Sleep Experiment - Day 7

June 27, 2011 – Day 7

Today was pretty great. In fact, it felt like clockwork. Every nap was preceded by a brief period of tiredness and followed my only a short time feeling groggy. It seems that yesterday was indeed just a random blip in the adjustment process.

I once again faced a few issues regarding sleep scheduling in the face of a more active schedule. I had to take my first nap earlier than usual and my second nap later than usual. This resulted in more extended periods of tiredness after and before these naps respectively. However, it seemed that my body was able to readily adapt to these minor changes.

As opposed to yesterday, I experienced nothing but the positive effects of polyphasic sleep: I was well rested, I felt alert, and I was able to actually use all of my waking hours for productive endeavors (I didn’t really take advantage of this though). Riding this wave of seemingly positive results I decided to break my own rule and start analyzing my data from the PVT. Things haven’t been going exactly as I expected. But more on that later.

The breakdown of my day is as follows:

6am – wake up. I woke up quickly from my alarm. I felt the usual grogginess but this time it passed almost immediately following my walk (longer and more rigorous than usual) and breakfast. I also had course registration to deal with this morning, which may have contributed to the alertness.

10:45am – 1^st nap. Usually my naps are at 11am but I was invited out to brunch and had to push this one forward. I wasn’t particularly tired when I got to bed but I still managed to fall completely asleep.

11:05am – wake up. I found it especially easy to wake up from this nap. I had to rush out to brunch and I was afraid of oversleeping. It took me a little extra time to fully wake up (especially because I did not eat soon after waking up) but I was soon at my normal state of wakefulness.

4:30pm – 2^nd nap. I began to feel tired around 2pm this afternoon. It wasn’t a terrible feeling and didn’t hugely impact my afternoon but it was a little annoying. I also delayed my nap by 30 minutes and was thusly awake for an extra 25 minutes or so between naps that I don’t usually have. I managed to fall asleep very quickly.

4:50pm – wake up. I woke up quite quickly and felt almost immediately well rested. I had a very productive evening following this nap.

9:40pm – 3^rd nap. It took me a while to fall asleep during this nap. I eventually fell into a deep sleep.

10pm – wake up. While I woke up with my alarm, it took me a few extra minutes to get out of bed. I have felt a little groggy since waking up but that is due to the sedentary activities I have done this evening.

The data for today:

While I felt fairly alert all day, the PVT seemed to be disproportionately difficult. I felt that my reaction times did not necessarily reflect my wakefulness. I have also decided to scrap the working memory portion of this experiment. I don’t believe that I would have gained any useful data from performing these tests without a baseline and some method of scaling for different n-values in the n-back task.

While on the topic of data, I finally did the analysis for the last seven days of data (the days of polyphasic sleep). I’m not entirely sure how to describe what I saw and am nowhere near a point at which I can make any definitive claims. But, I can give the general gist of what I’m examining and what I’m seeing.

In completing the PVT each day I only get one piece of data: an approximately 20 item table of reaction times. To simplify things and to allow for comparisons across days the sample mean and variance is calculated (as an unbiased estimator) for each days data set. I’ve also been calculating the median of the data (although I don’t know what I’ll use this for, if anything).

The most basic analysis that I have done is plotting the mean reaction times (with error bars) versus the day of the experiment. This plot (I’ll include it in a later post) looks like a scatter about a constant value. I haven’t experimented with any fitting routines as of yet but this plot doesn’t really show anything exciting.

I have also been rating my sleepiness on a scale from one to ten. While this is extremely arbitrary (I found some rubrics that actually rate sleepiness, but again this was a few days into the experiment) it still gives a general idea as to my level of perceived wakefulness.

Plotting this ‘sleepiness ranking’ versus the day of the experiment has not been very illuminating either. Even when compared to the reaction times. More detailed analysis will need to be done to potentially show a correlation between perceived sleepiness and reaction time.

The final item I am collecting is ‘lapses in attention’. This is an item often seen in the articles I have been reading and is easily extracted from the data. I simply define any reaction time over 0.5s to be a lapse in attention. This value may seem arbitrary but it is the value that seems to separate the max of my reaction times on well rested days (ranked as a four on sleepiness) from sleepier days.

