I've seen some interesting arguments that 'sleep' is actually the default state of living organisms, and being 'awake' is the temporary altered state evolved on top of that.
> The earliest life forms were unresponsive until they evolved ways to react to their environment, he suggests, and sleep is a return to the default state. “I think we didn’t evolve sleep, we evolved wakefulness.”
While this makes sense, an alternative hypothesis also makes sense: that consciousness just came when the hardware was there, and a standby state for it then evolved afterwards. It's easy to buy if you just postulate that the standby state wasn't actually necessary for a healthy mind at first. We started putting essential functions into that time window after it was there, and now we must sleep, but the original purpose was just a low-power mode to wait for morning or something.
Supporting evidence: horses sleep 2 hours, cats sleep 16, and even humans vary widely in how much sleep they need. That's hard to explain if all of it is fundamentally necessary, but easy to explain if the precise length is irrelevant for biological purposes and that the length was determined by outside factors e.g. how much this species stands to gain from remaining in a low-power state.
I've always marvelled at the huge discrepancy in sleep needs between people; many need 7-8 hrs per night, but some report 4-6 feeling optimal. Anyone care to guess if future technology/medicine might ever be able to improve rest/recovery efficiency to the point that people only need to spend 5-10% of their lifespan unconscious instead of ~30%? Or at least even the playing field so we can all rock 6 hrs and feel amazing?
As far as I understand it you spend 4 hours sleeping, then your subconscious wakes up and spends 4 hours training itself based on new data acquired during the day, and then your consciousness wakes up and shuts down the training in order to execute for the next day. So I'm not sure that reducing sleep to just 4 hours would help, it is enough to survive and stay alert throughout the day but probably not optimal.
Edit: I also think that this is why you get tired when you sleep too much, your subconsciousness will run exhausting mental training when your consciousness is asleep so sleeping when your subconsciousness is alert makes you more tired.
Afaik, when they actually measure people performance, nobody works optimally on 4-6 hours of sleep a night. People may claim whatever or ignore the feeling, but sleep deprivation affects them still.
I’m betting that improving measurement tools and understanding the subtler points of what sleep does and how to influence it will bring the ability for people generally to get higher quality sleep and ultimately need less.
to be honest, I think this is all solely due to caffeine. I sleep 5-6h if I'm on caffeine, I sleep 8-9h if I'm off caffeine. When I first started drinking caffeinated drinks at age ~23 (yes really), I had a short period where I could still sleep full nights but eventually I was always down to 6h.
In my opinion most people don't attribute any of these sleep changes to caffeine because they've been on caffeine for a long time, never fully stop and when you are younger it doesn't have this effect yet or immediately.
I don't think this is likely. It's well known that caffeine disrupts sleep and that you therefore need to spend more rather than less time in bed to get the same rest.
This sort of makes sense, as unnecessary movement drains energy. It seems counterintuitive, then, that sleep has survived for so long, but the forces pushing for it must be strong.
It does seem rather coincidental that we sleep for 7-9 hours, which is the majority of the dark time, during which wakefulness would only expend energy with little gain (thinking of apes instead of modern humans)
I pushed myself to try this one summer in college when I was working in a lab that needed things to be checked on at odd hours. I ended up severely sleep deprived, but it was fun to try and debunk it at least for myself.
Polyphasic sleep worked for me but was extremely fragile. As in a slight deviation in schedule would ruin my life for days. It seems like the funny sleep schedules are things that work for some people in pretty narrow circumstances but with significant drawbacks.
I think over time it became more clear that the few people who were able to do it, enjoy it, and keep it going, were physically or genetically unusual in some way. No matter how well they described their approach, most physically can’t copy them.
Biphasic sleep is still quite popular but it tends to be framed as taking a nap rather than as a 24-hour sleep regimen.
> Biphasic sleep is still quite popular but it tends to be framed as taking a nap rather than as a 24-hour sleep regimen.
