Could be the reason they live such slothful lives rife with violence. Hard to figure out why the white man behaves the he does! I personally think it has to do with a genetic predisposition to lash out in hatred.
The white man has only been civilized, for at best 5 centuries. Tens of thousands of years they lived as virtual land roaming savage animals. Natural selection selected the most violent psycopathic of the race that was successful in pro creating with as many negresess (their light skinned offspring) they could furthering their primitive behavior. It is futile to even attempt it. Anywhere the white man rests his head is an area that has experienced chaos and violence. From Africa to Europe, the white man leaves a wake destruction in its path.
Just look at the destruction of native peoples all over the world! Not all of the white people are bad but I am sure the many mean well in their cognitive dissonant personalities as they want the best for all citizens and not just the ones who happen to have stolen power over the ages.
Well said.
Clearly white plantation owners and their white employees failed lamentably in attempting the needed rate of miscegenation.
You make an interesting point about music. I agree that listening to classical music is not good for going to sleep. Indeed the best soporific I have found is the news, repeated as it usually is without new and exciting news. An exception I found was the Canadian news which was so irritatingly boring that it had the opposite to the desired effect. The BBC followed by Deutsche Welle was fine….
I agree with Another Fred but go a little further in wanting to add in the likelihood that many genes are involved in each of the important functions of sleep so that some people might be able to process their disorganised perceptual and argumentative data from the day much more quickly and efficiently than others thereby needing less sleep to make sense in the offoce next day. Cf. the genetically influenced differences in processing speed for math, for example. Other genes would mean that more or less time was needed for muscle repair or restoration of endocrine functions.
Indeed. Still that's only two more groups out of numerous across the world. I'd like to see more data.
There was this recent story
I would have liked to know whether they had considered the hypothesis that the hunter gatherers might have enjoyed several hours during which body and mind could get at least part of the benefits of proper sleep. One could make an approach to this anywhere by having some subjects spend say 5 hours sleeping and 4 hours meditating or engaged in rituals close to meditative relaxation.
I would be interested to know about “polyphasic sleep” and the studies which show that some people can sleep less asca result without harm. I only hear of the studies showing how many people are not getting enough sleep and the harm it causes.
My theory is that the real intrinsic need for sleep is roughly normally distributed around an average of about 7.5 hours with sd roughly 50 minutes. But that might be complicated by the possibility that one person might be able to provide sleeping time for all neurological, hormonal and other physical repairs as well as consolidation of memories, calm anxieties and whatever else sleep is supposed to do for an adult in 5 hours a night’s sleep whereas another person might need 8 hours for health of heart, arteries and endocrine glands even though their mental functions were adequately served by 5 hours sleep. Those latter might be the senior execs who have heart attacks at 50 (used to be 10 years earlier in mybfather’s generation).
Peter,
The OKCupid database has data for various sleep-related variables. Since the sample is 70k world-wide, it would be possible to examine regional differences as well as racial. Sample size probably too small (few Africans use it) to examine state x race interactions except for the largest states.
Yes, they lost me there. Of course the differential is genetic, Occam’s Razor….
another apparently overlooked factor in the data presented is the age of folks, and especially whether they are retired and do not set the alarm.
So far, my sleep needs have changed not a whit since childhood. If I do not get enough sleep, I feel tired, even with only an hour or so short of normal.Joe Webb
Then for those attracted to Chinese 5 element theory and acupuncture, the theory claims that different organs get their charge as well as their rest at different hours of a 24 hour clock. On this stuff I am agnostic but I sleep better between the hours recommended by this theory…10 pm to 6 or 7 am, which of course is merely consistent with caveman life/nature.
Joe Webb
I live near Stanford U. I used to mess with my sleep cuz of work schedules and thus paid attention to Stanford Sleep Center info.
Last time I checked, they recommended 8 to 9 hours sleep for long life and they liked naps.
I am retired and allow myself as much sleep as my body wants. Stanford Sleep Center took the position that most people do not get enough sleep and rest. Most folks perceive me as 15 and sometimes more years younger than I am.
Never smoked, don’t drink, moderate exercise and allow myself as much sleep as my body wants. I recommend it. Nothing like a fully rested body and mind.
