As a narcoleptic, I am always suspicious of extreme polyphasic sleep claims. Biphasic seems to be natural, but anything like the uberman schedule seems to conflict with what I know about narcolepsy.
The primary symptom or possibly the primary cause of narcolepsy is skipping straight from light sleep to REM within minutes of falling asleep. When I was tested, I entered REM between 3 and 7 minutes of falling asleep. Sleep cycles are fractured and slow wave sleep is reduced or skipped entirely.
By contrast, a normal person enters REM after usually more than an hour, stopping along the way in three different phases of sleep. The deepest stage, slow wave sleep, is where quite a lot of brain repair occurs. Glial cells are restored, free radicals are cleared out, glucose is stored in the brain. Growth hormones repair tissue damage.
Many of the claims of ubermen proponents seem to rest on entering REM almost immediately after staring a nap. Much like a narcoleptic. Stage four is arguably more important for mental health, but this stage is not mentioned by proponents that I have seen. Furthermore, some of the symptoms of narcolepsy seem to match the experiences of polyphasic sleepers, particularly the general awakeness/non-grogginess which is occasional unexpected and uncontrollably strong daytime sleepiness.
Background: The idea of less sleep super appeals to me because I need so much. Before I was diagnosed I tried Uberman but it didn’t seem to reduce my daily hours of sleep needed, and in retrospect it obviously could never have done that for me. But my natural sleep cycle is super polyphasic, 3 or 4 naps a day and reduced sleep at night. Unfortunately, my body wants is 10+ hours regardless of whether its in one chunk or spaced out throughout the day, and spacing seems irrelevant since I rarely have SWS regardless.
I’m polyphasic on Everyman 3 since about March 2011 (Jan and Feb spent unsuccessfully trying to make Uberman work). According to my aging Zeo I get approximately the same REM and SWS as I did on 7.4hrs of monophasic sleep before I adapted. Nearly all of the SWS is in my 3hr core. On Uberman I never achieved enough SWS in my naps to get me through. The adaptation was ridiculously hard—both for how very unpleasant it was and for having to get through that while sleep deprived.
I could believe that a 3 hour core could contain a lot of SWS, making it definitely better than Uberman. In those little naps, it’s easy to jump into REM and hard to jump into SWS. I was under the impression that 3 hours is still less SWS than the minimum to prevent sleep deprivation symptoms, but I also am endlessly impressed by the capacity of the human brain to adapt to any symptom. Did you do any cognitive functioning tests before/after switching to Everyman?
I agree with your skepticism. The polyphasic community claims that they are able to make drastic reduction in sleep time because they go straight into REMs when taking a nap. This conflicts with a lot of my understanding.
It is my suspicion that they are mistaken about that, and that actually, if a person has acclimated to polyphasic, he/she isn’t going into REM at all and that this is where gains come from.
There’s the polypahsic society. They are more-or-less the representatives of consensus among polyphonic folks. (I think. Perhaps I’m misrepresenting them?)
Stampi is not very helpful for figuring out what polyphasic people are doing while they sleep. So far, I’ve yet to find a single paper that features a polysomnographic evaluation of someone doing uberman or everyman, much less one that does a basic evaluation of whether someone who has been polyphonic (long term) is exhibiting clinical symptoms of sleep deprivation. Both of those, but particularly the polysomnograph, would be very informative.
I’ve read some of the Polyphasic Society’s website, and they make a different argument. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem the website exists any longer (or now it’s at a different location?), but the Internet Archive has the page I read. You can see that they claim something a little more sophisticated than that they go straight into REM (with the implication that REM is all you need, etc.). Likely, they do this because the REM claims are false for multiple reasons. I discussed this with ChristianKI on LessWrong a year ago. Beyond the REM claims, their newer claims are contradicted by the research in Stampi’s book (see the link in the previous sentence for justification).
The reason you don’t see studies about polyphasic schedules like Uberman and Everyman is probably because sleep researchers consider the idea to be so far-fetched that it’s not worth doing a study. I have seen some polyphasic sleep proponents use Zeo, however. Look at the Polyphasic Society link I gave in the previous paragraph for an example.
As a narcoleptic, I am always suspicious of extreme polyphasic sleep claims. Biphasic seems to be natural, but anything like the uberman schedule seems to conflict with what I know about narcolepsy.
