The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
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Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#2I'm amazed by how thoroughly he wrote up the experiment.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#3I'm amazed by how thoroughly he wrote up the experiment.
yeah, with a sample size of 1 and the subject at a prime point in maturation.
What's the lesson learned from this?
Disclaimer: this experiment would destroy me (but I'm old enough to be the author's father).
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#4I am fascinated by this, when I was younger I was obsessed with cutting out sleep, experimenting with polyphasic sleep, energy drinks etc.
I'll add one other anecdote that I don't know what it means, but I had a project I was working on that was tight deadline, as a result I was only able to get two hours a sleep a night for about a week. For some reason once I got past the third day my tiredness and desire to sleep seemed to dip considerably, and I found that staying awake when engaged in any activity or discussion was easier. If I was just sitting in a meeting or presentation that I wasn't very interested in I would doze off, but as long as I was engaged I felt like I didn't need to sleep at all.
I really wish we knew more about sleep.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#5> However, for the entire duration of the experiment I had to resist regular urges to sleep and on several occasions when I did not want to play video games was very close to failing the experiment, having at one point fallen asleep in my chair and being awakened a few minutes later by my wife.
I don't really believe this, and I find this interesting and impressive,but this sounds like a George Costanza scheme after getting caught playing video games or sleeping too much
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#6I've always mused that we could somehow recover some of the "wasted" time of sleeping. 8 hours every night - a third of a human's lifespan - is just so much time.
Sadly, I've never found any positive research that there's any way to do it safely. When I was younger I found schedules like the Uberman[0] and was amazed by the claim: only 2 hours of sleep a day required, as long as you stuck to a pretty rigid schedule and were disciplined about napping on time. I never had the scheduling freedom available to actually give it a go, and accounts of others trying it seemed to indicate that it was actually pretty awful to keep up.
This article seems promising, but it's a relatively short experiment. Would be interesting to see what happened after a year of 4 hour sleep. Based on the author's description, sounds like their body was trying to force them asleep at every turn and they had to fight through it. That would be hard to maintain long-term.
I truly wish one day we can isolate and synthesize whatever magical thing happens during sleep and recover some useful time. This seems much more practical than life-expectancy extension to me. As long as, of course, employers don't take it upon themselves to increase the workday as well. I'd rather sleep than work.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#7An academic study (2007):
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#8You can't fool me, I know this was just an excuse to improve your FPS aim!
Jokes aside, really good read. I had similar goals of cutting out sleep when I was younger. I'm curious what the authors mood was throughout the experiment. That's the main thing I've noticed when not getting enough sleep. My output may be good, I may feel engaged, but every second of the day is torture.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#9The guzey_arena_0 test could be biased by his skill level improving over time by playing it regularly, though if he was an avid FPS gamer prior to the guzey_arena_0 tests, the asymptotic growth of skill had probably leveled off in time. I didn't see this addressed in the paper outside of this section:
"I will give myself a sleep opportunity of 8 hours (23:30-07:30). I will practice the tasks I’m going to use in order to mitigate the most extreme practice effects during the experiment. I will perform all tasks as follows:
Aimgod guzey_arena_0 at 12:30-12:50, 15:30-15:50, 18:30-18:50 and 21:30-21:50 (I also played about 2 hours of guzey_arena_0 on 2020-03-31 and 2020-04-01 while designing the experiment)"
That might not have been enough to blunt the practice effect.
Still I think it's valid data - might have been better if he played guzey_arena_0 for a period beforehand on normal sleep until his improvements leveled off.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#10I'm amazed by how thoroughly he wrote up the experiment.
yeah, with a sample size of 1 and the subject at a prime point in maturation. What's the lesson learned from this? Disclaimer: this experiment would destroy me (but I'm old enough to be the author's father).
> What's the lesson learned from this?
That sleep is complicated, and that people doing scientific case studies contributes to the overall corpus of material we have to inspire others.
There need not be a breakthrough everytime you do a case study for science to be useful and we should stop expecting that.