Which gets me to work and stress. I think people get worn out and aged by overwork and stress.
Which also contributes to alcohol etc. use. I have known a couple folks who would not let themselves get more than 5 hours of sleep. They always looked bad and dunno about their longevity.
Joe Webb
why is it bad to notice bad Jewish behavior?
It’s bad when people obsess about Jewish behavior to the point that they don’t notice non-Jews doing exactly the same thing. If you think Mark Zuckerberg is bad because he’s Jewish, you probably won’t notice the harm being done by non-Jewish oligarchs, like Rupert Murdoch and the Koch Brothers.
I don’t get how the siesta tradition would affect Africans more deeply than it affects Hispanics, Asians and people from the Mediterranean.
Who said it did? Most of the sleep research has been done on Euro Americans and African Americans.
According to this Americans of above-average intelligence get somewhat less sleep (and stay up later) than less-intelligent Americans:
I find it a bit surprising that people stay out longer on Friday night (and the wee hours of Saturday morning) if they’re more intelligent.
Quoting Malcolm Pollack, “Maybe black people and white people are just, well, different in some way that manifests itself, directly or indirectly, in different sleep patterns?”
I agree. “Different” doesn’t necessarily mean “pathologically different.”
Another prediction: African sleep length will vary less during the seasons relative to northerners, who tend to sleep longer during the winter and shorter during the summer.
I’ve seen only one study that could test your prediction. It’s the one by Friborg et al. (2012) on Ghanaian and Norwegian subjects:
Ghanaians
weekdays – January 6.82 h August 6.90 h
weekends – January 6.91 h August 7.03 h
Norwegians
weekdays – January 7.27 h August 7.14 h
weekends – January 7.85 h. August 7.92 h
Sleep doesn’t seem to vary seasonally among Norwegians, at least not to an appreciable extent.
Economic factors, stress, poverty? Living conditions?
Those factors were controlled.
This study investigated the relationship between ethnicity, discrimination and multiple dimensions of sleep. Substantial ethnic differences were detected in PSG-assessed sleep architecture. Consistent with previous investigations, after controlling for differences in age, BMI, SES and smoking status, African American participants took longer to fall asleep, slept more time in Stage 2 and less time in SWS than Caucasian participants.
I’d like to the see the data sorted by region of the country. America is a big diverse country ethnically and culturally. A blacks in New England exhibiting a greater or lesser sleep gap compared to blacks in the Deep South? How about white sleep patterns between Appalachia and the Midlands?
That study has been done. Americans sleep the least in the South, with Ohio and West Virginia being the only non-Southern states with short sleep duration:
Eighty-four counties were hotspots, with high levels of insufficient sleep (P < .01), and 45 were coldspots, with low insufficient sleep (P < .01). Hotspots were found in Alabama (1 county), Arkansas (1), Georgia (1), Illinois (1), Kentucky (25), Louisiana (1), Missouri (4), Ohio (7), Tennessee (12), Texas (9), Virginia (6), and West Virginia (16). Coldspots were found in Alabama (1 county), Georgia (2), Illinois (6), Iowa (6), Michigan (2), Minnesota (1), North Carolina (1), Texas (7), Virginia (12), and Wisconsin (6). Several contiguous hotspots and coldspots were evident. Notably, the 17 counties with the highest levels of insufficient sleep were found in a contiguous set at the intersection of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia (all P < .0002).
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352721815001096
The somewhat comical part of these studies is the assumption that all whites are the same when anyone who has traveled a bit knows this to be false. Similarly, the greatest genetic diversity among humans is in sub-Saharan Africa, thus meaning all blacks are not the same either.
I agree. I would predict that southern Europeans likewise have shorter nighttime sleep duration.
I don’t agree with your second point (the greatest genetic diversity among humans is in sub-Saharan Africa). Most of that diversity is non-functional. The sub-Saharan African gene pool has more junk variability because it has stayed put in the same continent. A lot of that variability was lost due to founder effects when modern humans spread to Eurasia.
The greater the strains of mental activity, the more need there is to sleep and to dream,
How would you reply to the previous commenter who noted that smarter people sleep less?
