[Polyphasic Sleep] Errata, Food, Reductionism
(1)
It's become apparent to me in the past few days that, when I wrote last week's post on the theory of sleep, I didn't know what I was talking about. Or rather, I had an incomplete picture of the subject at hand, and oversimplified a system that was more complicated than I was giving it credit for.
A little more digging has revealed that there is, in fact, evidence that SWS may be important for consolidating declarative memory, which breaks down into episodic memory (events) and semantic memory (facts). By contrast, REM consolidates procedural memory and spatial memory (both of which are more or less exactly what they sound like). Previously, I had dismissed it as "useless". Oops.
Of course, that's not the whole story, either: non-REM sleep is split into periods of "light sleep" and periods of SWS. Altogether, an 8-hour monophasic sleep cycle includes something like 1-2 hours of REM, 1-2 hours of SWS, and 4-5 hours of NREM2 light-sleep. The goal of the E3 schedule, then, isn't so much to absolutely reduce needless SWS, but to restructure the sleep cycles to reduce NREM2, at minimal cost to SWS/REM. (Note that E3 differs from other polyphasic schedules in this respect; notably, Uberman almost entirely eliminates SWS, and packs two hours of REM into just six short naps.)
Now, it makes intuitive sense that, if the brain is using SWS for consolidating certain types of memory, there's an additional "rest state" where it's actually doing nothing but resting. And so,