The primary symptom or possibly the primary cause of narcolepsy is skipping straight from light sleep to REM within minutes of falling asleep. When I was tested, I entered REM between 3 and 7 minutes of falling asleep. Sleep cycles are fractured and slow wave sleep is reduced or skipped entirely.
By contrast, a normal person enters REM after usually more than an hour, stopping along the way in three different phases of sleep. The deepest stage, slow wave sleep, is where quite a lot of brain repair occurs. Glial cells are restored, free radicals are cleared out, glucose is stored in the brain. Growth hormones repair tissue damage.
Many of the claims of ubermen proponents seem to rest on entering REM almost immediately after staring a nap. Much like a narcoleptic. Stage four is arguably more important for mental health, but this stage is not mentioned by proponents that I have seen. Furthermore, some of the symptoms of narcolepsy seem to match the experiences of polyphasic sleepers, particularly the general awakeness/non-grogginess which is occasional unexpected and uncontrollably strong daytime sleepiness.
Background: The idea of less sleep super appeals to me because I need so much. Before I was diagnosed I tried Uberman but it didn’t seem to reduce my daily hours of sleep needed, and in retrospect it obviously could never have done that for me. But my natural sleep cycle is super polyphasic, 3 or 4 naps a day and reduced sleep at night. Unfortunately, my body wants is 10+ hours regardless of whether its in one chunk or spaced out throughout the day, and spacing seems irrelevant since I rarely have SWS regardless.
I’m polyphasic on Everyman 3 since about March 2011 (Jan and Feb spent unsuccessfully trying to make Uberman work). According to my aging Zeo I get approximately the same REM and SWS as I did on 7.4hrs of monophasic sleep before I adapted. Nearly all of the SWS is in my 3hr core. On Uberman I never achieved enough SWS in my naps to get me through. The adaptation was ridiculously hard—both for how very unpleasant it was and for having to get through that while sleep deprived.
I could believe that a 3 hour core could contain a lot of SWS, making it definitely better than Uberman. In those little naps, it’s easy to jump into REM and hard to jump into SWS. I was under the impression that 3 hours is still less SWS than the minimum to prevent sleep deprivation symptoms, but I also am endlessly impressed by the capacity of the human brain to adapt to any symptom. Did you do any cognitive functioning tests before/after switching to Everyman?
Also consider how different humans are. Even the recommended sleep ranges have a spread of almost x2 between min and max.
infographic that is too large to inline
Oh dear. Can we please not post very large very bright low-information-density infographics right into threads?
sorry. didn’t find a way to rescale and forgot.
I agree with your skepticism. The polyphasic community claims that they are able to make drastic reduction in sleep time because they go straight into REMs when taking a nap. This conflicts with a lot of my understanding.
It is my suspicion that they are mistaken about that, and that actually, if a person has acclimated to polyphasic, he/she isn’t going into REM at all and that this is where gains come from.
Who do you mean with “the polyphasic community” exactly? Who’s actually doing polyphasic sleep and claiming such a thing (e.g. hasn’t read Stampi)?
There’s the polypahsic society. They are more-or-less the representatives of consensus among polyphonic folks. (I think. Perhaps I’m misrepresenting them?)
Stampi is not very helpful for figuring out what polyphasic people are doing while they sleep. So far, I’ve yet to find a single paper that features a polysomnographic evaluation of someone doing uberman or everyman, much less one that does a basic evaluation of whether someone who has been polyphonic (long term) is exhibiting clinical symptoms of sleep deprivation. Both of those, but particularly the polysomnograph, would be very informative.
I’ve read some of the Polyphasic Society’s website, and they make a different argument. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem the website exists any longer (or now it’s at a different location?), but the Internet Archive has the page I read. You can see that they claim something a little more sophisticated than that they go straight into REM (with the implication that REM is all you need, etc.). Likely, they do this because the REM claims are false for multiple reasons. I discussed this with ChristianKI on LessWrong a year ago. Beyond the REM claims, their newer claims are contradicted by the research in Stampi’s book (see the link in the previous sentence for justification).
The reason you don’t see studies about polyphasic schedules like Uberman and Everyman is probably because sleep researchers consider the idea to be so far-fetched that it’s not worth doing a study. I have seen some polyphasic sleep proponents use Zeo, however. Look at the Polyphasic Society link I gave in the previous paragraph for an example.