Frost, more interesting, i.e., more work for you, would be a piece on the levels of mental illness in different ethnic groups.
Mental illness is a product of genetics and environment. In the past, the suicide rate was low among the Inuit. Now, it is very high. The Inuit haven’t changed genetically. It’s the environment that’s changed. There was a government policy of moving the Inuit off the land and into settlements … where most of them have nothing at all to do. They feel useless and many kill themselves.
Same with Euro Americans, especially working-class whites. Their jobs have been outsourced to China and insourced to illegal immigrants. They too have nothing to do. They feel useless and many kill themselves.
I believe the Inuit, like Euro Americans, cannot handle inactivity. It seems to trigger suicidal ideation, and it’s difficult to shut down that process.
Personally as an owner of a fairly well-endowed brain, I am heavily dependent on eating enough to keep said brain happy, but also in need of a lot of sleep, at least 8 hours and usually 9.
Again, how do you reply to that previous commenter who noted that smarter people sleep less? (It’s not a big difference, and I suspect that many smart people have very active lives that encroach on sleep time).
I’d expect self-reported sleep duration to be highly noisy. Heck, I doubt I could reliably tell you how long I sleep at night. As such, I wouldn’t rule out systematic biased error in sleep duration by race, leading to these apparent differences.
No, we see these race differences in sleep duration even when the participants are monitored by sensors of various kinds:
Sleep data acquisition was performed using the Embla A10 polysomnography system (Embla Systems Inc., Broomfield, CO USA). We assessed: Electroencephalography (C4/C3), electrooculography, chin electromyography, leg electromyography, airflow with an oronasal thermal sensor, airflow with an air pressure transducer, snore events with a piezo snore sensor, respiratory effort with piezo thoracic and abdominal belts, oxygen saturation with a pulse oximetersensor, and body position with a position indicator.
Just by eyeballing the SDs, I would say there’s not a lot of noise in the data.
Actually it was shown that black sleep less because blacks are outside robbing stores and whites while they sleep.
There was this recent story
Indeed. Still that’s only two more groups out of numerous across the world. I’d like to see more data.
It's much more than that, though. They have done studies where they allow a subject to get a normal total amount of sleep, but don't allow them to go into REM sleep. It really messes a person up.This is also why 'drunk sleeping' is never really restful, even though you might sleep longer than normal after a night out. The alcohol messes with your REM sleep.
Assuming sleep is essentially just a way of keeping energy expenditures down when they’re not needed
We only spend about 2 hours in REM sleep. Indeed, there are people who practice polyphasic sleep to minimize the amount of time they spend sleeping with no apparent ill effects. Surely this suggests that the great bulk of sleep is superfluous?
Could be the reason they live such slothful lives rife with violence. Hard to figure out why the African behaves the he does. I personally think it has to do with a genetic predisposition to lash out in hatred. The negroid also is extremely sexually active, if I m not mistaken, black females on average have more testosterone then Asain males. Black women are very sexually aggressive. It is not uncommon in black inner city areas for black girls to be having sex at age 12. I think is do to high infant mortality deaths in Africa, they evolved to mass produce children because so many would die at a young age.
Prior to colonization the African lived as basically an animal without any medicine or technology. The African has only been civilized for a few centuries. Tens of thousands of years they lived as virtual land roaming savage animals. Natural selection selected the most violent psycopathic of the race that was successful in pro creating with as many negresess they could furthering their primitive behavior. Their is so pacifying or domesticating nature’s creation of the negro. It is futile to even attempt it. Anywhere the negro rests his head is an area that has experienced chaos and violence. From Africa to Europe, the negroid leaves a wake destruction in its path.
There was this recent story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34544394
Indeed. Still that's only two more groups out of numerous across the world. I'd like to see more data.
There was this recent story
I’d like to see data on average sleep duration across the world.
I’d expect self-reported sleep duration to be highly noisy. Heck, I doubt I could reliably tell you how long I sleep at night. As such, I wouldn’t rule out systematic biased error in sleep duration by race, leading to these apparent differences.
