I'm talking about the sleep schedule in which you take many short naps over the course of the day, and by doing so cut out the less useful stages of sleep and keep just the REM.

The idea of having 3+ extra hours of immersion per day is certainly very tempting, but with many people's work and school schedules it might not be practical.


What do you think?

Practical? It's downright impossible. You can't do any form of work which takes more than 4 hours, unless you're allowed to sleep in the middle of it. What makes polyphasic sleep work is exact sleeping patterns, down to the minute. If you run a schedule where you're up for a few hours and then sleep for 15 minutes, you may not sleep ANY more or less than that. Not 20 and not 10 minutes, or you're messing up the whole schedule and will fall out of it.

I know a few people who achieved this during college - for a few weeks, anyway. You will be dead (figuratively speaking) the first week or two, but if you stick with it, it really does work. Until you get sick, that is - while you can rest your brain on a polyphasic sleep cycle, you don't give your body enough time to recover from even a minor illness.

(Edit: not literally dead...)

Polyphasic sleep is suited for crisis situations where you cannot afford to sleep for 6-10 hours at a stretch like normal: military and humanitarian operations, sailboat racing, that sort of thing. You pay a price for it: decreased memory performance and creativity--which are exactly the skills you need to acquire a language.

Bad juju. Language is memory plus practice. Memory is sleep. 45 minutes of healthy sleep is more important than squeezing in another episode of Gokusen.

Don't trust me. Trust the guy who eats, sleeps, and breathes SRS.

Dr. Wozniak, creator of SuperMemo Wrote:Some people like firefighters or emergency surgeons may sacrifice their sleep for the sake of others. Most of the remaining population though will optimize their sleep for best health and best creative performance during the waking time. Polyphasic sleep is definitely not the answer to such optimization goals.

....

Why less is more? Because by giving your brain as much sleep as it wants, you can be far more creative and productive in your waking time. Not just far more. In a polyphasic sleeper, the creativity may dip by an order of magnitude. Its like with top performance sports. Wrong timing of a dinner may cost Lance Armstrong his yellow jersey. Do not let yourself be marginalized in the race for intellectual excellence!

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm

EDIT:

Couldn't pass this line up. Same article:

"The same testosterone-derived characteristics that drive man to leadership, war, or dreams of super-human accomplishment underlie the polyphasic death wish."

Seriously, bad idea. If you do it, take copious notes so we can laugh at--erm, with you when it's all over.

nest0r Wrote:I'm of the opinion that polyphasic sleep is one of those silly self-improvement memes (such-and-such famous figure did this!) that got out of hand via bloggers. Here's an interesting exchange that cites Claudio Stampi, though I'm too lazy to read his articles for myself: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960176

Here's a copy of Stampi's out-of-print book, which apparently has no chance of being reprinted: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6ICZ6T27 - Supposedly he compares polyphasic and regular sleep here, finds the former lacking except in times of sleep deprivation or somesuch.

I did some reading of that book, I suggest going through and checking out the bits about REM/SWS and circadian rhythms. Keep in mind it's from the early '90s (the research seems to be mostly from the '70s and '80s).

"However, the author would like to caution against misleading interpre-
tations of these conclusions. What is being proposed here is not that
polyphasic sleep is preferable to monophasic sleep, nor that everyone
should now switch to a multiple napping behavior 'panacea.'

... Should adult humans be forced to reduce sleep by considerable amounts,
polyphasic sleep may be more efficient than monophasic sleep. Unfortu-
nately, experimental evidence for this hypothesis is limited to a handful of
preliminary studies; this, in turn, may allow for some speculation on the
matter."

IceCream Wrote:nest0r... does it say anything about breaking sleep into a couple or 3 blocks a day? would that be harmful, or wouldn't it matter?

It goes into a 'dizzying array' of combinations, you could skim through. Apparently not much research into polyphasic sleep has been done because it's considered inhumane or something? I feel like there must be more current studies somewhere. Not that I think we'll get many different answers than are in that book, aside from better knowledge about sleep stages and the effects of sleep deprivation.

Is it just me or did all of you guys get into this sleep-thinking mode after hearing that Aijin sleeps only 3 hours each day.

IceCream Wrote:It also says that naturally we have 2 major sleep urges that occur roughly 2 times a day, 12 hours apart, although one of them is overridable.

Sounds like those siestas they do in Spain.

You guys are cute.

