Cheating Sleep - Scientific Results

From the full article HERE at Digg.com

As any good scientist would, I referred to past studies, recorded data, and discussed notes with some of my colleagues. Although the sample size was just one—and, obviously, biased—I was going to end up learning a great deal about an activity that we spend nearly a third of our life doing.

 With looming deadlines and an upcoming thesis defense, I was determined to find more hours to fit in work and study. The answer came from reading about the famous American inventor Buckminster Fuller, who, Time reported in 1943, spent two years sleeping only two hours a day.

 Fuller’s short dreams

The method to achieving what seemed like a superhuman feat was called the Dymaxion sleeping schedule: four naps of 30 minutes taken every six hours. Much of Fuller’s inventions were labeled “Dymaxion,” which is a portmanteau of dynamic, maximum, and tension, and I was certainly inspired to live like a great man once did....

Not sleeping properly causes problems, so we say that sleep is essential to many functions such as memory and cognition. But why we sleep and what ill-effect sleep deprivation may have remain poorly understood.

(Photo credit - Master Uegly / Wikipedia)

That lack of knowledge, however, hasn’t stopped people from experimenting with sleep. My experiment began six years ago, and today there are many more online forums dedicated to discussions around what is now referred to as “polyphasic sleep.” People have scoured past examples, such as the life of Leonardo da Vinci, to develop new polyphasic schedules. Like the Dymaxion schedule, the general idea is to break the large chunk of sleep at night in to multiple naps and thus reduce the total time spent sleeping....

s Roger Ekirch notes in At Day’s Close: A History of Nighttime, a segmented sleep pattern was common as recently as the 18th century.

 Back then people often slept for four hours, then woke up for an hour or two before going back to bed for another four hours. In the period they were awake at night, people smoked, had sex, and even visited neighbors. It was the advent of night-time lighting that allowed us to squeeze in more awake time doing things and made people adapt to what is today’s monophasic sleep.

The hardest part, after the initial three weeks of adjusting to the schedule was keeping up with socializing. The world is monophasic and students in universities love alcohol. I sometimes avoided events if they clashed with my naptime, or I often left parties early so that I could keep living my polyphasic life.

Five years on, I carry a few napping skills from my experiment. I can nap anywhere (as long as I have ear plugs to block noise and I’m not caffeinated). I use naps to clear my head, and I haven’t found a better solution for doing that.

The experiment also taught me that I should respect sleep. Stretching myself to the limits gave me a deeper understanding of how crucial this activity is to our life.

Would I do it again? Perhaps, if I can find enough motivation for a large, well-defined project, such as writing a book. But I won’t do it for more than a few months, because there is a biological purpose of sleep that has only become clear in the last few years.

All the cells in our body require nutrients and produce waste. Blood vessels supply these nutrients throughout the body, and lymphatic vessels collect the waste from all parts of the body except the brain.

That waste, recent studies have shown, is cleared by the cerebrospinal fluid, which acts like the lymphatic system but does the job more effectively in the tight space inside the skull. What is more important, however, is that this waste clearance only happens while sleeping.

This is the most compelling answer to the question why sleep is so important to the normal functioning of the brain. Until I see studies that say that a polyphasic pattern, does not affect this waste clearance system, I won’t be returning to polyphasic sleeping on a long-term basis. But I don’t regret the experiment I ran fueled with my youthful spirit.

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I read this and think - cheating on sleep POISONS our brain if it isn't filtering away waste that only happens during sleep.

Full article HERE