As for dream activity, those dreams that I recall are pedestrian and of no apparent relatedness to my daily routine.
That’s interesting, my experience has been the exact opposite. My dreams always connect to my daily life. They usually follow the typical bizarro world plot line of a dream, but each part of the dream can be traced back to something in my life (usually something that is connected with high emotions, good or bad).
An important function of sleep that you omit is the disposal of toxic residues and waste derived from a days activities. As you note the brain consumes a large portion of the body’s energy. That consumption generates waste that must be removed. Most of the waste removal occurs during sleep.
Assuming sleep is essentially just a way of keeping energy expenditures down when they’re not needed
It’s much more than that, though. They have done studies where they allow a subject to get a normal total amount of sleep, but don’t allow them to go into REM sleep. It really messes a person up.
This is also why ‘drunk sleeping’ is never really restful, even though you might sleep longer than normal after a night out. The alcohol messes with your REM sleep.
I need to start staying up later then.
I hear that the brain requires a relatively large amount of energy compared to other organs.
An example of that is the scientific racialist position that a large and intelligent brain becomes a relative deficit when the owner of such a brain is surrounded by dummies and consequently a society that does not have much to think about. The deficit was, as I recall, merely that of squandering of precious calories on a brain that gobbles up calories even when just idling in traffic like a muscle-car guzzling gas in gridlock. In a poor society, calories are hard come by and the smartie unlucky enough to be born into such a society is at risk, in the first place, of not having enough to eat, and this can lead to other deficits.
Personally as an owner of a fairly well-endowed brain, I am heavily dependent on eating enough to keep said brain happy, but also in need of a lot of sleep, at least 8 hours and usually 9.
As for dream activity, those dreams that I recall are pedestrian and of no apparent relatedness to my daily routine. The main exception being women who have made some kind of emotional impact. Politics, etc. which I think about far more than women, never appears in my dreams.
Perhaps naively, I see sleep as merely rest and nothing more. Another observed phenomenon personally is listening to music when I am tired. I listen to mostly classical with a bit of straight ahead jazz now and then. I don’t want to listen to music when I am tired. My brain is tired and does not want to process it. It is that simple. It wants to rest and go to sleep.
What is also very interesting is how a short nap can revive me. This can I suppose be seen as some kind of “Unconscious” settling of accounts, or as merely profound rest. I put my money on the latter.
Joe Webb
That's interesting, my experience has been the exact opposite. My dreams always connect to my daily life. They usually follow the typical bizarro world plot line of a dream, but each part of the dream can be traced back to something in my life (usually something that is connected with high emotions, good or bad).
As for dream activity, those dreams that I recall are pedestrian and of no apparent relatedness to my daily routine.
Frost, more interesting, i.e., more work for you, would be a piece on the levels of mental illness in different ethnic groups. Does it fit the usual Rushton pattern?
Sleep is not really about preserving energy or recharging the body’s physical batteries, although these can be secondary effects of sleep. The primary and quintessential purpose of sleep, however, is maintaining proper mental functioning.
We sleep so that we may dream. We dream so that we may integrate new sensory perceptions into our existing patterns of behavior and respond accordingly to an ever-changing environment. This is a necessity of animal existence.
Plant life is defined by the nutritive faculty only and is the simplest form of life. Plants neither sense, move, nor reason; they just take in nourishment and grow, all of it unconsciously. A plant is not entirely separate from the landscape and setting in which it appears; rather it forms a part of that setting. Using a bit of poetic license, one might say that the plant is an extension from the soil in which it grows. It is the soil in which it grows–the life bearing capacity of the soil at highest potential.
Animal life is defined by the both the nutritive and sensory faculties. Animals also take in nourishment and grow (indeed, the animal “body,” considered in abstraction, is just a plant); but in addition to the body there is also the animal “self.” Unlike the plant, every free-living animal is an individual, a microcosm within a macrocosm, and stands separate and apart from its environment. The ability to sense means that there is a distinction between that who senses and everything else in creation. The animal is not unconscious like the plant; it has to care for itself. It senses, and it must respond to that which it perceives. Such responses we call “motion,” using the word in an expansive sense. Thus sensory perception and motion go together.
