Experiment with n=1: proves subject did not
seem impaired during this one stint when he knew he was being measured, and chose the measures himself, and had control over the situation and experiment.
The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
191–200 of 368 posts
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if you can call it an agenda but I think there's something like a 'wellness' or moderation bias in these fields. The idea that you need to balance out hard work, slow down, and so on. For example, as it turns out there is little evidence that stretching actually does anything, yet a lot of experts used to recommend it for decades. Same with nutrition, 'balanced diets', workouts at low heart rates and so…
What do you mean that stretching doesn't do anything? Any links to such evidence? It's a pretty simple experiment to stretch every day for a month and measure your flexibility gains, so that's quite a bold claim. Do you mean it has no direct impact on your health?
>https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/08/stretchin...
it actually has negative impact on health and injury in people who do static stretches in particular is significantly increased. (as is in people with high levels of flexibility in general)
Nowadays stretches as a warmup are not recommended any more.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#193When I go many days in a row without enough sleep, I find that my cognitive abilities (i.e. what I am capable of doing) does not seem to significantly decline--as judged by things I build and people I interact with. But, my endurance of focus (the amount of time for which I can perform at a high level) does suffer. The weird thing is that it doesn't feel like I can't keep going... it's just that I sort of somehow don…
That's early phase sleep deprivation for me. Distinct from late phase, where I'll forget a sentence the second I hear the next one. Just completely shot short term memory until I find time to sleep for 10 hours, sometimes a few days later. Comes around the day after a deadline.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#194I 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.
It's not a perfect long term measure. Generally over time, an online games community becomes better on average by two factors: good people getting better, and bad people quitting the game. Unless you are actively getting better in step with the community, stagnation means becoming a relatively worse player.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#195When I was younger, I somewhat involuntarily got 4 hours of sleep a night for about 2-3 months.
I remember the first month was fine, but by the second month I'd started to hallucinate in the day time.
The reason this happened was that I took a night job suddenly (midnight til 8am, but sometimes as late as noon because the overtime was good). I couldn't get used to the schedule and seem to get more than four hours of sleep during daylight.
The job was a truck driving job, delivering huge pallets of newspapers out in time for the paperboys/girls at 5am-7am across a few cities from the printing press. I remember it was a sweet job, relatively high pay compared to what I'd had recently and very low stress since the factory was empty, you grab the clipboard with your route, forklift the pallets onto the truck and listen to music the rest of the night.
I started to get extremely tired while driving sometime in the second month. I fought it hard and would stare straight ahead jerking myself awake every couple of minutes eventually. Not long after that the lines in the road would insidiously become snakes and I'd be following a river in a half dream sort of zone.
By the end of the second month I knew I had to quit or I'd end up getting myself killed on the road, no matter how good the job was. I forced myself to stay on the extra two weeks because two weeks notice is something my parents instilled upon me that you always have to do. I kind of agree but feel like I should have made an exception then.
I was probably 20 at the time.
Some points I'd like to raise: 1. I don't believe two weeks is long enough to feel anything. Particularly not if you're young. 2. Loss of cognition is really really obvious if you're operating a large metal box that can kill you. The ability to play video games seems like it could easily fool you into thinking you're coherent. 3. Lack of sleep amplifies stress. If you don't have much stress, it's going to be way easier. Someone falling behind on their loan payments, working overtime, and taking care of dependents would likely see a much bigger effect on their life, even with smaller margins of sleep lost.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I find that my cognitive abilities (i.e. what I am capable of doing) does not seem to significantly decline It's very common. Studies on sleep deprivation report that subjects do not feel their cognitive abilities decline. However, measuring cognition using objective tests does show a significant decrease in these abilities.
See also: "I'm better at pool after 3 beers." Yeah, no you're not.
A few beers makes you better at anything hindered by anxiety. For many people, that's playing pool at the bar in front of others. Or speaking a foreign language. Or holding conversation.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
How did you realize you needed to get a CPAP?
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#198I discovered that about 1/3 of people can be sleep deprived without any ill effects, which is the bucket I fall in. Another 1/3 will be disgruntled but can function at a lower level, but for the last 1/3, it's catastrophic and can't function at all. That's my wife, and what exemplified this the most was after having kids. She was almost immediately a wreck but I was able to hold together with the lack of sleep and sp…
I think it depends on conditioning. I've always had to work nights while in high school and college, so I never really could get enough sleep during those years no matter how much joy and happiness I abstained from to make more time. As a result, I get by OK on 5 hours if behind the gun on a deadline, but even if I make time to sleep in I might only get 7 hours total.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to really like that guy... But I got a suspicion that sleep experiment may have been fabricated. There is zero proof beyond the blog posts :/
Seems lot a lot of effort for seemingly no return at the time. Without evidence to the contrary, I'm unwilling to doubt him.
Plenty of return from oblivious user traffic. You see all the self help crock being peddled at the bottom of the page? This article is like chumming the water.
Re: The effects on cognition of sleeping 4 hours per night for 12-14 days
#200I definitely couldn't do it. After about a week, my body would just crash/go to sleep by itself, world be damned. Same, or rather, worse, when working 12 hours a day for more than ~2 weeks. I just start thinking "what the fuck am I doing? Why is this worth it?", and if it's not worth it it would just drive me into a serious depressive mood. Maybe because I know I could do better than this, that there are other option…
Lack of sleep amplifies stress. That's why people argue more frequently and are more easily agitated when they're sleep deprived.
A lot of the people who say this doesn't affect them seem to be bored video gamers with no career focus and no stress.
I feel like they'd feel it too if they had to work 12 hours a day and had some moderate stress.