I’ll be doing several of these, but what everyone’s doing is a psychomotor vigilance task, which my research so far suggests is the most efficient way known to track the whole jumble of things under the heading of “sleep deprivation”. If the results of this are interesting and I do a much bigger thing in the future, we’ll do a whole lot more tests then.
I’ll be doing several of these, but what everyone’s doing is a psychomotor vigilance task, which my research so far suggests is the most efficient way known to track the whole jumble of things under the heading of “sleep deprivation”.
The PVT is a good thing to use. For people not familiar with it, it tracks the ability to maintain focus, which is the primary thing that sleep deprivation destroys (and makes driving while tired so dangerous). There are long-term concerns about mental ability which the PVT will not address- some people who have done these sorts of sleep schedules find that they run out of ‘creativity’ after a few weeks, which is a serious concern but something hard to measure. (It’s also hard for me to differentiate between “I generate ideas for 8 hours of useful work a day, and when I’m awake 20 hours a day that’s obviously too little” and “I don’t generate ideas anymore” from their reports.)
Right, there are a whole bunch of concerns, some easier to test than others. I chose the PVT because I wanted a test that distinguishes effects of a polyphasic schedule from effects of chronic partial sleep restriction. And it now occurs to me as blindingly obvious that I should have said that outright in the OP.
PVT is good for public safety. I’d like to have stats from some of the cambridge games as well. PVT is a sort of bare minimum mental performance measure. Because I sometimes do challenging work, I care sometimes about quality hours awake, not adequate/alert hours.
I don’t think dual n-back is a good idea. I can’t imagine people under the stress of the adaption to actually stick with it. http://www.quantified-mind.com/ is probably much better.
Please do mental benchmarking: Mnemosyne/Anki/spaced-repetition, dual n-back, http://www.quantified-mind.com/ , http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/ - something objective.
I’ll be doing several of these, but what everyone’s doing is a psychomotor vigilance task, which my research so far suggests is the most efficient way known to track the whole jumble of things under the heading of “sleep deprivation”. If the results of this are interesting and I do a much bigger thing in the future, we’ll do a whole lot more tests then.
The PVT is a good thing to use. For people not familiar with it, it tracks the ability to maintain focus, which is the primary thing that sleep deprivation destroys (and makes driving while tired so dangerous). There are long-term concerns about mental ability which the PVT will not address- some people who have done these sorts of sleep schedules find that they run out of ‘creativity’ after a few weeks, which is a serious concern but something hard to measure. (It’s also hard for me to differentiate between “I generate ideas for 8 hours of useful work a day, and when I’m awake 20 hours a day that’s obviously too little” and “I don’t generate ideas anymore” from their reports.)
Right, there are a whole bunch of concerns, some easier to test than others. I chose the PVT because I wanted a test that distinguishes effects of a polyphasic schedule from effects of chronic partial sleep restriction. And it now occurs to me as blindingly obvious that I should have said that outright in the OP.
PVT is good for public safety. I’d like to have stats from some of the cambridge games as well. PVT is a sort of bare minimum mental performance measure. Because I sometimes do challenging work, I care sometimes about quality hours awake, not adequate/alert hours.
I don’t think dual n-back is a good idea. I can’t imagine people under the stress of the adaption to actually stick with it. http://www.quantified-mind.com/ is probably much better.