Eating My Own Shit
October 15th, 2009If you start with a bad assumption, you will invariably reach bad conclusions and constantly delude yourself about that fact. The only way to fix this is to regularly question your own basic assumptions about things. The scientific method provides a neat way (in fact, the only way) to do just this. Ask yourself: Is there a different explanation? On what data do you base your decision? Does another interpretation fit, too?
I don’t just claim this, but actually live this way. I want to demonstrate this by changing my opinion about sleep. Frustrated with polyphasic sleep, I have reëvaluated my own assumptions and checked the data. I read more studies and biology texts, looked through my own records and re-read a few polyphasic blogs. And I must conclude that polyphasic sleep, by and large, doesn’t work.
Let’s start at the opposite end – what does work? Well, polyphasic sleep is the best (known) option you have when you can’t have more than 2-4 hours per day of sleep. If you must sleep that little, for example because you are into solo sailing or your newborn child and 2 jobs keep you up all day, than polyphasic sleep is right for you. It minimizes the damage this kind of life will do, but you will still be worse off. You will still be sleep deprived.
Ok, having acknowledged that, let’s start with the criticism. In fact, it’s a very simple criticism because it only involves one point.
Polyphasic sleep destroys your memory.
Sure, you are awake more (if you are lucky, most people aren’t and delude themselves to the fact), but you can’t use the time in any meaningful way. You can’t learn more, in fact, you’ll learn less. All existing studies show that performance is slightly below normal levels, which means you have 4-6 more hours of waketime, but you are actually performing worse than if you had slept them all. Great job. That’s like taking a shortcut, only to drive slower so that you arrive even later.
Why is there not a single polyphasic scientist? No, Tesla was not polyphasic, he crashed regularly. Edison lied about his schedule and, while being mostly polyphasic, didn’t save any time (and he was not a scientist). Buckminster Fuller only slept polyphasically when touring, for the reason I mentioned above.
Why is there not a single polyphasic polyglot? You’d think that someone who is learning multiple languages at the same time would be glad over every single hour per day he can get. Yet, not a single one of them is documented to be polyphasic. Some have tried (mostly early polyglots), no one was happy with it.
Why does no military or space agency advocate polyphasic sleep? There are several studies researching it, but they all document a severe loss of performance and they all advise against it, except when external circumstances force you to be polyphasic, as mentioned earlier.
Why does all data collected via SRS, like for example Supermemo, show that sleeping in big chunks correlates with good performance? If there are working examples of polyphasic sleepers, no one of them has ever demonstrated this via their SRS statistics, and Supermemo captures a lot of those. There isn’t a single example of someone sleeping 4 hours or less per day and still getting a normal retention rate for the same amount of data learned.
There is a simple answer to these questions: Because polyphasic sleep doesn’t work. It’s bullshit. For all the claims of “superhuman” feats, there hasn’t been a single bit of evidence for it. Proponents have made all kinds of claims and assurances, yet have presented nothing. Most of them don’t even seem to be capable of grasping the importance of empirical evidence. It is pseudoscience.
Conclusion
If you don’t care about your memory and you don’t care about being able to learn, sure, go right ahead. If you also keep in mind that the majority of people drop out of polyphasic sleep after a month or less, I would recommend a better alternative: Amphetamines. It has exactly the same amount of advantages (awake at all costs), is easier to use and fucks you up just the same.
I’m now recanting all my previous posts and claims about polyphasic sleep. They are wrong. I have marked the posts accordingly. Don’t sleep polyphasically, yo. If you still think that it works, prove it. And no, “I’ve been doing this for months and I’m fine!!1!” isn’t proof. Get some real data. A SRS is a good starting point. Show that learning for 8 hours or more per day works as least as well as normally and doesn’t destroy your sleep. You won’t be able to, but try all the same. Hint: just log your exact sleeping times and do a few standard performance tests. This alone will probably demonstrate that you are deluding yourself.
So what’s the real alternative? This.