In the higher animals, the interface between the microcosm and the macrocosm increasingly becomes embodied in the functioning of the nervous system, whose job it is to integrate the impressions left on the sense organs and to modulate the organism’s responses to them. The nervous system’s ability to perform this function, however, is not unlimited. When the organism can no longer receive sense impressions or generate responses, tiredness is experienced and sleep ensues. The body becomes a plant again; and the mind, temporarily cut off from pressing demands, is free to digest the material of the day.
For human beings there is an additional element. Human life is defined by the nutritive, sensory, and rational faculties–man is the rational animal. Therefore, in addition to the mere sense impressions of the animals there is added to our experience the whole new dimension of words and concepts. This is what gives human dreams their particularly surreal quality, as the relationship between material sense impressions and immaterial concepts is undergoing constant adjustment in the theater of the mind.
All of this can be summed up in a simple relationship: The greater the strains of mental activity, the more need there is to sleep and to dream, and in fact this is exactly what we find. Children, to whom the world is constantly affording new experiences and who are actively learning all the time, sleep and dream more than adults; intellectual workers dream more than manual laborers; people in new circumstances (e.g. moving or changing careers) experience an uptick in dream activity; and people under great duress, who have just endured the loss of a loved one or a divorce, or are otherwise in the depths of some spiritual crisis, even though they often suffer from sleep disturbances, are prone to have the most piercing and lurid dreams of all. Finally, people who are deliberately deprived of sleep in psychological experiments are known to undergo a pronounced mental deterioration which ultimately results in psychosis and death. Well-adjusted adults with settled lives and few existential concerns infrequently remember their dreams and can get by on the least amount of sleep.
The relevance of these data to the present article I will leave to the reader to determine, but my guess is that the exact opposite of the article’s contention is in fact the truth. Blacks today are generally less worried and stressed out than whites.
And that only stands to reason.
I’d like to the see the data sorted by region of the country. America is a big diverse country ethnically and culturally. A blacks in New England exhibiting a greater or lesser sleep gap compared to blacks in the Deep South? How about white sleep patterns between Appalachia and the Midlands?
The somewhat comical part of these studies is the assumption that all whites are the same when anyone who has traveled a bit knows this to be false. Similarly, the greatest genetic diversity among humans is in sub-Saharan Africa, thus meaning all blacks are not the same either.
Or, we can fall back on magic and pretend the Sandman is a Racist.
antisemite:
any thought of person that a Jew doesn’t like
No one’s mentioned yet an important data point, the Yale email atrocity:
This email and the subsequent reaction to it have interrupted their lives. I have friends who are not going to class, who are not doing their homework, WHO ARE LOSING SLEEP [emphasis added], who are skipping meals, and who are having breakdowns. I feel drained.
This article by a member of the Black Student Alliance is clear proof that racism is the cause not only of sleep disparities, but of disparities in educational achievement, mental health, and nutrition as well.
Economic factors, stress, poverty? Living conditions? Smaller/larger households, type of job? TV use, eating patterns. Family conditions, drug and alcohol use? There are so many potential confounding factors.
Any time we are talking about something as a characteristic of race there needs to be race wide research. Do whites in Europe or Africa sleep more than blacks. Do blacks in Africa really sleep less than whites? We need more research and hopefully some black researchers will get involved.
I dated a great girl from Sierra Leone for a year and learned that sun is for relaxing and shivering is for activating. I learned that because I knew the opposite all my life, without knowing I knew that. I have often wanted to simplify my experience reductively and say that blacks are basically all bipolar, because what’s with the range of their emotions, I mean it’s patently abnormal you know? Big heat makes them relax and trigger happy too?… well because they’d rather relax, except for that blazed nigga tryin to debo my spot. Still killing in cold Chicago? Well, they’re kinda cold blooded, in an activating sense, you know?. With these people there’s an exception to every rule and you have to start by reversing the rules. The most consistent, scientific environment I suppose is of course prison. And yep, they were always the majority early risers, every morn, up playin spades. And rapping all afternoon till rec.
