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Comment by outworlder | Hacker News Reader

I have found exactly zero peer-reviewed studies that say that you can replace what is considered to be normal sleep (with one or two phases) with polyphasic sleep.

I've once seen a quote (can't find it on google right now) from a doctor who said something like "Trying to 'adapt' to polyphasic sleep is like trying to teach your bowel to excrete in portions of exactly 25 grams. It doesn't work that way.".

Alarm clocks are designed to scare our brains, as if we were in danger, to forcefully wake us up. I can't imagine that sort of punishment, multiple times a day, over long term.

Researching the subject, I have found the following link. Note that the Supermemo software is from the author, so there is some bias there towards using (and purchasing) the software. Other then that, the articles are interesting. http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic2010.htm

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The way that adaptation works (warning: simplifying a bit here) is that your brain wants you to get restful sleep when you aren't allowing it to. In this situation, its default strategy is to cause you to feel the effects of sleep deprivation in order to induce sleep. If you successfully resist this urge, only going to sleep at certain times, and follow a schedule fairly strictly, then your brain will give up after a week or two, and will learn to just take whatever it can get during those time slots (i.e. go directly into REM sleep).

After a while of doing this (adaptation), you will get most or all of the sleep you need, just from naps, and you will no longer feel sleep deprivation.

Check out the book "Ubersleep" written by Pure Doxyk, someone who has successfully done long-term polyphasic sleep, for details on this model of sleep.

albedo you have made a excellent summary! When I tried it, I slept 20 minutes every 4 hours and at the end when my system had adapted, I woke up automatically after 20 minutes even before my alarm went off and full of energy as if I slept 10 hours. But after 4 hours, I was completely exhausted and I really needed my 20 minutes of sleep.

Steve Pavlina had taken the schedule up and had wrote about it in some detail. Not what you'd considered peer reviewed but definitely a first hand experience akin to Buckminster Fuller's experience with the attempt at a polyphasic sleep schedule.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/10/polyphasic-sleep/

Dude is a 'life coach'... There's absolutely zero reason to trust anything he says

There don't seem to be any long term studies (which isn't terribly surprising, as getting significant compliance in the long term would be incredibly difficult. There are a couple studies over small periods which found increased/equivalent alertness from short sleep periods.

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