What went through my mind was, why study sleep? Over 50 years, scientists have enthusiastically researched into slumber’s biology. Anthropologists have rarely scrutinized the sleep patterns and practices of different cultures, much less those of different classes and ethnic groups in the United States. While investigators readily concede that they don’t yet know why people sleep and dream, they assume that they at least know how people should sleep.
Humans sleep in their own way because of both biological and cultural influence. Biological influences are as follows. A culture’s sleeping style serves as a growing child’s training ground for managing biologically based systems of attention and alertness. Sleep typically unfolds in shared spaces that feature constant
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Individuals tend to slip in and out of slumber several times during the night. Darkness greatly limits activity and determines the time allotted to sleep. Folks there frequently complain of getting too much sleep, not too little. Balinese infants are carried and held continuously by caregivers so that they learn to fall asleep even in hectic and noisy situations to groom “fear sleep” that will literally scare them into sleep. Teenagers may require more sleep than adults and may have a natural tendency to go to sleep later and wake up later than at other ages. Animals from rodents to giraffes and the experimental human sleepers secrete elevated amounts of the hormone prolactin when they rest quietly, even if they are not asleep. Prolactin may promote a state of calmness that accompanies sleep. The cultural influences are as followed. A culture’s sleeping style serves as a growing child’s training ground for managing biologically based systems of attention and alertness. Initiation rites often force participants to cope with sleep deprivation. Individuals enter somnolent, or near-sleep, states in order to magnify an occasion’s psychological impact and to induce spiritual