Polyphasic Sleep: Facts and Myths. Contents The law of accelerating returns We live in the times of accelerating acceleration. The Moore's Law makes the world smaller, faster, more connected and more efficient. We are now able to touch and feel Kurzweil's generalization: the law of accelerating returns . At the same time, the myth-making power of the human mind is now grotesquely amplified by the all-mighty Internet. Around the year 2000, a new meme cropped up in several blogs on the net: The Uberman's Sleep Schedule. The Uberman's Sleep Schedule The idea behind the Uberman's Sleep Schedule is to gain waking hours by sleeping the total of just 3 hours in 6 portions distributed equally throughout the day. The Uberman's Sleep Schedule was proposed in this blog at Everything2.
Polyphasic sleep More and more frequently, Uberman's Sleep Schedule was being referred to as polyphasic sleep (the term popularized by research and book by an Italian chronobiologist Dr. Polyphasic sleep is quite widespread in animal kingdom. The myth of the eight-hour sleep. Image copyright Other We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night - but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural. In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month. It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.
Though sleep scientists were impressed by the study, among the general public the idea that we must sleep for eight consecutive hours persists. In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. Image copyright bbc. Segmented sleep. Segmented sleep, also known as divided sleep, bimodal sleep pattern, bifurcated sleep, or interrupted sleep, is a polyphasic or biphasic sleep pattern where two or more periods of sleep are punctuated by periods of wakefulness. Along with a nap (siesta) in the day, it has been argued that this is the natural pattern of human sleep.[1][2] A case has been made that maintaining such a sleep pattern may be important in regulating stress.[2] Historian A.
Roger Ekirch[3][4] has argued that before the Industrial Revolution, segmented sleep was the dominant form of human slumber in Western civilization. He draws evidence from documents from the ancient, medieval, and modern world.[2] Other historians, such as Craig Koslofsky,[5] have endorsed Ekirch's analysis. Segmented sleep as a historical norm[edit] The human circadian rhythm regulates the human sleep-wake cycle of wakefulness during the day and sleep at night.
Wehr's study[edit] Physiology[edit] See also[edit] References[edit] Dr. Christopher Winter: Stop Trying to Get Eight Hours of Sleep. You have messages. Inbox (1) Subject: "I told you so!!! " A lone message sat in my inbox last night as I checked my phone before bed. I usually try to avoid email at night, but the subject had me hooked instantly since I'm fairly sure I'm never wrong. I assumed the triple exclamation was meant to send a message of urgency that one or even two exclamation points could not adequately convey. The email was from an unfamiliar sender. Clicking on the link, I was immediately confronted with a picture of Dr. "Once upon a time, you could sleep like a baby. Instantly I knew where this message had come from and what it was about. "Why do you go to bed at 9:00 p.m. if it takes you an hour to fall asleep? " "Because I need my eight hours.
" Eight hours. Where did this number come from? Sadly, the answer to that question is far from simple. So how much sleep do you need? So how can you figure out how much sleep you need? How long does it take you to fall asleep? Can't sleep? Loading Slideshow. How Much Sleep Do You Really Need? Sleep is one of the richest topics in science today: why we need it, why it can be hard to get, and how that affects everything from our athletic performance to our income.
Daniel Kripke, co-director of research at the Scripps Clinic Sleep Center in La Jolla, Calif., has looked at the most important question of all. In 2002, he compared death rates among more than 1 million American adults who, as part of a study on cancer prevention, reported their average nightly amount of sleep. To many, his results were surprising, but they've since been corroborated by similar studies in Europe and East Asia.
Kripke explains. Q: How much sleep is ideal? A: Studies show that people who sleep between 6.5 hr. and 7.5 hr. a night, as they report, live the longest. Morbidity [or sickness] is also "U-shaped" in the sense that both very short sleep and very long sleep are associated with many illnesses—with depression, with obesity—and therefore with heart disease—and so forth. How Much Sleep Do You Need. View Larger >> Sleep is a vital indicator of overall health and well-being. We spend up to one-third of our lives asleep, and the overall state of our "sleep health" remains an essential question throughout our lifespan.
Most of us know that getting a good night’s sleep is important, but too few of us actually make those eight or so hours between the sheets a priority. For many of us with sleep debt, we’ve forgotten what “being really, truly rested” feels like. To further complicate matters, stimulants like coffee and energy drinks, alarm clocks, and external lights—including those from electronic devices—interferes with our "circadian rhythm" or natural sleep/wake cycle.
Sleep needs vary across ages and are especially impacted by lifestyle and health. To get the sleep you need, you must look at the big picture. How Much Sleep Do We Really Need: Revisited Video production in partnership with Download NSF's recommended sleep times chart.