Question: hello, do animals have similar sleep patterns to us?

Yousef Alqurashi answered on 5 Nov 2018:

What a great question!! The answer is yes and no at the same time. Yes because we know that all mammals sleep in way or another similar to humans. No, because the pattern of sleep and the system that responsible for sleep in some animals are different. It basically differed from animal to animal. Take for example rats, rats have similar sleep patterns to us and they require some sort of rest in ordered to improve their learning memory, exactly like human. However, some animals, like dolphins, sleep with half of their brain. Brown bats sleep for nearly the entire day.Giraffes can go without sleep for weeks. They really vary but the sleep is a fundamental part of their life span. In term of dreams, it is almost impossible to know if animals dream or not because we only know if some one dream or not is by asking them. This is is almost impossible to know in animals.