[extropy-chat] Healthy, wealthy and wise

[Martin Striz]

On 4/14/06, "Hal Finney" <hal at finney.org> wrote:
> I posted a few weeks ago about Steve Pavlina, a consultant and blogger
> who has been experimenting for several months with "polyphasic sleep",
> where he takes about a 20-30 minute nap every four hours around the clock.
> In this way he gets by with 2-3 hours per day.
>
> Martin Striz responded skeptically:
>
> > Let me add that polyphasic sleep is bogus.  NO drug or method has been
> > demonstrated to replace any amount of sleep under controlled
> > conditions for more than two or three days.  If Steve claims that he
> > ONLY sleeps 2-3 hrs per day, then I know some investigators who will
> > pay good money to study him for a week.  Most of the time, people who
> > claim to be low sleepers get small naps or microsleeps that they don't
> > even realize they are getting (which you wouldn't notice if you were
> > constantly sleep deprived, say, through polyphasic sleep).  The vast
> > majority of people who have come to sleep researchers claiming not to
> > sleep at all have been shown to sleep 4, 5, 6 hrs a day.
>
> Frankly I don't see how you can say so dogmatically that sleeping 2-3
> hours per day is bogus when you grant that some people sleep only 4
> hours per day.  Given how little we konw about sleep, and given that
> people apparently are known who sleep only 4 hours per day, how can we
> rule out that someone could sleep only 3?

Sleeping less is pointless if you are less vigilant and less
productive as a consequence.  Some people naturally sleep as little as
4 hrs per day, but they are rare.  They are out somewhere around the
fifth or sixth standard deviation, so I have reason to question
whether someone is really sleeping that little.  Reducing your natural
sleep time even further and claiming that you don't lose cognitive
ability or productivity is even more dubious.  There's reams of data
to back that up, that's how I can say it so confidently.

> Anyway, Steve Pavlina has now announced that he has ended his polyphasic
> sleep experiment.  He enjoyed the extra time but in the end it was too
> much trouble being out of phase with the rest of the world.  His blog
> entry describes his reasons, and also links back to all of his entries
> that detail his journey into the strange world of polyphasic sleep:
>
> http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/polyphasic-sleep-the-return-to-monophasic/
>
> I think if you read these, they make for a convincing story.  I can't
> rule out the possibility that it's a fabrication; Steve does sell himself
> as a "personal development" expert and has donation links on every page.
> I gather that his sleep experiment has garnered quite a bit of publicity.
> But in the end the story has to stand on its own.  To me, his extensive
> journal entries and the comments from his wife have the ring of truth.
> But I can't say for sure.

If he wants to prove himself, there dozens of people who would love to
examine him under controlled conditions.  If he can demonstrate the
ability to function productively under controlled conditions, then he
is truly rare, truly an anomaly.  His methodology won't work for 99.9%
of the population, but he'll get rich hawking it anyway.

Martin