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?
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.
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?
