Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Shadrach]

I thought the bit about unihemispheric slow wave sleep was particularly interesting. USWS is something I've talked about before because I think it's really cool, but I never considered the role it could play in resting on one leg. If one leg is controlled by the "awake" hemisphere and one is controlled by the "asleep" hemisphere, it seems intuitive to balance on one leg rather than coordinate both of them together.

An interesting sidebar on this: birds are capable of unihemispheric sleep because unlike eutherian mammals, which are the only animals with a corpus callosum, birds have no equivalent structure connecting the two hemispheres of the brain. The communication between these hemispheres is much more limited than with us. It's interesting to think about how their perspectives/consciousness might differ from ours. Is each bird really a pair of intimately connected individuals? I guess nobody is sure.

Further reading if anyone's interested:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7116194/

Not too sure about the model they've constructed but nice that academia is catching up with what some of us have known for a while now.