Polyphasic Sleep Deprivation: Days 2 and 3

Ok, so day 2 morning was pretty rough. Waking up at 7am was pretty hard. Once I was up though, things were not HORRIBLE. I was able to stay pretty focused and really didn't run into drowsiness at all, however headaches were a problem after the sun went down. Day 3: once again seriously hard to wake up from the main night sleep. But getting up and getting to work before traffic was nice. I got to work about an hour and 30 minutes earlier than usual and was able to get a good head start on the day's work. Again focus was not really a problem - interestingly my mood has been pretty good. I'm normally really grumpy when I tired. I think though, it would not take as much to piss me off right now. Anyhow, being 90 minutes earlier to work, I left about 30 minutes before normal so I got a lot more work done than usual and still got out ahead of the traffic jam. I'm still having a little trouble switching off during the afternoon nap. Falling asleep during the night cycle is really quick, but I think my mind is subconsciously staying extra active to keep me from passing out that it's hard to fall asleep in the afternoon cycle. Could also be that I'm just not used to sleeping during the day yet, too.

Asteroids!

Recently, we've had a lot of astrological happenings here on planet Earth. First a sizable asteroid entered the atmosphere measuring in at 55 feet across and 10,000 tons. This meteor, traveling at a speed relative to earth at 40,000 mph exploded high altitude with the energy of about 500 kilotons of dynamite. To put that force into perspective the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a force of about 15 kilotons. The high altitude spared Earthlings of significant damage, but the shockwave broke glass over about a 50 acre range injuring about 1200 people.

Here is some amazing footage of the meteor exploding:

Just a few hours later an unrelated asteroid named DA14 narrowly missed earth. This one was much, much larger measuring 150 feet across and weighing 130,000 tons. Where the Russian meteor was about the size of a schoolbus, DA14 is the size of the white house. DA14 would have exploded with 3.3 MEGATONS of energy. Interestingly, while doing some research I found out that we were actually struck by a meteor about the size of DA14 in 1908. It struck in an unpopulated location in Siberia called Tunguska. When it popped, the explosion knocked trees down for 830 miles! The devastation of a DA14 sized asteroid in a populated city would be incalculable.

Tunguska damage:

DA14 will miss us by about 17,000 miles. Astronomically speaking, it's unbelievably close. Here's how to put that into Earth-term perspective. The moon is 221,000 miles away and Earth is about 7900 miles across. This asteroid will actually come INSIDE our geosynchronous ring of satellites. It's about 1/10th the distance to the moon. About 1/5500th the distance to the sun.

If that still sounds far I'll try to put it into astronomical terms. Andromeda, the NEAREST spiral galaxy to us is 15,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. I don't even know what that number is, but it's 2.5 million lightyears x 6 trillion (miles in a lightyear). DA14 is 1/882,352,941,176,470 the distance to Andromeda, and that is the CLOSEST spiral galaxy. Andromeda is about 765,000 parsecs away. This distance is pretty much impossible to illustrate because you need something for size comparison. The biggest thing you and I know is the earth and on pretty much any scale we could imagine, earth would have to be microscopic to see Andromeda and the milky way at the same time. This website did the best job I've seen so far: http://scaleofuniverse.com/

To minimize the scale here, the nearest solar system to us, Alpha Centauri is 4.21 lightyears away. The asteroid is 1/10th of a lightsecond away from us. It's so close to use that our gravity changed it's course by nearly 90 degrees.

One other thing I wanted to do is explain the difference between an asteroid and a meteor. An asteroid is a relatively small bodies orbiting the sun. Asteroids are generally rock and/or metal. I think that science has actually further classified asteroids into some boring sciency names like small-planetoids etc, but I'm not too sure. When space stuff collides, small particles are chunked off and called meteoroids. When one of these enters the atmosphere, it starts burning up and leaves a tail. This is called a meteor or shooting star. Finally, if a meteor survives the atmosphere and collides with the Earth's surface, it's called a meteorite.

Polyphasic sleep cycles: Day 1

Recently, I've been looking into polyphasic sleep cycles. The word is pretty self explanatory - instead of a single sleep at night, you have multiple sleeps throughout the day. The most extreme of these is called the uberman cycle. In this cycle you sleep for 20 minutes every 4 hours and apparently, that's all you need! Can you imagine how much you could do in a day with only 2 hours of sleep? I've been wanting to try a polyphasic sleep cycle for awhile, but being a working gent, my schedule doesn't really allow for anything too extreme.

The way polyphasic sleep works, is basically by starving yourself of solid blocks of sleep, your body trains itself to fall into REM sleep much faster. A typical sleep cycle is 90 minutes long - 65 minutes on nonREM sleep, 20 minutes of REM and 5 minutes of nonREM. Not that nonREM sleep is throwaway, but REM is much more restorative. So a person who is adapted to the uberman cycle for example can fall asleep very quickly and almost instantly achieve REM sleep reducing the total sleep needed in a day to 2 hours.

Uberman sleep cycle: awake 92% of the day.

With biphasic sleep I'm not really sure if one can get the same efficiency that you can out of one of the more extreme poly techniques so I'm planning to start continuing on the 90 minute sleep cycle theory. 4.5 hours of sleep (3 cycles) at night and 90 minutes (1 cycle) when I get home from work. I'm hoping that the reduced amount of sleep and giving myself 2 chances for recovery will still increase my REM ratio. This saves me 3 hours a day which is actually a HUGE amount of time. Right now I sleep 9 hours, get up and go to work and get home about 6. I have 5 - 6 hours to cook/eat/clean/socialize/etc per day. Adding 3 hours to this gives me +50% free time! Research indicates that in the absence of social conditioning humans are polyphasic by nature and I'm fascinated by the science behind this and the idea of all this extra free time.

I'm in day 1 of my biphasic sleep experiment. There are 2 schools of thought for biphasic. One is a 6 hour nights sleep with a 20 minute nap in the day. The other is a 4.5-5 hour sleep with a 90 minute nap. The latter makes more sense to me since 20 minutes will not approach REM sleep - at least until I reduce the amount of time it takes to fall into REM sleep. So for now the schedule will be: 2:30am - 7am sleep. 6pm-7:30pm nap.

Biphasic sleep cycle: awake 75% of the day

I had a normal day Friday, went to bed at exactly 2:30 got up with the alarm at 7am. I went downstairs and made breakfast - enough for Diana when she gets up. While the sausage was cooking I did the dishes and a few other chores downstairs, but found myself bouncing from one thing to the next before finishing. That's very unusual behavior for me. I blame the lack of sleep last night. My mind isn't focused and keeps moving to the next thing. So I made a list of stuff to do. Finish unloading the dishwasher, have a protein shake, take a shower, take my vitamins etc. Eventually I sat down in front of the gas logs to enjoy my breakfast. I was really hungry but as soon as I started eating I lost my appetite. Maybe it's because I hate eggs. I forced myself to eat as much as I could but found myself chewing the same bite for a really long time before swallowing. Sitting in front of the fire in the silence was pretty relaxing, except Ebenezer kept trying to get up on my breakfast. I eventually gave him a piece of sausage so he would leave me alone, but predictably he chewed on it for awhile, spit it out and continued to try to eat off my plate. I gazed through the fire, unfocused, a few times. Not asleep, but just kind of zombified. My mind wandered toward the asteroid that nearly hit us and I am going to do a blog post about that soon.

Monophasic sleep cycle: awake 63% of the day

Looking forward to my afternoon nap!