Again, I would like to examine any correlations between reported sleepiness and lapses in attention as well as with reaction times. But like the first two plots I have described, this one was just as much of a non-issue. It looked more like there was a correlation between reported sleepiness and lapses in attention. However, the reaction time information does not immediately seem to correlate.

That’s all for now. Expect more discussion of analyzing this data but don’t expect too many more days of actual polyphasic sleep. Due to starting a new job and having to feed and inject our aging diabetic and blind dog, Tiger, while in Calgary without changing his schedule, I will be transitioning back to monophasic sleep sometime in the next week. I realize that many people will say I’m copping out, or that my data is inconclusive because I didn’t complete the requisite month of adjustment but such is life. If I was seeing more drastic results in the data I think I would be keener to continue to pursue this method of sleep, but right now it doesn’t fit with my duties/lifestyle. I will however, after a week of recovery and a week of new baseline testing for the n-back task and some sleepiness measure, be reducing my sleep from 8 hours to 6 hours. This time the sleep will be in one large chunk, and will hopefully provide a nice contrasting data set to the one I have already built on polyphasic sleep.

So keep following this blog and, while it may be a bit more boring for a few weeks, it should pick up again when I start rambling like a sleep deprived person again!

Sleep Experiment - Day 6

June 26, 2011 – Day 6

Today felt like a set back. The groggy feeling upon waking up from my three-hour sleep persisted throughout the day and no amount of successful napping could alleviate the feeling. Correspondingly, the lack of sleep and perception of a set back put me in a foul mood. This sleep project soon became demonized, stupid and pointless, whereas yesterday it was pretty great and I never wanted it to end.

The most interesting thing about my exhaustion today is that nothing seemed to have sparked it. I couldn’t think of a single mistake in my routine yesterday that could have caused me to feel so gross today. I can only hypothesize that my sleep debt (the physiological desire to sleep) built up to such a point that the amount of sleep I received did not fully eradicate it. Therefore, I felt tired as none of my naps provided adequate time and intensity of sleep to balance my sleep debt.

This notion of unbalanced sleep debt leads the body to compensate by adapting and increasing the intensity of the sleep. Do you think it is these small incremental adjustments (after the initial adjustment to 4 hours) that continually improve the quality of polyphasic sleep?

The sleep pattern I followed today is broken down as follows:

6am – wake up. I found it quite easy to get out of bed this morning. However, I did not feel very rested. I proceeded to go for a walk and eat breakfast, a previously sure-fire way to clear up any lingering grogginess. However, no amount of walking or eating or any busy work could shake the groggy feeling.

11am – 1^st nap. I quickly fell asleep and woke up with my alarm.

11:20am – wake up. I did not feel refreshed or alert. I wanted to keep sleeping until the groggy feeling went away.

4:20pm – 2^nd nap. I fell asleep fairly quickly. This nap was basically identical to my first nap of the day.

4:40pm – wake up. I felt much the same as after my first nap. The only positive is that I did not feel any worse than I did after nap 1.

9:40pm – 3^rd nap. I happened to be out at a friend’s house during the time of my third nap. I was lucky enough to be able to borrow their bed to get my nap. I managed to get a few minutes of sleep and having my eyes closed refreshed me a little.

10:00pm – wake up. I still felt groggy but managed to make it through the rest of the night without too many problems.

Data:

Because of my active social life I didn’t manage to complete the 3-back test like I was supposed to. I don’t think that my working memory data is going to amount to anything.

That’s all for today. Like I’ve noted throughout this post, I am really tired and have felt groggy all day. Hopefully this will pass tomorrow and I’ll be back to a polyphasic normal.

Sleep Experiment - Day 5

June 25, 2011 - Day 5

Today felt much the same as yesterday. Generally I was in a good mood and felt rested. I was able to concentrate on tasks for long periods of time and had a very productive day.

My sleep pattern:

6am – wake up. This was the first core nap I have woken up from where I didn’t immediately spring out of bed. I felt almost comatose and thanks to the persistence of certain alarms I managed to make it out of bed without falling back asleep and oversleeping. I ate breakfast and went for a walk immediately. Upon returning home I felt rested and alert.

