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Comment by lightblade | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if human can be trained to do this. Certainly sounds like something coming out of sci-fi or martial art movie.

No, we lack the ability.

Any animal without big selection pressures to develop and maintain this ability seems to lose it rapidly, as other adaptations of the brain for other purposes seem to preclude USWS. Only animals which really need it seem to have it.

I have heard of Cowboys sleeping with eyes open, but not sure if thats just a old wives tale.

I know first hand someone who have driven several kilometres only to "wake up" and not being able to explain. This is of course extremely dangerous and in every case I know of it has ended with a damaged / wrecked car though luckily no injuries or fatalities. (Back country roads, middle of the night etc).

What happened in at least one of these cases was dreaming with eyes open. From what I hear that might not be to uncommon but here I'm back to old wives tales.

There is a case to be made with these situations that you weren't actually asleep.. you just didn't lay down memories for the period of time, because nothing happened.

You feel like time is missing because you have no recollection of that time - but that does not have to equate to you not being awake, or able to respond.

My college roommate slept with his eyes open. Creepy as fuck.

Full-day working hours? Programmer by day, designer by night!

Right brain asleep while you're programming and left brain asleep while you're designing! You could literally never stop working! ;)

You'll end up making code that works well but looks like crap, and beautiful designs that have zero use in the real world ;).

But good luck doing either of those with only one hand.

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