The 12-14 days is crucial here, I think: The US Army tested battle readiness and effectiveness off and on since WWII and found that you can keep a unit working well for a couple of weeks with about 4.5 hours a night. After that, they start to have serious problems. Less than 4.5 hours a night and the problems start a lot sooner.
The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
171–180 of 368 posts
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also: "I'm better at pool after 3 beers." Yeah, no you're not.
I dunno. I realize Balmer peak is a semi-joke, but I really enjoy bowling and used to go once a week or so with friends. Some days we'd get a pitcher of beer, some times we wouldn't. My third game is reliably better if we bought a pitcher. So who knows! Lots of confounding questions there. (three beers, though, my bowling probably gets much worse reliably)
Better compared to other players at the moment or compared to your sober self? Because it could also just mean you handle alcohol better than friends you play with.
Jokes aside, fully agreed. You just gotta get enough alcohol that your confidence and peacefulness are up (which would cause you to play better), but not to the point where negative effects of alcohol overpower the positive ones. And that's a tricky one to balance.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#173> It seems that there’s very high variation in how people respond to sleep deprivation. There you go. It's the tyranny of averages: when variation between humans is greater than the effect of the intervention. This reminds me of reading The How of Happiness and learning that happiness is basically 50% genetics, 10% circumstances and 40% behavior. The author frames that 40% as a really big number, but I thought about…
Research in general pretty much has to work this way. You're trying to identify "laws" or rules that govern reality. Outliers are interesting, but in general we expect to find many instances of some phenomenon—which means that by default we're looking for cause-and-effect relationships that apply in "most cases."
It's also worth mentioning that it's very easy for people to convince themselves that they're special or different when they actually aren't. Our own psychology is very unreliable. So while your point is well taken, people should also not assume they're the exception to the rule, even if they might be.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#174I find the cognitive tests in the experiment to be insufficient, to make the argument that practical cognition did not suffer and that the experimenter was 'productive for 16 hours'. The experiment uses two computer games and a 3 hr test, not much of a comparison to all day non-stop creative software development. The SAT is one neat little question after another, every challenge carefully crafted and nicely wrapped. Time to completion is always relatively easy to calculate.
Creative coding requires a level of alertness that I find is most similar to a chess game. A working day is around 8 hours. A 3 hour assignment feels like a half-day.
I wonder how many hours the author could play chess against a good opponent, on 4 hours of sleep a night? I doubt it approaches '16 productive hours'...
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#175I read about the Uberman sleep schedule stuff myself when I was younger and trying to recover time I "wasted" sleeping. I ended up trying Uberman myself (15 minute naps, 6x per day). I did a decent amount of prep work. I talked to my doctor (who basically said as long as I'm not falling asleep while driving, go for it). I set up ways to track my cognitive abilities around work (remote software engineer at the time).…
Was adaptation to Uberman staggeringly difficult? I tried it multiple times, each time thinking I had come up with the perfect system to push through, and each time failing. On my final attempt I would go for bike rides to stay awake and would actually doze off for a few seconds at a time ("microsleeps") even while riding. I concluded that physiology determined whether or not something like Uberman is even possible f…
> Was adaptation to Uberman staggeringly difficult?
Not sure which adaptation. For dropping into the mechanics of actually sleeping it was hard, but manageable. I spent a solid 48 hours awake. That ended at ~9:40 AM and I gave my spouse strict instructions to get me up at 10:00. I fell asleep instantly, and she had trouble getting me up in 20 minutes, but we got there. The second nap I had a couple shots of espresso right before I went down, and that helped me get back up. The worst part was that first night. I was sorely tempted. After a weekend I had kind of fallen in a rut, but it helped to be out and about for a bit, just so that I was stimulated enough to not feel sleepy. After about two weeks I had fallen into something that felt normal. Sleeping was kind of a chore then.
Adapting other parts of my life were harder. Close friends knew what was up, so when we went to a party or something I'd take my naps in a car, or another room. During the year I'd say I skipped half a dozen naps, and it was always a battle of willpower to not be completely derailed. I didn't drink, because I didn't want that to be a reason I skipped a nap.
These were the reasons I ultimately decided to stop, but it was never really a stable situation. Missing a single nap would throw me off so hard that it was a battle to go back into it.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had just purchased and starting reading the book when this was first posted here. I haven't spent much time to look into either side, but I stopped reading the book because I felt like I may be filling my mind with false information. And I bought it in the first place thinking an expert was going to teach the most important things we know so far about sleep. It bums me to think about this.
I can summarize what both the original author, and what the person wrote criticizing agree on. Yes, sleep is required. Get enough sleep that you feel rested. A lot of the critique was around the 8 hours, and the conclusions about what happens if you get less. Anecdotally, I never sleep 8+ hours. I also get up without an alarm clock every single day. I'm not going to stress that I normally sleep ~7 hours and feel rest…
One problem with this approach is that if you've always had dysfunctional sleep, you don't understand what "feeling rested" really means. I had undiagnosed sleep apnea until my late 20s, and it was insane what a difference getting a CPAP made. I literally couldn't conceptualize how fatigued I had been all of my life until I had something to compare it against, and when I finally started getting restorative sleep my whole life changed.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#177I read about the Uberman sleep schedule stuff myself when I was younger and trying to recover time I "wasted" sleeping. I ended up trying Uberman myself (15 minute naps, 6x per day). I did a decent amount of prep work. I talked to my doctor (who basically said as long as I'm not falling asleep while driving, go for it). I set up ways to track my cognitive abilities around work (remote software engineer at the time).…
> Would I suggest it to others? No. There were other issues I had with the plan, more societal. And it was frustrating to not be able to focus on something for more than 3.5 hours at a time. But it certainly was an interesting time. This mirrors what I found in airforce studies about the uberman schedule. The overall gist was: The uberman schedule, if executed well, gives a person more time in a day awake without sev…
This jives with my experience. When I missed a nap, I'd crash hard about 2 hours later. I'd end up taking a 2 hour nap, and then fight to get back on the schedule.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
See also: "I'm better at pool after 3 beers." Yeah, no you're not.
I dunno. I realize Balmer peak is a semi-joke, but I really enjoy bowling and used to go once a week or so with friends. Some days we'd get a pitcher of beer, some times we wouldn't. My third game is reliably better if we bought a pitcher. So who knows! Lots of confounding questions there. (three beers, though, my bowling probably gets much worse reliably)
There's a very funny Mitchell and Webb sketch on this very subject:
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#179Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#180I read about the Uberman sleep schedule stuff myself when I was younger and trying to recover time I "wasted" sleeping. I ended up trying Uberman myself (15 minute naps, 6x per day). I did a decent amount of prep work. I talked to my doctor (who basically said as long as I'm not falling asleep while driving, go for it). I set up ways to track my cognitive abilities around work (remote software engineer at the time).…
The idea of using gaming stats like FPS kill-to-death ratio as a passive measure of cognitive function is fascinating to me. Along the lines of other passive stats like smart scales and fitness trackers.
Obviously, there are specific tests you can do, but it's difficult to integrate those into your daily routines to generate consistent stats.