Polyphasic Sleep Seed Study: Reprise

Matt Fallshaw's 2012 presentation to minicamp on polyphasic said that it trades flexibility for time - you sleep less, but you must follow a rigid schedule. It's possible that the military need too much flexibility to make it practical.

I'd have thought that the military would at least shy away from Uberman polyphasic because getting enough sleep on that schedule is very fragile-- if there's an emergency, there's much less reserves than for people who sleep in larger chunks.

I have indeed heard many rumors of the military running fascinating sleep experiments. But I've not had much luck getting access to their results, let alone the details of methodology and such. I admit, however, that I've spent less time and effort looking for them than I should have. If you happen to have illuminating links, please share them!

Polyphasic is useless for the military IMHO.

Its not flexible. Pilots are less useful if they must be sleeping on multiple rigid times.

Its risky. Because if you lose a nap you are fucked. And this is exactly the type of screw-up the military likes least. You train people to stay functional under duress. Not to be germless lab pigs that fall like a feather missing a nap.

I just meant the schedule. I've taken to calling it a diet since I'm avoiding it sortof the way people do with food.

The Zeo. It isn't designed to handle short naps, so you have to manually copy down the data right after a nap into a spreadsheet or notebook or something.

The graph is a little misleading on how long it takes to recover, I'd say, since the falling out part was due to being quite sick. There is also an important additional note, which is that on E3 so far, I'm getting way less REM than I used to get with normal sleep (see plot of my baseline data below). As I eventually concluded with Uberman, it really seems like the standard E3 schedule has no possible way of giving me the amount of REM that I used to get (over two hours per night on nights when I would sleep 8-8.5 hours and feel well rested), so I'm going to test a diet that will take 5.5 hours rather than 4, but will have a legitimate chance of matching my baseline numbers for REM and SWS (slow wave sleep). This would beat my normal sleep time goal of 8 hours by 2.5 hours a day, but would include lots of naps, so it's yet to be seen if it is worth it. It will come down to whether I turn out to be able to take advantage of several 30-60 minute waking periods that are part of the rotation I'm going to try.

for

subconscious learning (there are some posts on LW about the habit to reflect the lessons of the day before sleep) I just stumbled over this study:

Memory reactivation and consolidation during sleep, 2004 by Ken A. Paller1 and Joel L. Voss

http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/11/6/664.abstract

which argues:

We propose that declarative memories change both during waking and during sleep, and that such change contributes to enhancing binding of the distinct representational components of some memories, and thus to a gradual process of cross-cortical consolidation. As a result of this special form of consolidation, declarative memories can become more cohesive and also more thoroughly integrated with other stored information. Further benefits of this memory reprocessing can include developing complex networks of interrelated memories, aligning memories with long-term strategies and goals, and generating insights based on novel combinations of memory fragments.

Maybe you could just release the raw Zeo data?

Still nothing?

I looked into this at some point, and the reports I found of people who had actually tried this seemed to mostly say that it was horrible if you actually tried to keep up with it. It's probably a bad idea to go mess with the 24-hour cycle unless if it's not broken to begin with.

One possibility I'm thinking of is to have the two core sleeps around the workday, for example 4 to 8:30 sleep, then 9 to 17 work, then 17:30 to 19:30 sleep and a 20 minute nap sometimes around 23.

This is good to hear, because 6hrs is definitely better than 8hrs. However, evidence of sustained cognitive performance quality is even more important to me on this sort of schedule, because we already know that many people on swing shifts (and in, say, grad school) seldom sleep more than six hours a day, and often in separate chunks, but we also know that both the short-term and long-term effects of this sort of chronic partial sleep deprivation are detrimental. If someone's only sleeping two-hours a day and is still able to talk, it seems much more likely that something strange and completely not understood is going on, and chronic partial sleep deprivation is not what's happening.

I didn't expect a response! It's probably too late now, which is a shame—there's not that much information on polyphasic sleep. But thanks for answering anyway!

Will do.

Will do.

All I know is from a press release from 7 years ago. Googling it produces rumors that it is behind schedule but still going forward.

Added: it seems to have renamed almorexant and failed a phase 3 trial. But there are other orexin antagonists still being pursued.

dunno. Orexin-RA-1 isn't a type of orexin, but a drug to block it.

If adopting a weird sleep schedule has a high cost for the experimenter, that also offsets any potential payoff of adopting one on the experiment's basis. The experiment so far hasn't yielded any valuable results, because we already knew that a mild polyphasic schedule can be maintained (siestas), and that only running on naps is difficult (college students). Sleep deprivation is interesting and cognitive test results are fun to read; other than that novelty I don't see the VoI, because we already know with confidence what to expect from the test: slowed reactions and limited attention, with more extreme impairment for more deviant sleep schedules.

I sincerely appreciate the support! I actually took a very long time to finally get this post up because I was embarrassed about not having orchestrated things anywhere near as well as my personal standards demanded. I'm reluctant to do things mediocrely and I really, really need to reinforce the notion that it's a very good thing that it got done. Period.