ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2015
Decreasing sleep requirement with increasing numbers of neurons as a driver for bigger brains and bodies in mammalian evolution.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Neurodevelopment as a shared genetic etiology linking sleep-related phenotypes and psychiatric disorders: a genome-wide pleiotropic analysis.Mammalian genome : official journal of the International Mammalian Genome Society · 2026Article
- Systematic Review on the Association Between Sleep and the Risk of Alzheimer's Disease: An Evolutionary Perspective.Evolutionary applications · 2026Review
- Local versus global sleep organization and the quest to determine sleep function.Neurobiology of sleep and circadian rhythms · 2025Article
- Individual sleep need is flexible and dynamically related to cognitive function.Nature human behaviour · 2024Review
- Systematic cortical thickness and curvature patterns in primates.NeuroImage · 2023Article
- Re-examining extreme sleep duration in bats: implications for sleep phylogeny, ecology, and function.Sleep · 2022Article
- Unraveling why we sleep: Quantitative analysis reveals abrupt transition from neural reorganization to repair in early development.Science advances · 2020Article
- Sleep and ageing: from human studies to rodent models.Current opinion in physiology · 2020Article
- A Layered Control Architecture of Sleep and Arousal.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2020Article
- Effects of Aging on Cortical Neural Dynamics and Local Sleep Homeostasis in Mice.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2018Article
- Sleep research goes wild: new methods and approaches to investigate the ecology, evolution and functions of sleep.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Review
- Does selection for short sleep duration explain human vulnerability to Alzheimer's disease?Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2017Article
- Unraveling the Evolutionary Determinants of Sleep.Current biology : CB · 2016Review
- The quantum mitochondrion and optimal health.Biochemical Society transactions · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
1 author at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Mammals sleep between 3 and 20 h d(-1), but what regulates daily sleep requirement is unknown. While mammalian evolution has been characterized by a tendency towards larger bodies and brains, sustaining larger bodies and brains requires increasing hours of feeding per day, which is incompatible with a large sleep requirement. Mammalian evolution, therefore, must involve mechanisms that tie increasing body and brain size to decreasing sleep requirements. Here I show that daily sleep requirement decreases across mammalian species and in rat postnatal development with a decreasing ratio between cortical neuronal density and surface area, which presumably causes sleep-inducing metabolites to accumulate more slowly in the parenchyma. Because addition of neurons to the non-primate cortex in mammalian evolution decreases this ratio, I propose that increasing numbers of cortical neurons led to decreased sleep requirement in evolution that allowed for more hours of feeding and increased body mass, which would then facilitate further increases in numbers of brain neurons through a larger caloric intake per hour. Coupling of increasing numbers of neurons to decreasing sleep requirement and increasing hours of feeding thus may have not only allowed but also driven the trend of increasing brain and body mass in mammalian evolution.
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