now we’d be a bit more able for it rather than either waking up with a cricked neck, or drooped over ourselves?!
In: Biology
Animals have been sleeping for like 500 million years, we have been sitting in airplanes for fifty. (And even humans sitting at all is recent in evolutionary terms)
This must be a personal thing because I can kind of sleep just fine sitting up straight. The trick is to imagine your back and neck as a spring that dampens motion traveling up it. It also helps to have something to focus on like music basically I start meditating and after about 30 minutes I’m not exactly awake but I’m not fully asleep either, but time passes by much quicker, I feel rested afterwards, and I’m able to react to the movements of the vehicle I’m on be that a plane, a bus, or a truck someone else is driving.
Evolution provided an excellent solution to this problem: sleeping while lying down.
You’ve nailed it in your question, really. Our necks, in fact our entire vertebral columns, aren’t optimized for being upright. It’s a structure originally designed for walking on all fours that was repurposed for standing straight. We’ve only been doing this for the last couple million years, while our more distant ancestors had been going around on all fours for hundreds of millions. We get by, but it’s still got its kinks to work out.
As for airplane seats, they’ve been a part of our evolutionary history for a much shorter time than walking upright. It’s literally only been a century. There hasn’t been nearly enough time for selection pressure to do something about it. So, if we want to feel okay after a long sleep, we have to lie down and give those neck and back muscles a good rest.
> waking up with a cricked neck
waking up with a cricked neck doesn’t kill you, and waking up without a cricked neck doesn’t help you have more children, so evolution [by natural selection] is not very interested.
Evolution happens in the opposite way that you’re thinking it does. Creatures don’t grow and develop traits that are advantageous. They have random mutations that cause that particular animal to procreate more than the previous iterations. Eventually either everyone else dies off, or the new version just overtakes the old in population density.
If we lived in a world that suddenly stopped people from being able to sleep properly and people were dying off in droves from sleep deprivation, there may be some people out there who are more resilient in being able to sleep, and their children are the only ones that survive. After a few generations, we all just sleep like that.
It’s hardly an evolutionary pressure that will make any significant difference in the likelihood of those who can versus those who cannot surviving to reproduce.
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