Hacking Sleep (or, too much to do before the singularity strikes)
Greetings, post-interesting readers! One of the banes of pre-singularity existence is time-crunch. Arguably this is getting worse as things accelerate (certainly so for doctoral-student-AGI-developer-wannabes), and drastic measures such as hacking one's sleep cycle might be called for.
The basic idea is to train your body to go directly to REM sleep, bypassing (presumed) less essential stages. This is known as Polyphasic Sleep. In the "Uberman Sleep Schedule" (no, I didn't invent the name, and neither did Ben, AFAIK) this is accomplished by replacing nightly "monophasic" sleep with six evenly spaced 20-30 minute naps.
Research seems sparse, but it sounds plausible at first glance. Evolutionary psychology might suggest that it's not wise to chronically meddle with something this... On the other hand, we moderns certainly meddle with plenty other things and, to an extent, seem to get away with it.
16 Comments:
Your link's broken.
Specifically, your link to the Kuro5hin story.
Ahh. Kuro5hin is moving servers...
The only problem with this protocol is that slow wave sleep, the sleep you get when you first fall asleep, pays off the sleep debt and is considered to be more important than REM sleep (I work in a sleep research lab). You can get away with these 30-minute chunks probably because you can get away with cutting off some REM sleep.
What you bring up, however, is an important issue in our hyper-busy modern environments. People have been trying to find ways to eliminate or substitute for sleep (for example with meditation), but nothing has been found to be significantly effective in replacing sleep under controlled conditions. That is, you can sleep less, but your performance will be worse.
A researcher in my own lab is examining the claims that meditation can "replace" sleep or increase vigilance, and it appears that it has some effect, but if may not be better than sleep. If it's no better than a 1-to-1 trade off, if you have to meditate for as long as you sleep, then you've gained nothing.
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Naughty Kruo5hin ;p. You can get a cached version by googling for "Uberman's Sleep"..
As a related comment, I have kept my friends aware of my experiments with modafinil, a drug released for narcoleptics, which is pretty effective at relieving you of the need for sleep for one or two nights. Unfortunately I have found that a day or two after I use it, I get horrible abdominal pains; but I have a terrible digestive system and some others I know have used it without such a serious side-effect. I am waiting for a Modafinil variant that doesn't screw with the digestive system!
I also found that, after using modafinil, trying to sleep led to interesting experiences, including a 5-hour-long lucid dream.
-- Ben Goertzel
Modafinil was actually invented by my boss's former colleague (who went off to start Hypnion and make millions). Its advantage is that it appears not work through the dopamine pleasure pathways, and therefore has a low potential for abuse (it's believed to work through glutamate). However, it's still just a stimulate, not a substitute for sleep.
We all want there to be some effective replacement, and believe me, there are millions of dollars being poured into that kind of research (the Defense Department is always looking for ways to get soldiers who can work more and sleep less). However, the purpose of sleep is complex and an effective replacement will probably have to be multifactorial.
it's not clear to me that there is any argument against polyphasic sleep on a health basis. There is little research data on the sleep habits of pre-agricultural humans, but it's plausible that hunter-gatherers and similar would be in precarious enough positions to not sleep in enormous 8 hour blocks of synchronized vulnerability.
If anyone is aware of specific data against polyphasic sleep, I would be interested. I have not found any specific data on it, and recieved no negative side-effects myself.
Well for those interested a friend of mine did the uberman cycle for a while and made a blog specifically dealing with how he felt etc:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ubermannequin/
Although I realise there are others out there I thought his commentary was quite good.
In addition I've really enjoyed using Modafinil. I don't know if others get the same effect but I get a real motivational boost and puts me in a great mood. Unfortunately Nubrain has stopped shipping to New Zealand so I'm not sure if I'll be able to get anymore for a while!
The same guy who did the uberman experiment, recently came across Spike http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do;jsessionid=60E8A5F43F5D6C2E31BA21D20C9A5F06.hydra?id=628912
which seems to be subjectively similar to Modafinil. But more hush hush and less researched.
outlaw, so you've been practicing the polyphasic sleep protocol? How many hours do you sleep total per day and how long have you been doing it (consecutively)?
The author of the Kuro5hin article claims to only sleep 30 min x 6 = 3 hrs per day. If he can do that for more than three or four days and maintain normal levels of vigilance (using standard metrics such as the psychomotor vigilance test), then he would have found something that has eluded a community of sleep researchers for decades.
If someone can demonstrate normal vigiliance levels on fewer than 4 hrs of sleep for at least one week, I would like to invite him or anyone else to my lab personally for a controlled study. Monetary reimbursements would be made.
