Activity around the clock: The evolution of sleep in human and non-human primates

睡眠是灵长类生命的一个重要方面，我最近的研究表明，睡眠与我们物种的进化史有着多么深的联系，以及它与许多对现代人的成功至关重要的权衡是如何联系在一起的。睡眠不足会损害我们人类的一些最重要的心理和生理特征：工作记忆、注意力、视觉运动表现和决策。然而，现代社会中许多最重要的工作需要高认知能力和思维敏锐度，同时还需要低质量的睡眠。例如，飞行员、医生和警察全天候值班，但睡眠机会有限。我们提议的一个中心前提是，由于生态条件，许多动物面临睡眠挑战，而进化已经优化了它们对这些挑战的反应。另一个前提是，我们从灵长类祖先那里继承了睡眠需求，包括睡眠认知限制。这项提议旨在通过研究圈养的非人类灵长类动物、人类狩猎采集者的睡眠，并将我们的发现应用于西方人类睡眠，为睡眠灵活性提供一个全新的视角。 我建议应用现代进化史和统计学方法来评估睡眠的变化，并将有助于建立一个与生态和压力有关的灵长类睡眠变化的数据库。因此，这项建议的目的是通过生成和提供迫切需要的灵长类睡眠结构数据，将现场、比较和理论项目整合到一个研究计划下，最终改变我们对灵长类睡眠进化的理解，从而推动进化和生态学领域的发展。 具体地说，我将测试这一假设，即进化通过在典型的24小时昼夜循环中选择特定物种的睡眠持续时间、深度和时间来优化灵长类对生态挑战的反应。我将在一个权衡的框架内探索睡眠(即，成本-收益)，努力实现三个具体目标：(1)生成长臂猿和大猩猩的原始睡眠数据，并将其与关于多个人类种群和非人类灵长类动物的现有数据相结合。(2)为了评估人类是否具有更灵活的睡眠特征，我将开发一个理论模型来生成个人、群体和物种级别的睡眠动力学的零分布。(3)最后，拟议的研究将有助于建立一个关于灵长类睡眠变化的数据库，这将改变我们对灵长类睡眠进化的理解。 作为灵长类血统，人类是独一无二的，在非常短的时间内，我们迁徙并适应了全球范围内的一系列栖息地。因此，在系统发育框架内以睡眠等特征为目标是至关重要的，这些特征有助于我们物种相对于其他灵长类动物的独特地位和进化成功。

Sleep is a crucial aspect of primate life and my recent research has demonstrated how deeply connected sleep is to our species' evolutionary history and how it is associated with many trade-offs that are important to the success of modern humans. Sleep deprivation impairs some of the most important mental and physical attributes of our species: working memory, attention, visuomotor performance, and decision making. Yet, many of the most important jobs in modern society require high cognitive performance and mental acuity all while coupled with low-quality sleep. For example, pilots, doctors, and police officers have round-the-clock duties, but limited opportunities to sleep. A central premise of our proposal is that many animals face sleep challenges due to ecological conditions, and evolution has optimized their responses to these challenges. Another premise is that we inherited sleep needs, including sleep-cognition constraints, from our primate ancestors. This proposal aims to provide a fundamentally new perspective on sleep-flexibility by investigating sleep in captive non-human primates, human hunter-gatherers and applying our findings to Western human sleep. I propose to apply modern phylogenetic and statistical methods to assess variation in sleep and will contribute to building a database on primate-sleep variation in relation to ecology and stress. Therefore, the aims of this proposal advance the field of Evolution and Ecology by generating and providing urgently needed primate sleep architecture data by integrating field, comparative, and theoretical projects under one research program that will ultimately transform our understanding of the evolution of primate sleep. Specifically, I will test the hypothesis that evolution has optimized primate responses to ecological challenges by selecting for species-specific flexibility of sleep duration, depth, and timing throughout a typical 24-hour day-night cycle. I will explore sleep in a trade-off framework (i.e., cost-benefit) by working towards three specific aims: (1) generating original sleep data in gibbons and gorillas and combine it with existing data on multiple human populations and non-human primates. (2) To assess whether humans are characterized by more flexible sleep, I will develop a theoretical model to generate null distributions of individual, group, and species-level sleep dynamics. (3) Finally, the proposed research will contribute to building a database on primate sleep variation that will transform our understanding of the evolution of primate sleep. As a primate lineage, humans are unique in a remarkably short period of time we migrated and adapted to an array of habitats at a global scale. Therefore, it is critical to target traits, such as sleep, within a phylogenetic framework that contribute to the unique status and evolutionary success of our species relative to other primates.