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[nutballs]

I am considering adopting a polyphasic sleep pattern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
where you sleep 20 minutes every 4 hours.
this results in 6 extra hours a day of awake time.
maybe then I could actually get some shit done.
Work at night play at day.

The only real down side i can think of is that without work there is absolutely dick-all to do at 3am. tv sucks. cant do anything loud cause it would wake the wife and kid. video games bore me. I guess I could join a 24 hour gym and workout, but that is only an hour. hmm, quiet hobbies, like circuit building.

I can't seem to find any studies of it, which personally I find really weird. Only personal experiences, which all sound mostly promising, except for the lonelyness (40 extra hours a week of being the only person awake sounds like it gets lonely).

anyone ever consider doing this? even for 6 months that would give me an extra 1000 hours to get shit done.

[perkiset]

Well first off, think of all the extra time you'd have for porn & masterbation - that alone is almost reason enough for the experiment.

Seriously, I'm exhausted enough as it is and can't imagine dicking with my sleep any more than I do, which is simply to not get nearly enough. Don't worry, the little one will soon have you doing No-Phasic sleep soon enough.

On a more intriguing bent, I wonder if that would help or hinder ADD? I speculate that at first it would be horrible, but perhaps after the work-in period, since you're always closer to your last relaxation period, you might actually get a natural decrease in bright light syndrome. Maybe. Or perhaps you'd just fuck yourself into a hole in the ground and beg for someone to kill you. Just sayin.

[nutballs]

actually from everything I have read, polyphasic sleep schedule tends to get your more "sleep" since most of the time in monophasic sleep is rampup an rampdown time. In polyphasic your brain stops "fucking around" and just gets straight to REM.

As for ADD, I thought that as well. I really don't know, and it could go either way depending on what my actual cause is. My gut is that it will help, since I will have 4 hour chunks to deal with, instead of 16 hours in 1 chunk. It could help to compartmentalize my modes of thought. 4 hours, im gonna play some games. 4 hours work. 4 hours tv (bad example...). 4 hours of porn. etc etc. 1 task per segment. Though most of my segments would be either work or baby.

[vsloathe]

It definitely works. I used to do it in college.

Your first few weeks you will be tired all the time, but after you get used to it your energy will go through the roof. And every 4 hours, if you break the cycle, your brain will say "TIME TO GO TO SLEEP" and it will be *really* hard not to.

[perkiset]

OK, old guy shows his paranoia about different ways of thinking moment:

Doesn't the notion of fucking around with something as basic as our evolutionarily developed circadian rhythm dick with you a little? Just because you can make it work, is it really more healthy or better? And what are the long term benefits/risks? It's becoming more and more clear that not enough or too much sleep are actually detrimental to life expectancy and/or disease triggers, so how can we know (today) that doing something like that for 4 years wont just seriously ratfuck us later? Of late, I get more worried about "being around" to see my kids and their kids... so I find myself more paranoid about life-altering things (and substances  ) ...

[vsloathe]

You're operating on the assumption that we evolved the tendency to sleep the way we do and it's not a product of synthetic elements of our environment (e.g. a day job, I would argue that the 9-5 did not evolve as a survival mechanism for the species )

[nop_90]

evolution wise people probably where designed to sleep in several small series of time.
example look how dogs sleep etc.
humans would have to be constantly alert etc.

[nutballs]

i agree with everyone. lol

my initial concern was that I would be fucking with forces i shouldnt fuck with. but then I did some research and found out that at the very minimum, the most common circadian rhythm is 6 at night, 2 midday, thus siestas in so much of the world.

Though... sleep research with chimps result in an average of around 8 hours of sleep per night. So... that kinda makes me wonder if it actually is a natural mode for us.

what I have also found is that polysleep is not sleep deprivation. Its just moving around and condensing the parts that matter (in theory).

The survival aspect of small sleep makes sense. the less you sleep the less chance there is for getting suddenly eaten by something. Though in the same respect, it would also increase your calorie requirements, which could be very bad for prehistoric man.

I would assume that we would have better night vision if we were meant to be up at night. Its better than most people realize, but... it aint what my dog has. so thats a strike against evolution.

I could go about this as a complete experiment. Talk with my doc, get some baseline bloodwork and anything else he can think of, do it, start sleeping like a weirdo, then get regular retests to see whats going on. Ironically I think my numbers would get better, since I would probably lose weight... lol

[perkiset]

Biologically, the Pituitary gland secretes Melotonin when the body clock says sleep, but it is greatly enhanced by darkness and inhibited by light. And as NBs points out, our eyes would be better at night if we were designed to be more nocturnal. This would lead me to believe that evolution chose a monophasic sleep rhythm for us and ergo, my concern.