If you can get into a habit of meditating a few hours a day, sleep becomes less important (not speaking from experience). I have talked to several people who have gone through the traditional 40 month retreat every lama must experience. Each participant is only allowed to sleep between the hours of midnight and 4am. Even then, they must sleep sitting up. I commented that I could never endure the sleep requirements (much less the other 20 hours each day of intense practice). They all say it doesn't feel like they are deprived of sleep at all and feel fully alert throughout the day.

I've always thought polyphasic sleep was interesting and I wanted to try it, but... I can't take naps. I'm just not a person who can sleep during the day.

liosama Wrote:Is it just me or did all of you guys get into this sleep-thinking mode after hearing that Aijin sleeps only 3 hours each day.

Well, someone mentioned polyphasic sleep in that thread, and it's something that's come up before w/o much evidence to back it up, so I decided to look up that book to confirm/challenge my own skepticism and clarify what it might be usful for. Then I guess someone else read the thread and decided to make this thread--and I feared they may have missed my link, so I reposted to counter their potentially uncritical acceptance of the idea that there's more REM/less delta, etc., when doing polyphasic.

bodhisamaya Wrote:If you can get into a habit of meditating a few hours a day, sleep becomes less important (not speaking from experience). I have talked to several people who have gone through the traditional 40 month retreat every lama must experience. Each participant is only allowed to sleep between the hours of midnight and 4am. Even then, they must sleep sitting up. I commented that I could never endure the sleep requirements (much less the other 20 hours each day of intense practice). They all say it doesn't feel like they are deprived of sleep at all and feel fully alert throughout the day.

Could be religious zealotry. Or not, but it's possible. Just like people who claim they feel much better after being healed by a Priest from a shady church. Religious belief + placebo can probably get you quite far. However, as far as 40 months seems a stretch so it probably helps a fair bit. I've personally experienced on several occasions that just resting can be a half-way decent substitute to sleep in some situations.

I might have the 6 hour gene, unfortunately I'm so lazy that I have a hard time getting up in the morning anyway. When I was traveling in Asia for 1 month and a half, I slept probably less than 6 hours on average since we traveled almost every day, but while I looked tired I didn't feel it at all.

My girlfriend probably has a 15 hour gene. If I don't wake her, she can sleep infinitely.

I read that humans are naturally biphasic when it comes to sleep. The chemical that induces sleep is released at night and in the afternoon.

I also read that Winston Churchill would stay up till 3 AM every night in his bed working on things, sleep 4 hours, then almost always took a 2-3 hour nap around 3 PM.

I recall it also saying that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to sleep for 12 hours for 3 days after spending time with Churchill because the man was full of energy.

I can't quote this one though but found the article interesting.

Tobberoth, out of curiosity, is your girlfriend Japanese? My wife and many of my friends' Japanese girlfriends also have the infinite sleep cycle if left undisturbed.

For me personally my sleep cycle usual requires me sleeping large amounts. If i get 9-10 im usual full of energy and don't become tired until late night. Getting 7-8 is usual the regular amount of sleeping. But for me i'm known for sleeping through a lot of things. Such as thunderstorms. I'm usual a deep sleeper. I'm not the type of person who likes to take naps, well only when deadly tired. But they always mess up my sleeping pattern. It usual means sleeping like around 3-5 am if i take naps during the day-time.

We already have a solution to getting less sleep and doing more work.

Coffee

Drink up my friends.

I'm not a coffee person. I don't like that drink for some reason. Just tastes weird to me. I'd prefer some hot chocolate or pop. But pop itself isn't good in excess amounts, so much acidic carbonic drinks out there...

hereticalrants Wrote:but with many people's work and school schedules it might not be practical.

"might"

hahaha

The older I have gotten, the less sleep I seem to need. When I was in high school, I would sleep more than 10 hours a night. I average about six hours now. If I get more, I feel sluggish.

splitting your sleep up into multiple parts per day, is called polyphasic sleep. the type of polyphasic schedule often talked about where you sleep for maybe 20 min at a time, totaling maybe 4 hrs a day, is called ultrashort polyphasic sleep.

stampi's researched showed an improvement after 2 weeks on the schedule over baseline values in tests of memory and processing speed. i don't find this too surprising: memory is consolidated during sleep and since there is less information to process, it's more efficient; and (after the initial sleep inertia) you are more alert, refreshed, and can focus better.

i think it's promising, but it's extremely difficult for most people to get on the schedule, and to function in society on this schedule.

i would be very interested in research on biphasic schedules without extreme sleep deprivation. 4 hrs plus 1-3 hr nap doesn't seem too inconvenient and possibly quite beneficial.