Assuming sleep is essentially just a way of keeping energy expenditures down when they’re not needed (humans can’t hunt or gather at night) it stands to reason that northern peoples would sleep more on average.
Another prediction: African sleep length will vary less during the seasons relative to northerners, who tend to sleep longer during the winter and shorter during the summer.
It's much more than that, though. They have done studies where they allow a subject to get a normal total amount of sleep, but don't allow them to go into REM sleep. It really messes a person up.This is also why 'drunk sleeping' is never really restful, even though you might sleep longer than normal after a night out. The alcohol messes with your REM sleep.
Assuming sleep is essentially just a way of keeping energy expenditures down when they’re not needed
It would be interesting to extract some figures on the average length of sleep allowed to male and to female slaves in the US, and the siestas allowed to them; as well, of course, as any comparable figures for the rest of the Americas.
Especially in the high mortality sugar plantations of the West Indies there could, I hypothesise, have been selection for those able to survive on little sleep without excessively damaging consequences for their health.
Anything known? There doesn’t appear to be enough evidence about Africans to rule out the possibility of the way slaves were treated being a factor.
When blacks are actually asked about sleep and sleep quality, they report fewer problems than whites or Hispanics do.
In 2010 and 2014, the GSS asked respondents how often they’ve had trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep in the past year. The percentages among whites (n = 1,802), blacks (n = 354), and Hispanics (n = 127) who answered either “often” or “sometimes”:
Whites — 57.5%
Hispanics — 55.2%
Blacks — 48.4%
Quoting Malcolm Pollack, “Maybe black people and white people are just, well, different in some way that manifests itself, directly or indirectly, in different sleep patterns?”
Very Bright (IQ > 125)
Weekday: 12:29 am -7:52 am
Weekend: 1:44 am -11:07 am
According to this Americans of above-average intelligence get somewhat less sleep (and stay up later) than less-intelligent Americans: http://elitedaily.com/life/culture/night-owls-creative-intelligent/686025/
Bedtimes and wake-up times for Americans in their 20s by IQ.
Very Dull (IQ < 75)
Weekday: 11:41 pm -7:20 am
Weekend: 12:35 am -10:09 pm
Normal (90 < IQ 125)
Weekday: 12:29 am -7:52 am
Weekend: 1:44 am -11:07 am
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night#Duration_and_geography
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-many-myths-of-paleo-sleeping/410707/
It seems to me being that being asleep is the safest thing to do when it is dark and there are predators and other dangers. You are not going to be able to find food blundering around in the dark, and might easily become food. Long nights would select for sleeping longer. The above linked study found hunter gatherers were woken before dawn by the cold and moved about most in the morning. They avoided the midday sun and that time for taking a nap seems logical.
Where you got the info from? “Siesta” is still a BIG rutine thing in China now.
Med Siesta is for the same purpose as that in China, but for quite a different ends. Both aim at preserving energy level, Med one for fiestas in the mid nights, China one for the better efficiency during the afternoons.
It would be interesting though to see the correlation between avg brain size and the lenghth of sleep hours.
What kind of “inquiring mind” one expects from a scientist starts from a position of “it can’t be biological differences”? Jesus.
I don’t get how the siesta tradition would affect Africans more deeply than it affects Hispanics, Asians and people from the Mediterranean. Siesta was a thing in China up until the ’90s.
Whatever the case, suppose the finding was that whites sleep less than blacks.
Then, the PC police would be saying whites succeed more because they are awake more and sleep less.
PC police would say blacks sleep more because ‘racism’ stresses them out, requiring them to sleep more and do less.
It’s how PC works. No matter what the data, blacks are victims and whits are villains.
Same with whites and Jews. If Jews do bad, the narrative isn’t “Jews did bad” but “whites might have ‘antisemitic’ thoughts about Jews who did bad”, therefore, whites are put on the moral defensive even though it is Jews who did bad. Btw, if lots of Jews do bad and if noticing this fact is ‘antisemitic’, isn’t ‘antisemitism’ a good thing for honestly noticing bad Jewish behavior?
When Wasps had the power and Jews noticed a lot of bad stuff done by Wasps, that was seen as good. So, why is it bad to notice bad Jewish behavior?