[thedarkness]

I sleep when I'm tired and wake up some time after that.

Cheers,
td

[nutballs]

my understanding is that melatonin helps to initiate sleep, but does not partake in the regulation. So a quick squirt from my pit and poof im tired at the 4 hour mark.

A thought i had about night vision is actually that we can see movement pretty well, even at night. So to see something coming towards you is possible. You cant hunt at night, but you can defend i think. I also realized that our eyes cannot be like geordi from startrek, seeing everything possible, so evolution forced some choices. Color, to identify berries, check! motion acuity to track prey/pred, check! high contrast range, check! wide color gamut, check! infrared... meh UV.... meh. Dogs for example sacrifice color acuity for IR (narrow ir). They also have a reflective membrane to double the light impact on the receptors. But that comes at a price of contrast from what I understand. Its all a balancing act, and I wonder if its a false assumption to say, if we were meant to be up at night we would see in the dark. Kind of like, if we were meant to fly we would have wings (i flew for xmas with no problem...).

[jammaster82]

Polyphasic sleep works for me but the 20 minutes needs to be 90
for one full cycle and when i wake up i feel the alpha waves flowing
and like i am at my best..

Didnt Kramer try this on Seinfeld?

[vsloathe]

If I want to solve a difficult problem, I go to sleep. I will usually wake up a few hours later right after a little time in REM and have the answer.

Unfortunately, my profs never used to let me take math tests that way 

[perkiset]

my understanding is that melatonin helps to initiate sleep, but does not partake in the regulation. So a quick squirt from my pit and poof im tired at the 4 hour mark.

The continued dispensing of melotonin helps keep you in sleep so that you can hit REM etc. My point here was that it is dark that triggers the pit and light and inhibits it, pointing towards a daytripper as opposed to a nocturnal beast.

A thought i had about night vision is actually that we can see movement pretty well, even at night. So to see something coming towards you is possible. You cant hunt at night, but you can defend i think. I also realized that our eyes cannot be like geordi from startrek, seeing everything possible, so evolution forced some choices. Color, to identify berries, check! motion acuity to track prey/pred, check! high contrast range, check! wide color gamut, check! infrared... meh UV.... meh. Dogs for example sacrifice color acuity for IR (narrow ir). They also have a reflective membrane to double the light impact on the receptors. But that comes at a price of contrast from what I understand. Its all a balancing act, and I wonder if its a false assumption to say, if we were meant to be up at night we would see in the dark. Kind of like, if we were meant to fly we would have wings (i flew for xmas with no problem...).

Evolutionary choices, no doubt - why do nocturnal animals have such good noses? Because eyes are relatively useless at night. Dogs have about 1000x the human capability when it comes to smell and memory of smell - this is because they DO hunt at night. I think evolution chose detailed daylight-oriented vision because that's what worked best for us... and since we need REM do commit our memories, the evolutionary derivative of a daylight-orientation makes sense on a lot of levels.

This is not to say that it wont work - I just put lights in my jeep that were NEVER intended for it, yet they work just fine. It is entirely possible that we can modify how our systems work and keep things well within the tolerances of what we need to function and prosper... it just creeps me out a bit. And I have little confidence that I'd be disciplined enough to do it - I'd want to sleep in all Saturday. And what about the lazy nap right after a life threatning orgasm? Sacrifice that? Are you kidding me?

[jammaster82]

inside the earth there are mole people.

i have excellent night vision.  ;p   

and for evolution, its no longer survival of the
fittest... modern science is more concerned
with conquering hair loss and prolonging erections.

see: pomegranate juice.

SO intelligent people are waiting to have babies
and jerry springers audiences babies mamas
are now babies grandmamas.. And Steve
is running the show but hes just one of them.
Not that I watch...

If we were frozen and thawed in 500 years we would
sound pompous and faggy to them because
you could call them all and just use this
to talk to them:

http://www.pchealthprofessionals.com/fun/ebonics2.swf

see: Dvd - Idiocracy

So evolutionarily, we are headed towards
a dumbing down and masses of monster
track jams being held on top of mountains
of trash and that will be even 'more better'.

Thats what im talkin' 'bout.

JM