11am – First nap. I fell asleep quite quickly for this nap and slept for a solid fifteen minutes after which I woke up naturally.

11:20am – wake up. Upon waking up I felt fully refreshed and alert. This was a wonderful feeling, which compensated for the more difficult wake up from my core sleep.

4:20pm – Second nap. I didn’t fall asleep immediately. I cycled between feelings of falling asleep and being awake. I eventually fell asleep as I was my alarm had to wake me up.

4:40pm – wake up. No issues waking up. I didn’t immediately feel refreshed but after about twenty minutes I felt full functional.

9:40pm – Third nap. This was a disappointing nap. At about 8:40pm I began to feel tired. I feel like this is to be expected (albeit a little early today) as it means I am getting used to sleeping at this time. However, as soon as I lay down to sleep the world seemed to get incredibly loud. It took me ages to fall asleep (I’m not even sure if I did) and I do not feel very refreshed at this point (11:29pm).

10pm – wake up. I woke up just fine but it was a struggle to get out of bed. Like I said above, I don’t feel like I recovered at all during this nap.

Data:

Exciting news!! Thanks to David, I’ve started exploring the effects of polyphasic sleep on working memory. While I do not have a baseline to compare my results to I feel that any trend in (the hopeful) recovery of my lost sleep will still be apparent in the data. The specific test I have added is called an n-back task. It asks the user to recall the nth back object in a string of objects. I’ll try to explain: in a 2-back task the user sees a letter A. This is followed (after a few seconds) by a second letter, B. Then a third letter is added, say, C. If C is the same as A (the object that is two back from the current object) the user should provide some input (a mouseclick). If the user does not click when they should, or clicks when they shouldn’t, the program records an error. These errors are tabulated after 20 objects. This is repeated 3 times.

If it so happens that I score above 90% for a specific n-back test, the following day I will attempt an (n+1)-back test. Because I do not have a baseline for this test, I will not be able to actively tell how my performance scales with n, but I anticipate that this will be easy to determine once my experiment and recovery phase are complete.

The PVT went well today. I feel more able to concentrate then I was two days ago. Like I always seem to say, ‘I hope this actually shows up in the data’. I actually cheated a little bit today and glanced at a few of the data files from the past few days and….I can’t really say anything conclusive. I really wanted to do some analysis today but managed to restrain myself.

On the concentration front, I was able to read a number of pages from a review article I’m working through. I didn’t find it hard to concentrate and I could synthesize the new information with my current understanding of the subject.

There are two things I want to remark upon tonight. The first is my apparent lack of REM sleep. Don’t misread this last sentence. I’m not saying that I have been REM sleep deprived for the last 5 days. Instead, I am remarking upon the lack of vivid dreams throughout this experience. This doesn’t really worry me. I’ve never been a big dreamer (or at least I don’t remember my dreams). Through the last five days I have fallen asleep from a semi-meditative state. My mind was surprisingly calm and I didn’t face my usual restlessness when trying to sleep. I feel like my short naps have lasted for longer than 20 minutes, which could be a sign of REM sleep (as opposed to the vivid dreams). I just find it interesting that something so prolific on the polyphasic blogs has yet to rear its head in my experiment. Only more time will tell if this is actually the case, but its something for me to think about.

The second thing I want to talk about is the literature on sleep that pertains to polyphasic sleep. My literature search is far from fully comprehensive and focuses mainly on chronic sleep deprivation (what polyphasic sleep most resembles in my eyes) but should provide a bit of hard facts about the effects of messing with your sleep.

In Fatigue Models for Applied Research in Warfighting (Hursh, S.R., et al 2004) it is remarked that chronic sleep restriction is hard to model. But that’s not why I read this article. There is one graph on page 7 showing performance on various psychomotor vigilance tasks versus the number of days of sleep deprivation.

Basically, all I want you to see is that performance decreases linearly with the number of days of restricted sleep. When I perform my analysis I will compare my output to graphs such as these.

