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![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2IoUq.jpg)
This blog will catalog my motivation, planning, and attempt at adapting and thriving using a polyphasic sleep schedule.'
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December 23rd
Two sleeps into building a routine around my alarm clock. The first night I slept for 6.5 hours and awoke, but forgot to wash my face after turning off my alarm. I just woke up after the second night after exactly 8 hours of sleep, turned off my alarm, and splashed my face with cold water. I am really happy with this since I woke up at 6:00AM, a feat I have historically found difficult.
In order to make a strong routine I will need to have more mornings like the second one and less like the first one, however I haven't slept over 8 hours yet which is good.
1. Banking Test Results
I have decided on the following games for measuring sleep deprivation:
Key Hero, a Chrome typing test application. Uses different text so I don't learn the content and skew results.
2. Memory Matrix. Start with 3 tiles in a 3/3 grid. You are shown where they are, then have to recreate the pattern. Each round you get right leads to a new round with one additional tile in the pattern. A mistake pushes you back one tile. This goes on for 15 rounds. The score is denoted as points/highest round.
7:06AM December 23 2965/11
7:13AM December 23 2345/10
7:18AM December 23 1125/9
3. Sleep Dash. Tests reaction time.
7:19 December 23 0.2268s
7:20 December 23 0.8068s
7:21 December 23 0.23s
I am including and accepting weird penalties and mistakes into the results. For example, my 7:20AM time for Sleep Dash included a 3 second penalty one round for clicking when there were no sheep, and my 7:18AM result for Memory Matrix involved a few rounds where mouse accuracy was the issue rather than recall. This is part of the games: being careful. Therefore results should suffer on account of unnecessarily or inaccurate clicks.
-- Edit --
It's December 28 and I'm going to do another round of tests. I slept for 7.5 hours last night, have recently eaten, and feel great. I've been downloading lots of papercraft .PDO plans for Pepakura viewer and I think that using my black and white printer to print plans, colouring them in with pencil crayons, and making the crafts will be my main activity to stave off sleepiness (keep me just occupied enough, not strained and not feeling tired). Anyways here are my new test results, didn't feel worthy of a new blog post. Here are my feelings following my 74.34WPM "performance:"
This was (expletive inbound)
+ Show Spoiler +
The first few sentences were all airport acronyms, hyphens, and American places. It's fine though going to do a bunch today. Piss.
Compiled Results
Key Hero, a Chrome typing test application. Uses different text so I don't learn the content and skew results.
Results Format
TIME(24h format) MONTH_NUMBER DAY_NUMBER WORDS_PER_MINUTE ACCURACY_(%)
6:57 12 23 102.59 99.4
7:00 12 23 91.21 99.06
7:02 12 23 94.14 98.77
10:54 12 28 74.34 98.80
10:59 12 28 86.87 98.23
11:00 12 28 87.88 97.98
11:01 12 28 91.18 98.45
11:02 12 28 103.16 99.01
11:03 12 28 85.48 97.44
11:04 12 28 98.15 98.51
Memory Matrix. Start with 3 tiles in a 3/3 grid. You are shown where they are, then have to recreate the pattern. Each round you get right leads to a new round with one additional tile in the pattern. A mistake pushes you back one tile. This goes on for 15 rounds. The score is denoted as points/highest round.
Results Format
TIME MONTH_NUMBER DAY_NUMBER POINTS HIGHEST_LEVEL_REACHED
7:06 12 23 2965 11
7:13 12 23 2345 10
7:18 12 23 1125 9
11:10 12 28 2665 11
11:14 12 28 2945 10
Sleep Dash. Tests reaction time.
Results Format
TIME MONTH_NUMBER DAY_NUMBER AVERAGE_REACTION_TIME
7:19 12 23 0.2268
7:20 12 23 0.8068
7:21 12 23 0.23
11:49 12 28 0.2234
11:50 12 28 0.2134
11:51 12 28 0.2166
11:52 12 28 0.2132
Speed Match. Quickly decide whether each new symbol matches or doesn't match the previous one. Emphasis on quick decision making and reaction time.
Results Format
TIME MONTH_NUMBER DAY_NUMBER REACTION_TIME ACCURACY_(%) TOTAL_CORRECT POINTS
11:18 12 28 879 93 38 1730
11:21 12 28 675 98 51 5400
11:46 12 28 792 98 44 4050
11:47 12 28 700 94 47 2970
Raindrops. Simple math equations fall down the screen. Solve them before their raindrop backgrounds reach the water at the bottom of the screen.
Results Format
TIME MONTH_NUMBER DAY_NUMBER EQUATIONS_PER_MINUTE SOLVED OVERALL_(%) PRESSURE_(%) POINTS
11:58 12 28 26 71 96 91 2958
12:01 12 28 26 74 95 70 3129
8:17 12 31 26 76 96 79 3339
Word Bubbles. Make as many words as you can with three fixed starting letters in a short time.
Results Format
TIME MONTH_NUMBER DAY_NUMBER WORD1_POINTS WORD2_POINTS WORD3_POINTS TOTAL_POINTS
12:09 12 28 180 330 180 690
12:15 12 28 420 180 300 900
12:18 12 28 450 150 330 930
 
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yo im kinda retarded so can you like explain how this works?
nvm im sifting through your old blogs
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Perhaps you should explain what polyphasic sleeping is?
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cool typing test. Just did it and got 121wpm :brags:
Why are you just testing your memory, wpm, and reaction time? I feel like those don't cover a wide enough area unless that's all you are curious about seeing what changes when you switch to a different sleeping cycle.
