Sleeping problems can be avoided: Sleep as a drive

Our definition of the influence that learning has on drives is more easily understandable in other areas of human behavior in which drive and instinct are factors. Applied to the drive to eat, it means, for example, that we do not have to eat the very moment we are hungry. We can suppress the drive to eat because we have learned to suppress it. We do not have to give in to an aggressive impulse; we can direct it, suppress it, or divert (transform) it to other impulses. The same applies to the sex drive or to the instinct for danger and protection. Again applied to the drive toward sleep, this means that among humans sleep is instinctual behavior that can be guided by a learning process.

Zoologists, biologists, and anthropologists have repeatedly asked why instincts and drives among humans do not have the imperative, absolute quality that they have among animals. The drives toward mating, aggression, hunting, and the chase, for example, all have such imperative status.

Portmann has attempted the most convincing explanation of this phenomenon. His formulation refers to man's "physiologically premature birth" as the reason that man, in terms of instinct, is the weakest living creature on earth. If the term of pregnancy for the human embryo were comparably as long as among other mammals, pregnancy would have to last two years. If humans were carried to such a term, all sense organs would be fully

developed, and the newborn would be able to sit, stand, and walk, would already have bladder control, and would even be somewhat able to speak. He would, as the saying goes, be ready to flee the nest (Portmann).

Since this is not the case, however, maturation among humans must take place outside the uterus. As a result, the human being is exposed during an extremely impressionable time to particularly strong environmental stimuli that have a profound and formative influence on him. Man's instincts and drives are also subject during development to powerful external environmental influence.

In this manner, the human being loses the condition of being imperatively bound to instinct and becomes "open to the world" (Portmann). He is exposed to environmental influences. But this also means that he can learn. The development of the cerebrum, the center of our rational capacities, has not similarly taken place among animals. The possibility of environmental influence is greatly increased by the development of the cerebrum and, as a consequence, what has been learned can also be intellectually understood and retained.

*2\340\2*