Another interesting article is Patterns of performance degradation and restoration during sleep restriction and subsequent recovery: a sleep dose-response study (Belenky, G., et al 2003). This study once again compares PVT performance across different amounts of time spent in bed, noting very similar findings as the other article I mentioned. The benefit of this study is that it also provides data on the amount of time spent in the different stages of sleep.

Have a read if you are interested. The study of sleep is quite convoluted and many articles will outright contradict each other. This all points towards more serious studies of sleep (if only ethics approval was a little easier).

Sleep Experiment - Day 4

June 24, 2011 – Day 4

Today was my best so far. Of course, this is only out of the polyphasic sleeping days and not the glorious days of 10-hour sleeps…

This is the first evening where all I really want to do is go to sleep. This is actually a little bit surprising. Throughout the school year I have prided myself on being a night owl and staying up until 1am or 2am or even 3am has never been a huge issue. So I guess I can confidently say, ‘I’m still deprived of sleep’. My body wants to do something it wouldn’t normally do.

Besides this evening, today has been a marvelous respite from the hazy half-awake state I was in yesterday. I seemed to have boundless energy and was in a giddy mood all day. The mood change was a delightful difference from the catatonic stupor I was in yesterday.

I also felt like I was able to focus and concentrate for long periods of time. I was able to successfully participate in a meeting and I resolved some of the issues with my slowly developing computer game. But I’ll get to that later.

First my sleep pattern:

6am – wake up. I once again found it quite easy to get out of bed. I had set 3 alarms and yet I only needed one to wake me up. I went for a walk again and upon returning home felt very awake and alert. I proceeded to go to the grocery store and make potato pancakes (delicious).

11am – First nap. This was one of those naps where I wasn’t quite sure if I fell asleep or not.

11:20am – wake up. No issues waking up and I felt very alert and refreshed after getting out of bed.

4:20pm – Second nap. I definitely fell asleep during this nap. However, I started drooling and woke up after about five minutes. I managed to fall back asleep after this but felt robbed of the potential for my first real REM sleep during a nap.

4:40pm – wake up. Again, no issues getting out of bed. I felt alert and refreshed following this nap.

9:40pm – Third nap. This nap didn’t go quite as well as the second nap. I did manage to fall asleep but this didn’t occur until later in the twenty minutes.

10pm – wake up. Waking up from this nap was difficult. I got out of bed quickly but didn’t stray far. I didn’t feel refreshed at all and having been craving sleep since waking up.

Data:

I felt like I performed better on the first half of the PVT today than I have even when fully rested. The second half felt more varied which could be an indication of the effects of sleep on my attention span.

When I finally sit down to analyze the data I hope I will see the trends I keep remarking upon in this blog.

I felt that my attention and working memory were improved today. I could complete my regular tasks while experiencing no extra difficulties. However, as the day has worn on (in particular, after my third nap) I have felt my mental acuity declining.

On all of the polyphasic blogs and forums it is always mentioned that it is important to have a project to work on to help stay awake. My projects have been cooking and programming.

First, cooking. I spent most of the morning making the aforementioned potato pancakes. These were followed up by caramel-chocolate-rice crispies-pecan-things in the evening. Both were/are delicious. The act of preparing food is the perfect way to spend the ‘hazier’ moments in my day, as it is task oriented, repetitive and structured.

Second, programming. I only find myself able to work on my computer game when I am focused and alert. Between cooking and programming I have all my stages of wakefulness covered.

Anyways, the game I am trying to design and implement is a cross between Spore and the simulation Polyworld. Wiki both for a bit more information. I’m programming in python and using pygame for the graphics. I’m at the point where I’ve implemented a Genome for both the user and the AI. While this is still a very simplified version of a genome (only 10 genes corresponding to 5 traits) it is easily testable. The basic idea is you control a primitive organism, which can move, eat, fight, and reproduce. I’m not entirely sure how to implement evolution (something akin to natural selection…ideas anyone??) so that it’s exciting and has some quickly noticeable effects (so the player isn’t bored).

Right now I’m working on how to program food into the environment. My original plan was not very elegant (nested for loop going through all pixels of the surface, listing all of the coordinates of the ‘food’ pixels and then moving towards the nearest one) and kept using too much memory resulting in a bus error. The moral of the story is I got a smack in the face about programming efficiently. I’ve since changed the code so that it works a lot better.