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alright so i just finished reading your previous blog and man you are nuts
but i'm glad you are going through with hit, i hope you accomplish your goal
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On December 23 2011 08:34 Br3ezy wrote:
cool typing test. Just did it and got 121wpm :brags:
Why are you just testing your memory, wpm, and reaction time? I feel like those don't cover a wide enough area unless that's all you are curious about seeing what changes when you switch to a different sleeping cycle.
I agree three tests is a little narrow, I'd be open to expanding the testing. As you allude to the goal is to measure sleep deprivation and hopefully my adjustment/recover to results which are equal to my "well rested" results which I am accumulating now. Here are the criteria for new tests:
1. Must require dexterity, mental fortitude, or concentration
2. Simply doing the test can't be a rapid way of improving
many games fail due to #2: I could learn them and my results would get all messed up, perhaps my best score would be when i'm most sleep deprived just because I learned the game so well by then.
On December 23 2011 08:36 leo23 wrote:
alright so i just finished reading your previous blog and man you are nuts
but i'm glad you are going through with hit, i hope you accomplish your goal
Thanks!
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ah crap, do you have control tests for before you started this to actually find out if you did improve or not?
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I am very interested in how this turns out. Keep up the writing I will read it for sure 
I am especially interested in the time when you start adjusting your sleep schedule to the uberman schedule. Will be interesting to see you work through that for lets say a week until you start getting used to it.
As far as I know eating helps making your body adjust faster to shifts in your daily routine. So maybe eating something after every nap might help.
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When I was in grade school we had this extra credit activity where we tried to do a sheet of 60 basic arithmetic problems as fast as possible. Maybe you could do mental math and use time/accuracy as a gauge? It definitely requires concentration/presence of mind, and I think you could pick the difficulty level of the problems such that "learning on the job" isn't an issue (i.e. make them within your comfort zone, but not absurdly easy).
This sounds very cool... I'm tempted to try it, except I would probably sleep through half my classes during the transition. Good luck
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16971 Posts
Good luck, and I'm looking forward to subsequent blogs detailing your progress. As an aside, one of my friends tried doing this, ended up getting depressed (or maybe he was already depressed), basically stopped doing anything, and dropped out of school. He's working from home now and making decent enough money, I guess, but yeah, polyphasic sleep was one of the contributing factors for his dropping out of school. I know anecdotes don't really mean anything, but no one I've seen try this has succeeded in the long term.
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I have been playing around with these sleep schedules for around 2 years now. "Best" achievement is dymaxion for something like a month (don't remember why I stopped but it wasen't because I had problems with the schedule). On top of that i have done multiple everyman runs that can be counted as more or less success.
But man it can be hard sometimes. I have failed uberman miserably like 3 times already and even something like 4.5h+2*20min everyman can be a bitch. Difficulties you'll face are common knowledge so i won't go into those. There is just one point that can't be emphazised too much: have something simple you really really want to do during all those night hours. You had few ideas but you might need more.
Currently my general opinion about polyphasic sleep is kinda mixed. It CAN be really fun experience (or hell). Seriously, the moment when you wake up after just 20mins of sleep and could swear that you slept whole night is so cool. But then again following the schedule is a giant hassle and at you still might(and probably will) feel drowsy at some points. It's not cool to be awake if you are too tired to actually do something.
So in the end it's not clear imo that uberman/dymaxion is better than just taking random naps or following a simple biphasic schedule. Then again I most certaintly wouldn't be taking random naps daily if it wasen't for these sleep schedules. So <3 to them. Hopefully in the future we can actually understand what is happening when you sleep and how does polyphasic sleep actually work.
Experience once/try if you are up to it? Hell yes. Lifestyle? Probably no.
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Your first blog had me worried and thinking it was really dumb, but since you're actually making some attempt to document the effects on your performance in an empirical fashion, I find it a lot more interesting. If nothing else you'll provide some data to those who think about it in the future. You should measure as many things as possible to make this as useful an experiment as possible. Something that tests your productivity would be useful (like how much work you get done in two hours) since that is one of the biggest concerns with sleep deprivation. Keeping track of your weight and other things that indicate your health would also be important. To do a 5 minute test on memory is good, but you should attempt to paint as broad a picture as you can (and then people in the future can pick and choose what they want to research more specifically). It might help to research other people who've done this. I remember reading something about some navy ships requiring it, but it could have been made up. See what you can dig up and expand on their studies.
glgl remember to abort your experiment if it looks like it is making you dysfunctional (in society and physically)
Seriously, the moment when you wake up after just 20mins of sleep and could swear that you slept whole night is so cool.
That isn't really a phenomenon of polyphasic sleep. That will happen to anyone even if they normally sleep 8hours. When I have a lot of work to do and I'm getting really tired, I take a 20 minute nap. I don't get REM sleep (since I haven't forced my body into the polyphasic schedule) but I do feel pretty awake and ready to work again. It's also worth it to note that lots of people go 4.5 hours of sleep without taking naps during the day, they just feel like they're too busy. They function poorly, but it should be a pretty small step to incorporate naps into that schedule. I know when I didn't even know about polyphasic sleep I would often take a nap between classes and sleep less at night just because it was convenient. Some of these schedules seem more reasonable than others, as long as they already fit into your routine. Esp. Biphasic and Quadraphasic, since you can afford to skip your naps if you have something really important.
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16971 Posts
From what I've gathered from reading online blogs on this topic, it's really hard to function socially, because if you miss your scheduled nap, it's pretty much over. So it'll be like 2:15 in the afternoon and suddenly you have to find a place where you can nap. Sucks if you're driving or something.
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Well, that's obvious. But there are a great deal of professions in which the extra hours would be a huge asset. Writers, programmers, basically anyone who works from home and requires seclusion to do their job well. It's not atypical for employed writers to go somewhere far away for a few months to write a novel. Not something you'd consider if you worked 9-5 or wanted to see people with any regularity, of course.
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