How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With?

"P.V.T. is tedious but simple if you’ve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once."

I can't say how true that is when you're doing a ton of email all day or research, and its more a function of the sum total of small delays in re-reading that build up over the course of an entire day. Contrasted with a day when your mind is so clear that you require no re-reading, it feels like you are so much more productive.

Additional sleep links:

1. Sleep: How to hack your brain (http://www.dustincurtis.com/sleep.html)

2. The 4-Hour Body: Engineering better sleep (http://techcocktail.com/book-preview-the-4-hour-body-enginee...)

I wonder how long it takes to recover from the decreased performance.

When I was in high school, I could pull an all nighter with ease to take care of an assignment (or to finish a Legend of Zelda game in one straight playing session).

Now, in grad school, I needed to pull an all nighter recently and found that I just couldn't do it anymore. I hadn't pulled an all nighter in years and it just seemed to be vastly harder than it used to be.

It is too bad the study didn't attempt to see how much sleep was necessary to recover. Would have been nice to know how long the residual effects from decreased sleep lasts. It is now a full week since the end of my semester and I still feel abnormally tired.

I don't buy the seemingly arbitrary distinction that 8 hours is a good night's sleep. I know people who require 9+ hours per night (ie they appear sleep deprived if they get less than 9 for a few consecutive nights). I know one person who requires about 4 per night (not a forced four where you end up looking 10 years older than you really are after a few years).

I do like the idea of testing where your sweet spot is, though. I've never done anything like the PVT, but I've found (through Steve Pavlina's advice) that if you wake up at the same time each day, every day, and simply fall asleep when you're tired at the end of the day, you discover pretty quickly where that sweet spot is. More here: http://www.ajkesslerblog.com/how-to-get-back-9-weeks-of-your...

Or the "siesta" style of sleep generally. That is, the pattern of having a nap in the day and a shorter nighttime sleep.