BTW, I just read through that Ubermannequin experiment, which was an amazing 51 days long (allowing for great assessment of chronic effects), and as expected the guy is suffering from decreased vigilance and sleep deprivation.
Just a few more observations on this polyphasic sleep thing that might help you out. You'll notice that Uber does well for the first two days, but by the third day, as expected, he starts oversleeping. Within a week he's crashing out with full rest periods, sometimes as long as 12 hrs. He's done nothing to replace needed sleep.
You should be aware that while you sleep, you go through an ultradian cycle of NREM/REM periods that last 90-110 minutes each. During REM sleep a good amount of reactivation of the limbic system occurs (dreams are believed to be associated with emotional/motivational memories), and it's easiest to wake up. REM usually comes in the last half hour of the cycle. For the first hour of the cycle, you're in NREM, which is difficult to wake up from. This is the stage at which people are most groggy and often don't even remember being woken up (if someone else does it), answering questions, etc., or don't remember turning the alarm off in their sleep (which sucks, I've done it).
By making the sleep period half an hour, you're always trying to wake yourself up right in the depths of NREM (probably stage 4) sleep. You can get away with that for the first few days, but it becomes incredibly difficult after that. You might try three 80-minute sleep periods during the day instead, and you'll at least be able to wake up easier. Although, I think you might as well get a good night's rest. :)
Sorry, I keep flooding the comments, but I just told my boss about your protocol. He worked at the Stanford sleep center (where sleep research was basically invented), and he told me about some relevant experiments carried out there.
One was the selective REM deprivation experiment. Participants were woken up every time they started to enter REM sleep, so that they got all their NREM sleep but no REM sleep. They faired better than any other sleep deprivation (or reduction) study participants. They felt close to normal but still not quite. This is where the investigators first established that NREM has a much more important role than REM. Those findings were confirmed by many other studies using memory tests as metrics, and physiological data.
Another was called the "90-minute day" experiment. Given that on average people are awake for 16 hrs and sleep for 8 hrs, this experiment maintained the same sleep/wake times overall but put people on a 1-hr wake, half-hour sleep schedule (thus "90 minute" days). People were profoundly affected by this schedule, even though they were still getting the total required amount of sleep in a 24 hr period. It demonstrated that consolidating all of your sleep into one period is more effective than breaking it up (one woman became an IRB concern when she reported that she didn't feel normal for a month following the experiment, so it was never carried out again).
You see, it's not just your sleep-wake state that's under circadian control. Much of your physiology is as well, including core body temperature (which is highest in the afternoon and lowest about 2 hrs before you wake up), the levels of various hormones (95% of human growth hormone is expressed at night, so kids really do grow in their sleep), and so forth. By dispersing your normal circadian (occurring over about a day) cycle, you could be profoundly disrupting and confusing much of your body physiology.
I would also make the strong warning that you should NOT DRIVE if you're going to be carrying out protocols like Ubermannequin did. Experiments where people were allowed to sleep only 5 hrs a day (thus 1-2 hrs sleep dep) showed that they had driving impairment equivalent to legally drunk persons.
I'd also add, because people may not know, that one's sleep debt actually accumulates over a period of a week or two. If you're in a good sleep schedule and you miss several hours of sleep one night, it'll take up to three weeks to really regain balance. This is part of why sleeping in on weekends to make up for poor sleep during the week doesn't really work.
I've had sleep problems since I was a child, and I recently found a device here that has allowed me to take control of my sleep patterns. I was suffering from delayed sleep phase syndrome, and using the light treatment in the mornings has made me get sleepy at night for once. If you've wanted to try adopting a free-floating sleep schedule in the past, light therapy might be a good replacement. I'm afraid it won't make you want to sleep any less, though.
Has anyone tried to use Modafinil with polyphasic sleeping? I've been up for 25 hours (since noon on 4/15/07) and have taken two 200mg of Modafinil at 10 hours and at 22 hours. I was fine until 9am this morning prior to taking the 2nd pill and then everything got a little woozy. I took the 2nd pill and it took about 2 hours and I felt physically fine but mentally I was off (nowhere near as bad prior to taking the pill), my body responded as if I had a few drinks but not drunk. When I concentrated on what I was doing, I was fine and got the job done but if I tried to do several things at once it felt like I might break something. Oh, I'm doing this to get my entire homework/mechanical project finished.
Anyways, I was thinking that taking Modafinil will help get past the first week of polyphasic sleep. It definitely curbs the side effects of sleep deprivation however, you still will have the drunk coordination issue until you establish the constant REM sleep patterns.
Having a clear mind and piloting a drunken body is by far the weirdest thing I've experienced. It all most proves Descartes dualism philosophy. Also it took me way too long to write this and I can type about 40-50 wpm.
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