huh I thought bla and/or others tried to persuade me against this in the thread, but other than reply #4 I don't really see anything.
Anyway, the deepest psychological effects of taking an uberman schedule without any long times of sleep whatsoever are vast and seem to take months to complete, but once all of them are completed I see no reason why it can't be extended indefinitely. While there may be unknown effects from carrying it out over years and years, I am most likely not going to ever see them as I already know that I am not going to continue this schedule indefinitely, only until some major roadblock occurs and I have to either switch to an Everyman schedule or revert entirely back to monophasic sleep. My original intentions with this were to have an everyman schedule, which seems to be more in line with the monophasic society.
I was doing some reading on arguments against polyphasic sleep throughout the night, especially focused on these two articles in particular, both of them by the same author:
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htmhttp://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic2010.htmThe main thing about this is that there is simply so tiny of a body of actual scientific research on it, particularly on any studies which focus on both forms of adaptation, both physical and psychological. The psychological adaptation for the everyman schedules are far less intensive than for the uberman schedule, but they both may have their challenges. Many of my thoughts on their subject are the insight they give into the circadian rhythm, and one comment in particular from their articles drew my attention and thought:
« Phase 0: Waking time: napping in Phase 0 is possible... [] ...
It will also introduce unwelcome oscillations in the circadian system that may take a few days to clear up.» (cleaned for parts irrelevant to my thoughts)
Basically, it shows that the circadian rhythm is actively malleable, and can most likely be stretched to its limits and fall apart entirely if an uberman schedule is adapted. Those oscillations could be taken advantage of and when at times of low energy, a polyphasic nap could be taken. The only difficulty then would be removing the large block of low energy which occurs during the night and is nearly unshakable from the rhythm. He also states that, while newborns will have a polyphasic sleep cycle, their one-year-old cohorts will have a biphasic sleep cycle like adult humans.
One method that may work in preventing the nighttime drowsiness would be to push the largest block of sleep to during the day before attempting this so that the body will get even more confused as the circadian rhythm is not matched with what is happening in reality whatsoever (that is, six naps equally spaced throughout the day) and the rhythm would hopefully weaken and allow for a faster transition, although the severe sleep deprivation of the transition also seems to be unavoidable and necessary to enter a polyphasic schedule and actually maintain it rather than transition slowly and horribly, resulting in a great deal of stress on the circadian rhythm, almost always too high to handle (as the abundant failures at polyphasic sleep can attest).
He also shows quite a bit of bias in his article against it:
«Phase 18-24: Night sleep: if you try to nap in Phase 18-24, you are bound to trigger a normal healthy night sleep. This is okay as long as you do not get down to "napping" with the evil intent of stopping the process in 20-40 min. Here is were the pain of polyphasic sleeping becomes hardest to bear.»
