A quantitative theory unlocks the mysteries of why we sleep | Aeon Essays

With these two insights, we did a back-of-the-envelope calculation to see if repair and reorganisation being reactionary to metabolic processes in the brain (which scales more slowly than the whole body) could explain the longstanding puzzle of how sleep times change why big animals need less sleep than small ones, and why adults need less than babies. We were delighted to see that the results were in the right ballpark, and that s when we started taking these ideas seriously to derive a rigorous, quantitative and predictive theory of sleep.

via aeon.co

Looks very interesting. Sleep related to scale of the critter. I’ll to mull this over during my nap.