radical_tyro Wrote:splitting your sleep up into multiple parts per day, is called polyphasic sleep. the type of polyphasic schedule often talked about where you sleep for maybe 20 min at a time, totaling maybe 4 hrs a day, is called ultrashort polyphasic sleep.

stampi's researched showed an improvement after 2 weeks on the schedule over baseline values in tests of memory and processing speed. i don't find this too surprising: memory is consolidated during sleep and since there is less information to process, it's more efficient; and (after the initial sleep inertia) you are more alert, refreshed, and can focus better.

i think it's promising, but it's extremely difficult for most people to get on the schedule, and to function in society on this schedule.

i would be very interested in research on biphasic schedules without extreme sleep deprivation. 4 hrs plus 1-3 hr nap doesn't seem too inconvenient and possibly quite beneficial.

The research you seem to be referring to is on p. 202 of the .pdf I linked early in the thread. He says that w/ those tests, while one showed prolonged decrements until after a 'free' day for sleeping several weeks in, and the other test showed two weeks of decrements followed by improvement, neither the decrements nor the improvements relative to the baseline were statistically significant. Keep in mind this was also one person in the '70s or whatever [correction: late '80s/early '90s]. Based on the other stuff in the book, the breakdown of how the circadian rhythm and SWS/REM are affected, and current research, I still get the impression that polyphasic is promising if you're forced to a reduced sleep schedule, but monophasic (possibly with occasional power naps ;p) is better overall.

Honestly, a lot of the studies in that book I'm iffy about even considering, because it doesn't seem they've been replicated, it's just one subject or a relative handful decades ago, and that's it. The rest is the echo chamber of bloggers. How about I irresponsibly suggest that some RevTKers try polyphasic sleep and tell us our how their Anki stats change? ;p

bodhisamaya Wrote:If you can get into a habit of meditating a few hours a day, sleep becomes less important (not speaking from experience). I have talked to several people who have gone through the traditional 40 month retreat every lama must experience. Each participant is only allowed to sleep between the hours of midnight and 4am. Even then, they must sleep sitting up. I commented that I could never endure the sleep requirements (much less the other 20 hours each day of intense practice). They all say it doesn't feel like they are deprived of sleep at all and feel fully alert throughout the day.

Sorry to play Devil's advocate here, but I remember reading some studies that showed that often they simply fell asleep while meditating although they usually deny having done so !

One thing worth noting is that especially when you are in light sleep you may not necessarily be aware that you are asleep, so I'm not implying that the people were necessarily consciously being deceptive.

When I was at college I took a neuroscience class taught by an expert on sleep, he recounted an anecdote from one of his experiments to illustrate this point. The subjects needed to stay awake for a certain period of time before they were allowed to sleep (I can't remember the exact point of the experiment). Their EEG was monitored in another room and if they started to fall asleep they got buzzed on an intercom and told not to fall asleep. One of the subjects was a body-builder and he kept falling asleep. The experimenter had to keep buzzing him and telling him not to fall asleep. However since he was only in a light sleep the subject believed he was still awake. Eventually since he kept getting buzzed the subject flew into a rage and starting smashing up all the equipment in the room. The experimenter rushed into the room and he himself was assaulted, and I believe he ended up having to call the cops.

MeNoSavvy Wrote:Eventually since he kept getting buzzed the subject flew into a rage and starting smashing up all the equipment in the room. The experimenter rushed into the room and he himself was assaulted, and I believe he ended up having to call the cops.

I fell out of my chair laughing
ahahhahahhahahha

MeNoSavvy Wrote:

bodhisamaya Wrote:If you can get into a habit of meditating a few hours a day, sleep becomes less important (not speaking from experience). I have talked to several people who have gone through the traditional 40 month retreat every lama must experience. Each participant is only allowed to sleep between the hours of midnight and 4am. Even then, they must sleep sitting up. I commented that I could never endure the sleep requirements (much less the other 20 hours each day of intense practice). They all say it doesn't feel like they are deprived of sleep at all and feel fully alert throughout the day.

Sorry to play Devil's advocate here, but I remember reading some studies that showed that often they simply fell asleep while meditating although they usually deny having done so !

One thing worth noting is that especially when you are in light sleep you may not necessarily be aware that you are asleep, so I'm not implying that the people were necessarily consciously being deceptive.

The Tibetan meditation posture is a little strict with shoulders back, spine straight and the eyes open. The moment a monk began to slouch it would be easily detected and corrected.
Though, I was in the Army 20 years ago and can attest it is possible to even sleep standing up.