There wasn’t really a point to all of this except to say that the source code may appear linked to this blog eventually. Both my roommates will attest that it is incredibly enjoyable to move a colored pixel around a black screen and make babies…

To sum up, I am having some fun and enjoying my extra hours awake. Hopefully tomorrow will be similar to today if not better.

PS. I think I am teaching my body how to nap during the day. I can typically allow myself to quickly experience a ‘floaty’ type of feeling that I get when I am falling asleep. The only concern now is giving in to this feeling and actually entering deep sleep. Further, I hope to be able to retain this ability to nap/control my sleep to be able to fall asleep faster even when I’m not polyphasic.

Sleep Experiment - Day 3

June 23, 2011 – Day 3

Today was difficult. There have been many times during my three years at university that I was forced to make it through one day having had only four hours of sleep the night before. Never have I had to do this two days in a row.

I woke up at 6am once again and went for a walk. This seems to be a necessity during the adaptation period to keep me from falling back asleep. The walk woke me up but didn’t make me feel any more alert.

The ‘fuzzy’ feeling I reported yesterday was back although far more pronounced. This prevented me from accomplishing anything today. I couldn’t sit and read, sit and program, or sit and watch TV for fear of falling asleep. Hopefully I will find it a little easier to concentrate tomorrow as I have actual things to do.

A breakdown of my sleep is as follows:

6am – wake up. Again, I had no trouble waking up after my core sleep. Unlike yesterday, I did not feel able to perform any significant tasks for the first five hours of my day.

11am – First nap. This was a welcome release for me. I managed to fall asleep at some point during the twenty minutes and recall having a dream (an indication of REM sleep). However, this dream was not entirely vivid as is often reported by other polyphasic sleepers and so I am hesitant to say that I have indeed tricked my body into going immediately into REM sleep.

11:20am – wake up. No issues waking up from this nap. I did not feel refreshed and this did not make the next five hours easier.

4:20pm – Second nap. I slept. Basically as soon as my head hit the pillow I passed out.

5:20pm – wake up. I overslept for the first time on this schedule. I have no recollection of stumbling across the bedroom to my alarm, but somehow I managed to turn it off and find my way back to bed. I am slightly optimistic that the short duration of this nap (I woke up on my own) indicates that my body is adjusting to less sleep and short naps. It should be noted that I felt like crap upon waking up from this nap. It felt like I had subtracted sleep from my two day total (i.e., more tired then when I started). This feeling abated after about 40 minutes and after that I felt incredibly refreshed and rejuvenated. Thinking about this makes me rescind my optimistic comment. The fact that I didn’t feel refreshed immediately seems to indicate that my body was interrupted during a long sleep cycle and breaking from this cycle caused my 40-minute hell.

9:40pm – Third nap. I couldn’t sleep

10pm – wake up. No issue waking up (I wasn’t asleep). I felt a little better having my eyes closed but I think any good feelings were still remnants from the hour-long slip up earlier in the day.

On the data front:

I haven’t looked at my reaction times but I felt that I performed equally, if not better, as compared to yesterday. However, my self-reported level of fatigue was greatly increased. It will be interesting to see what the data actually shows.

One thing I learned today was that I need to set multiple alarms. As the sleep pressure increases I foresee that it will be harder and harder to get up with my alarm. Hopefully I will be able to take necessary precautions with my wake up procedures so as to avoid oversleeping like I did today.

Looking into the future, I hope tomorrow is better than today. I know that adjusting takes a while but I want to see some sort of positive result. It’s hard to see how I will eventually recover all of this missed sleep. I guess I just have to keep going forward with the experiment and hope for the best.

P.S. There are a lot of insightful things I want to write about, including For the Love of Ray J, but I don’t have the brain power to make the words all smart and stuff. I really enjoy setting aside this time (about 12:30am to 1:30am) to write this journal and hope that in the future it can be less about the sleeping and more about the altered perspective I’m gaining by being awake and functional when most people are asleep.