October 17th, 2009 at 05:25
I’m ubermanning atm – everyman seriously doesn’t work well with me, feels very awkward
If it affects my learning languages, I’ll be switching back but my memory doesn’t seem like it’s worse from my original bad memory
October 17th, 2009 at 06:08
After you’ve adapted a bit, say after 2 weeks, just try learning vocabulary for a bit. I found that whenever I did something mentally taxing for more than 5 hours a day (not necessarily in one block) for a few days, I could not sleep polyphasically anymore. My brain would shut down and I couldn’t learn any more. From that point on, my performance would be abysmal until I had at least something like 5 hours of sleep.
This was very consistent for me (and every study done on this, ever).
October 22nd, 2009 at 19:21
Using SRS to measure how effective polyphasic sleep really is, is a good idea. But it is hard to do in practice. Less than 1% of those who try Uberman sleep schedule by themselves succeed. So it would be hard to find an Uberman. Experiments of those who haven’t fully adapted are not as valid. You would be lucky to find a single Uberman to try SRS.
There are actually 6 Ubermans registered on trypolyphasic.com. The number of Everymans is not much higher.
October 22nd, 2009 at 20:02
Sure it is hard to find someone that is both polyphasic and studies a lot, preferably in a way that is easy to measure (like with a SRS). The problem is, though, that many people that try polyphasic sleep are students who want to learn more or at least have more free time while studying just as much as before (at least from what I read, but there might be some bias in it). And I see no evidence whatsoever that this is possible.
But there are quite a few claims that Uberman gives you more energy and has you “never tired”. I’m not saying that everyone who says this is lying, but it would be nice if there’d be a little bit more than just anecdotal evidence for something which contradicts current sleep theories quite a bit. :)
Personally, I think it’s a combination of self-delusion and a rare brain configuration that allows this kind of sleep in the first place, but I’d sure love to be proven wrong.
November 27th, 2009 at 22:03
Can you suggest a protocol for using SRS to measure changes in memory performance over time?
November 28th, 2009 at 00:18
Assuming you are already somewhat familiar with using a SRS, here’s how I’d do it. In fact, I have done something similar twice during my everyman adaptation, but I also failed to adapt in general, so there.
The main problem is that memory works pretty slow, so you will always have to experiment with at least about 2 weeks of largely unchanged conditions at a time. If you don’t allow most of your facts to become mature, you won’t know how effective your current techniques really are. For example, doing an all-nighter and using rapid repetitions is a good way to get a lot into your short-term memory, but after a week or so, most of it will be gone.
Furthermore, you have to make sure that your facts are, on average, of a constant difficulty. This has been one of my major problems in general. If I just transformed some language course or textbook into a SRS deck, the first facts would be a lot easier than the last ones. So I’d have to make sure to add more hints, like pictures, or take smaller steps the further I progressed. Of course, you could just input a large amount of facts and than shuffle them, but this destroys a lot of context and makes learning them harder. Generally speaking, you are probably better off by learning medium-sized (say, a few hundred facts), mostly independent units and comparing those.
The actual protocol would be something like this (if you are really patient / a psychologist, you’d double the time spans involved to get clearer results, but alas, I’m neither…): You pick your unit size such that you can learn it all in about a week (in the case of vocabulary, this is probably something like 20 words a day, i.e. 100-150 words in total), than spend another 1-2 weeks doing reviews. That way, you will have done about 4-5 reviews per card. This should make them mature (or, at worst, 1 review away from it). Now you check your retention rate and average time spent per card. If your retention rate drops too low (about 80-90% is minimum), you are doing something wrong. If you need too long per card, you will soon lose motivation. Now make one change, e.g. switch to a different sleeping schedule, repeat, compare.
In the case of sleeping schedules, especially everyman, it might take a while for them to work right. It is normal to see some really bad performance during the first weeks, so it would be unfair to compare “week 10, monophasically” with “week 1, everyman” (which is why my data is not online).
Other changes, like a different card layout or a new diet, should show up immediately.
Additionally, I’d also pay attention to your motivation. Using everyman, I found that I was progressing very fast at first, but after 5 to 6 days, doing just 5 reviews would tire me out and I had a lot of trouble just preventing me from failing already “learned” cards all the time. This would kill all the fun and soon I dreaded doing sessions or would simply crash because cards would pile up, but I just couldn’t keep up until I took a long sleep.