That's right! here in the warmer and highly humid states of Mexico (mainly in the Yucatan peninsula) the Siesta is very popular. A lot of people sleep between 3pm and 5pm (when the heat and humidity are higher) and wake up early in the morning around 5pm . I never got used to sleep siesta, as always woke up groggy.
Another valuable lesson I got from that rabbit hole is that a "segmented" night's sleep is actually nothing to get upset over. If you wake up in the middle of the night, it doesn't indicate anything is wrong, and you can spend an hour reading by candlelight before returning to sleep, and it won't affect your restedness in the morning. Unscientific source: https://www.polyphasic.net/segmented-sleep/
I tried it for ~six months during undergrad, mid-'00s. I didn't feel sleep deprived but I disliked feeling so out of sync with everyone else.
My biggest complaint was the feeling of time being seamless. My six sleeping periods were all of the same length, so I sort of lost the feeling of a concrete 'yesterday' or 'tomorrow'.
I had a very similar experience. IIRC I did 90 minute naps every 4 hours for a week. My first full night of sleep after a week of 90 minute naps felt like waking up after one really extremely long and weird day.
I got caught up in the fad and tried hard at polyphasic/uberman in 2005, for like six months. It would almost work, but I didn’t feel good, and once in a while instead of waking up after 20mins it would be more like 12 hours and I’d feel even worse. I read somewhere that schedules like that were developed to temporarily get people through life-and-death situations where a long sleep just isn’t possible, and was never meant to be a lifestyle, and I never tried it again.
I had a few friends at university who got really into polyphasic sleep. Turns out college is a terrible time to set your schedule with that much discipline.
I’ve read (sorry no sources, about to go to sleep) that that turned out to not be a super scientific thing, and that while some people might’ve gotten temporary placebo benefits out of davinci naps, it didn’t turn into long term sustainable gains in overall energy.
I say this as I’m about to do 48 hours with 10 hours of sleep, but I’m doing this to hit a really cool deadline, and I’m not under the illusion that this is sustainable.
While i was in university at some point we had to program a compiler in C for our computer's class. I remember many sleepless nights with my friends and alone implementing that. I had a blast and had no problem doing those kind of cycles. Now I'm 40 and dont think I'll do it ever again. But at the time it was thrilling.
Fun things you really care about? I once spent almost three days straight writing some VJ software for a music festival I was performing at. Really cool… still a deadline.
Right. Same thing I think happened with Soylent nutrition.
I wonder what other health fads are there. It would make a good docu to follow someone like Supersize me! But doing all those health fads together for some time.
Great infographic. I love how 2nd icon for "Typical sleep posture or sleep place" takes over the 3rd row as well. Seems like some design trade-offs were well served.
That makes it sound like it isn't also the 3rd row... like you could have said that backwards also? I would have said "how the 2nd and 3rd icons are connected into a single design", which isn't really a "tradeoff".
> In three other points their physiology differed strangely from ours. Their organisms did not sleep, any more than the heart of man sleeps. Since they had no extensive muscular mechanism to recuperate, that periodical extinction was unknown to them. They had little or no sense of fatigue, it would seem. On earth they could never have moved without effort, yet even to the last they kept in action. In twenty-four hours they did twenty-four hours of work, as even on earth is perhaps the case with the ants.
I played around with Mutation Planet (an evolution simulator) on my old iPad and one of the interesting things was how critical the ‘nop’ instruction was to creatures’ survival. At first the faster creatures always won but as population increased and food become more scarce the balance shifted and the lazier/more efficient creatures thrived while the faster ones starved.
TL;DR there's some interesting background, but no real story here
> Will the orange sponges be the next creatures to stun the sleep skeptics? Maybe not right away. Joiner and Rouse couldn’t keep their sponges healthy long enough to carry out reliable experiments. After months of fits and starts, they paused the work to rethink the set up. Then, COVID-19 hit and shut the experiment down. Joiner doesn’t have the staff to start it back up. But another sponge may step in instead to show that even the simplest animals truly sleep. In emails, Itoh coyly referred to his lab’s work on these simple creatures. Mum’s the word for now, it seems. “These are ongoing projects,” he wrote. “Please look forward to them.”