Sleep Experiment - Day 2

June 22, 2011 – Day 2

Today was the first day in a very long time that I was actually awake before 7am. I miraculously managed to roll out of bed and into sweatpants when my alarm rudely interrupted my sleep at 6am. The first 15 minutes of my day were hazy at best. Looking for some kind of pick-me-up I chose to go for a walk to the beach. I have to say this will remain part of my morning routine for the upcoming week. Vancouver is beautiful in the early morning! The majesty of the cityscape sprawled at the foot of towering mountains caused me to catch my breath and reevaluate for a moment.

I’ve lived in Vancouver for 3 years now and never have I had quite the same experience that I had this morning. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep and ‘fuzzy’ way everything looked today, but if nothing else, this sleep cycle will be worth it for the mornings.

I can already tell that I am having more difficulty writing this post than I did yesterday. It has been a long day (18 hours awake) and the sentences don’t come very easily.

A brief summary of my sleeping patterns for today:

6am – wake up. I didn’t have too much trouble getting out of bed today. I did not feel very refreshed or well rested.

11:40am – First nap. I had to push this nap back due to a meeting with my supervisor. Nevertheless, I didn’t get any sleep. It was relaxing to close my eyes for 20 minutes.

12pm – wake up. Like I said, I didn’t sleep. Strangely, I felt refreshed following this nap. This could also have been due to the sizeable brunch consumed afterwards.

4:20pm – Second nap. This nap was right on schedule. I don’t know if I slept or not. I felt like I was in a constant stage of falling asleep without ever actually getting there.

4:40pm – wake up. My alarm had to wake me up. This has led to my aforementioned confusion regarding whether I slept or not. I felt refreshed but not nearly to the same extent as after my first nap.

9:40pm – Third nap. This nap was almost identical to my second nap.

10pm – wake up. Like I said, identical to my second nap. However, I most certainly did not feel refreshed after getting out of bed.

And so I sit here at 1:16am and just want to go to bed. I think it is stubbornness on my part that wont let me quit after just one day.

There are a few things I have noticed about my working ability and having all of this extra time. I have found that I am not (currently) able to do actually work after 12am or so. I don’t feel sufficiently up to the task although I hope this feeling will diminish as I start to adapt to this program. Similarly, I was not able to work until about 7:30am when I had come fully awake. For those of you keeping track, I have gained an extra 30 minutes of productive time (as compared to a person who sleeps 8 hours a day). It will be interesting to see how I unlock these extra hours as I start to adjust to this program.

On the empirical data front, I did my PVT as always, but have left out the raw scores for my reaction time. I’m going to get a friend to enter this data for me. This way should ensure that I’m neither discouraged nor influenced by my performance

In terms of my memory I feel less sharp than I would usually. I read about 7 pages of a review article on Quantum Information Processing and feel relatively confident in my retention of the material. However, I felt sluggish in recalling older or more basic information. My vocabulary seemed to be diminished and it would often take me longer to remember information when not fully concentrating.

My analysis would point towards sleep deprivation. And at this point I don’t really see how I can be experiencing anything other than just that (I want to see if my reaction times reflect this). But, before you freak out (Mum) this is part of the process of adjusting to polyphasic sleep. Make your body sleep deprived so that it will adopt the cycle you choose. Force it to recover during twenty-minute naps. But this will take time.

Looking to the future, I anticipate that tomorrow will be a very difficult day. Hopefully my naps will begin to rejuvenate me. I don’t expect immediate results. I will keep fighting towards a life where I can dictate the amount I sleep. But right now, sleep has the upper hand.

Sleep Experiment - Day 1

June 21, 2011 – Day 1 (Sorry about the length, the next few days will be shorter I promise)

In undertaking a new task one thing always strikes me: the way a good idea seems great the farther from it you actually are. I’ve rediscovered this fact as I plan to start sleeping polyphasically. It seems great from a distance. Four or more extra hours in my day. No more restless nights and sluggish mornings. What could go wrong?

Well, as I sit here on the first night of my experiment, the ‘wrongs’ seem to become all the more apparent.

One, I love sleeping. When the crush of a day finally overtakes me and I can disappear for a while into sleep. I find something entirely satisfying about sleep. However, I am in constant conflict with it. Like a star-crossed lover I want sleep but damn she treats me badly.

