I just came across this Scientific American article:
Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late.
“…after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift.”
My Own Sleep Experimentation
Heh. This reminds me of my sixth-grade science fair project, for which I talked my immediate family into staying up for 24 hours and taking a series of exams, administered every four hours, that tested different cognitive abilities. (One of my versions of an MRI scan? Catching a ruler while someone else threw it to the ground; where your hand landed on the ruler was measured as an indication of your relative alertness. Hey, I was 12 and rulers were cool, ok?) The results of my clumsy little experiment were consistent with what Scientific American claims in the article above.
In the midst of doing some research for my project, I had learned about polyphasic sleep (popularly known as the Da Vinci sleep schedule, since the artist was a believed adopter) in which one can theoretically shrink their daily required rest to 2-6 hours via sleeping multiple times in a 24-hour period. The idea was to extend the amount of time you’re awake every day by sleeping more efficiently.
I never quite took to the whole napping concept, but when I was in high school, I slept an average of 4-6 hours per 24-hour period. It was the only way I could sustain my Reese-Witherspoon-in-”Election” schedule, in which I traded rest for Key Club meetings, swim practice, and a year’s worth of AP Physics crammed into a six-week program. Yeah, I was that girl.
Phi for Sleep?
Since then, I haven’t really committed to one sleep schedule for a prolonged period of time. I wonder if there’s some sort of REM-related golden mean (sleep:awake; daytime:nighttime) that’s simply evading me. Because eight hours is about as unrealistic as the eight glasses of water I’m supposed to drink daily.
[Photo: Flickr/jurvetson]
Tags: da vinci code, golden ratio, phi, sleep
