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Why should this polyphasic thing work at all? A fair question; I too was once skeptical. Here's a quick explanation, though, to approximately the best of my understanding.

Prevailing neurological understanding of sleep distinguishes between Rapid Eye Movement cycles (REM) and Slow-Wave Sleep (SWS): REM comes in brief bursts, but is crucially important to mental function and consciousness in complicate ways that we don't quite understand. SWS, on the other hand, appears to be a simple 'resting state' that allows the body to recover from the day's stress. Thus the 8-hour monophasic sleep cycle typically breaks down into:

As we subject our bodies today to much less physical stress today than was present in the ancestral environment, I think it's reasonable that modern-day, modern-living humans can healthily survive on less SWS than we evolved to desire. REM, on the other hand, is a complicated mess of complicated that we understand incompletely, if at all, and which it might be unwise to tamper with. Thus, the Everyman-3 schedule that my roommate and I are transitioning to retains six REM cycles, but cuts out much of the SWS:

The first segment is three hours of "core" sleep that covers three REM cycles; the remaining cycles are placed throughout the day in 20-minute naps (it turns out that 20 minutes is almost

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I'm blogging now? Apparently. Expect a hodgepodge mix of assorted things, roughly corresponding to the set of things I'm interested in, in no discernible order. Maybe at some point, I'll get my act together and start composing sequences of posts, but for the initial brain-dump phase, expect no more than, well, a brain dump.

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Today, I begin transitioning to a polyphasic sleep schedule. If it works, I'll develop the ability to REM sleep in naps of twenty minutes, and survive on fewer hours of nighttime sleep by napping during the day. (The particular cycle I'm aiming for is "Everyman-3", three hours of night-sleep and three twenty-minute day-naps.)

Well, perhaps the word 'survive' is misleading. I'd like to do a lot better than 'survive'; I'd like to continue functioning at my present mental capacity, for extra conscious hours. While efficiency-times-duration calculations indicate that I should be willing to accept up to a 20% drop in efficiency along with the 25% increase in waking-hours, I suspect that the nighttime hours that I'll be awake will be less useful than the daytime hours I'd be taking a productivity-hit in, which means that an 20% hit is a loss. I'd like to see no more than a 5% dip in mental-function test scores, and if I see more than a 10% drop, I'm going to need to seriously evaluate the utility of being awake when everyone else is asleep.

My outcome expectations are as follows:

• 50% I give up before completing the transition
• 20% I observe significant mental-function decline post-transition
• 30% my test results exhibit no significant decline

Within the 30% chance of success, though, I expect a 1/3