

Sleep (or how to hack your brain) - Ideka
http://www.dustincurtis.com/sleep.html

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rileyjm
The article makes for an interesting read, however, I am not entirely
convinced that "polyphasic sleep" is necessarily effective or healthy. The
article states that, "There’s no clearly defined biological reason for it, and
it is intuitively an evolutionary disadvantage." This type of reasoning makes
me believe that longer sleep periods are healthy and required, otherwise we
would have evolved beyond that disadvantage. Dolphins have somewhat evolved
beyond the "disadvantage" of sleep by remaining conscious in one half of their
brain while they sleep. Granted... that is due to having to surface to breath,
which is a circumstance humans do not have to cope with. Another point I
noticed regarding this article that seemed a bit strange, is that the more
"standard/normal" sleep cycles require only four REM cycles, while the
"everyman-4 nap" or "uberman" require five and six REM cycles. If REM is the
only relevant sleep cycle, shouldn't only four cycles be necessary across all
sleep patterns?

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sgentle
I hate to be the lone voice crying out for science, but has anyone actually
ever seen any evidence that the "uberman" sleep schedule is possible? Has
anyone ever done it successfully for a long period of time and written about
it? Have any studies ever been done on it? And if so, where are these facts
and why do they get less attention than blog posts advocating the idea in
abstract, or as a cool new thing someone's _about_ to do but hasn't seen
results from yet?

At this point, I think all this polyphasic uber-nonsense needs to be relegated
to the "bread crusts make your hair curly" department where it belongs.

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donnaware
Isn't that what supposedly Edison did, take cat naps and then go back to work?
He probably did not know anything about REM and Polyphasic, maybe just
discovered he was more productive that way?

