Introduction

Haldo!  Netopalis here,  just wanted to start this blog out with a quick introduction of myself and what I will be trying to do.  Over the next few weeks, I will be attempting to follow the Uberman Sleep Schedule, which is a polyphasic sleeping schedule that reduces the amount of sleep of the user to two hours.  I will be napping for 20 minutes each at 1, 9 and 5, giving me four hours between naps.  I will be attempting to adapt to this schedule for two weeks – if it turns out that I simply cannot do it (my motor skills are dropping or my body is simply refusing to work on it), then I will be moving on to an easier Everyman Sleep Schedule.

During the adaptation period, I will be attempting to take a scientific approach to determining how well I am doing.  After waking, in each phase I will be doing a number of tests to check my progress.  Below are the tests and my average monophasic times:

Reaction time – .25 sec, tested by http://getyourwebsitehere.com/jswb/rttest01.html

Typing speed – 90-120 wpm (although it should be noted that, on my monophasic schedule, my typing speed greatly slows when I first wake up) http://www.typeonline.co.uk/typingspeed.php

Short term memory – 9-10 points using a game of Simon

Tetravex Puzzle – 1:30  (included in my distribution of Linux, using a 3X3 grid)

Long-term memory – At the end of my 1 AM nap, I will memorize a list of 10 random words and see how many I can remember on the next day.  I have yet to test this on myself, but will be doing that tomorrow.

If you have any other tests that you can recommend for me, let me know!

A bit about myself, incidentally – I am 21 years old and a senior in college.  Next semester, I will be taking only 14 hours worth of classes and working part-time as a paralegal.  I am hoping to adapt to a polyphasic schedule this semester to make work in law school significantly easier, and to hopefully silence a sleeping disorder that I have.  On seemingly random nights, I will wake up and start screaming and running around the house – as I am moving out on my own next year, this could be dangerous.  My thought is that I really won’t have time to do that in the 20 minutes that I would be sleeping, but that is of course dependent upon adapting to the schedule and, after adaptation, showing comparable scores on the above tests.

Additionally, I will be working on something that I’ve long wanted to do.  I call it the Renaissance Man project.  During this, I am hoping to read books from every field of inquiry, in order to gain knowledge greater than just general knowledge, but not quite an expertise.  I’ll be posting on here as I read, although it will be somewhat incoherent early on, I imagine.  After a few days, I hope to read for at least 15 minutes per phase, ideally reading a total of 60-90 pages per day on the project.  To ensure comprehension, I’ll also write myself out tests and quiz myself in the subsequent phase.

Factors that may affect my adaptation:

The aforementioned night terrors

Currently, I do not smoke, drink and am cutting my caffeine out this week.

I am not a vegetarian, although some people have argued that this does help adaptation.

I usually do fairly well on little sleep, although if left to my own devices, I will sleep for long hours.

I will be testing what I call an associative song – this is a theory that I’ve had for some time.  Basically, every time that I nap, first I will listen to this song, with the hopes of associating it in my subconscious with taking naps, making me fall asleep more quickly afterwards.

I think that’s everything.  I will be cutting out the caffeine and preparing to undertake the experiment – I start on Saturday and will go from there.

If you have any suggestions or comments, would like to know more about me or would like to suggest another test for me to run on myself, please let me know in the comments!

-Netopalis

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