Any thoughts on polyphasic sleeping? My gut reaction was that it's pseudo-science, but I had similar reactions to meditation, and advanced mnemonics. It turns out the former allows well trained individuals to self-immolate in complete stillness, and the latter to memorize a deck of cards as fast as you can flip through them.
Some individuals have mutations which allow them to sleep for very limited amounts of time while remaining fully alert. A family friend is included among these, needing only four hours of sleep or so to be a successful dean at a large state school.
Polyphasic sleeping with a reduction in overall hours to potentially as low as four hours (and rarely lower) is known to be possible in the medium-term, seemingly without severe negative consequences for cognition even for those without adapted genetics. It's not clear what the long-term effects would be, and if it's overall beneficial if you're attempting to maximize aggregate thinking ability.
i've seen it done, and the man was the wealthiest individual i've ever met
The science behind polyphasic sleeping revolves around the mind's circadian rhythms. During a day cycle, the mind will enter various and distinct phases where the different brain phases result in different brain wave activity. The important part about sleeping is that the brain needs to achieve the state where it produces delta waves. It's quite possible to retrain your circadian rhythm to intentionally get into deep sleep mode, the mode where the brain produces delta waves. This is the reasoning of how a polyphasic sleep pattern is supposed to work.
It turns out that as long as we get enough good quality (delta brain wave) sleep, the 8 hour window of traditional sleep isn't strictly necessary as we can proportion the good quality sleep throughout the day.
>>2,3
If the feds on http://textboard.org are pushing it must be p. nasty then neh?
Please try to ignore troll posts.
I always surprises me how little is actually known about the human body.
>>2 neat.
>>3
In my limited understanding I took delta-waves to be produced by all NREM sleep and the objective to be reducing NREM1 and NREM2 while still allowing for NREM3 or SWS sleep, and REM sleep. I've no idea what these things are though and why there would be uneccessary steps in there.
>>5 No you.
I spent a burt-out afternoon reading about this sort of thing and what I'm likely to do is just improve my "sleep hygeine" by avoiding artificial illumenation, and sleeping on my back. Rather than consciously change my sleep schedule I'm just going to more or less roll with whatever I feel like beyond trying to not deviate too dramatically at once or taking a nap in the evening or early morning.
Have you read this? It should help you with falling asleep, one way or the other: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Science_of_polyphasic_sleep
https://stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/03/polyphasic-sleep-one-year-later/