Two…well, there isn’t really a two. Voluntarily giving up sleep is something I never thought I would do. And so I stick with my first point: I love sleep. Having to stay up like this (its 1:03am now and I can’t sleep until 3am) is like the proverbial carrot driving the donkey. God dammit! I want to sleep!

I guess I should explain a little bit about what exactly I’m doing.

Any internet fanatic has probably stumbled across the mythical tomes of information promising 4 or more extra hours in your day. More effective sleep. The term for these types of promises is sleeping polyphasically. Most people (8 hour sleepers) sleep monophasically: one long core sleep. During this core sleep the body cycles between four (or so) stages of sleep. This cycle occurs more than once (each cycle lasting approximately 90 minutes) and, frankly, scientists don’t really know which are the important parts. Enter polyphasic sleep. The program I am undertaking involves 4 hours of sleep. One core sleep of three hours and three 20 minute naps equally spaced at 5 hour intervals. The idea behind this type of a sleep pattern is to cut out the unneeded parts of the sleep cycle. By forcing my body to adapt to this sleep cycle I will (hopefully) force it to only enter the needed stages of sleep.

Being a burgeoning scientist I like to proclaim that, “I’m doing this for science”. In fact, there is very little scientific literature surrounding the subject of sleeping polyphasically or on chronic sleep restriction. The general consensus is that this type of sleep cycle has no immediately noticeable negative effects, but surely it can’t be good for you.

I could point you to two sources that say otherwise and show improved performance (or equal health). But I would rather do my own scientific investigation.

In reading the literature on sleep deprivation, one test seemed to provide the most illuminating information regarding immediate performance of the test subject. It is called a Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT). Basically, it tests the subject’s wakefulness and response time. Being a bit of a geek, I decided to program my own PVT to use during this experiment. I have already taken data for nearly a week (to get a baseline for my performance) and will include the results when I conclude the study so as to do as much of a blind analysis as possible.

It has been suggested to me to study both my short term and long-term memory in addition to wakefulness. While I would love to explore as many facets as possible during this experiment, I couldn’t find any concise answers on how to measure these abilities and so will have to rely on self-reporting. But I will be working on (am currently working on) projects that make me think (read: physics) so I will notice a dip in my ability if it occurs.

Further, I would like to have an assessment of my health during various parts of this experiment. I have been unsuccessfully playing around with a heart rate monitor (a reading would be taken after waking from my midday nap) and I have toyed with the notion of checking my blood pressure. Obviously, I didn’t follow through on either of these and so have no baseline to compare to. But I figure I’m healthy enough to run a triathlon so I probably wont wreck myself completely (and if this turns out to be anything like smoking, my body should revert back to normal quickly after stopping the experiment).

Having gotten the science-y stuff out of the way I guess I should talk about the personal reasons for why I want to do this.

Ever since my parents rescinded their commanded bedtime I haven’t slept consistently. I manage to deprive myself of sleep during the week and become a glutton for it on the weekend. This type of sleep pattern has led me to be consistently tired. I regiment definite routines in my waking hours and yet my sleep has never conformed to fit with the rest of my anal-retentive life.

Furthermore, in my years at university, I have found myself becoming neither a night owl or early-bird. I don’t function particularly well in the early hours or late at night and so I’ve always felt my life had become compressed into about 14 hours: from 10am to 12am. That would be 10 hours of sleep! Gluttony!

So I sit at the precipice between a 14-hour day and a 20 hour day. Six extra hours to read, to work , to play. To do things I’ve always wanted to but haven’t had the time. I’m sure 3 of these hours will be spent procrastinating with extra TV shows but the remaining 3 hours will provide me an opportunity to program a computer game, to learn a new language, or to try yoga.

The possibilities seem endless. But again, things look better from far away. But right now I can see the blemishes of polyphasic sleep quite clearly. I will be a zombie. At least for the next few days. Online blogs remark upon a 1-2 week period of just barely making it followed by another 2-4 weeks before a full adjustment is made. Hopefully I can struggle through the awkward beginning and reap some of the benefits of polyphasic sleep. And if not, well, I’ll add a bit of data to the hunt for a way to live more efficiently.