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.