Well, Suby beat me to it while I was working on this post. Like he said, check out this webpage for a strong and very interesting case against the viability of polyphasic sleeping. The author, Poitr Wozniak, seeks to uncover some of the many myths about polyphasic sleep and how it works.
It should be mandatory reading for anyone considering going polyphasic. My biggest single problem with the idea of polynapping is the extreme bad science behind it: there is virtually no hard evidence in favor of it working, and a fair bit of hard evidence against it. Supporters do a lot of hand waving, saying things like ’supposedly…’ or ‘in theory…’ We point to testimonials and made-up facts, and they get passed around enough that we believe them. That article does a great job at laying out the evidence against polynapping.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I like it. For someone who is currently trying to transition, and who would very much like it to be true, it can be hard to read an article that’s so hostile to polynapping. The author is very dismissive and takes no pains to spare my feelings. What’s more, he uses fairly good science to make his point. As a rationalist I am forced to concede. He can’t provide evidence directly against polynapping (such as actual studies) but he does show why polynapping is incompatible with our current ideas about how sleep works, and that looks like as good as we’re going to get.
Still… if everything he says is true, we must not be getting the whole picture. How do you account for the successes? The people who succeed in becoming polyphasic overwhelmingly report how great it is. Are they all delusional from sleep deprivation? The author outright claims that they are making it up. I can’t disprove it. However, many of the claims against polyphasic sleep also hold against a schedule with core sleep and three naps. That was the schedule I maintained for four months last year, and it was either great for me or it made me crazy enough to think that it was great for me.
The rationalist in me is very happy to finally find someone acting like a scientist here. There are a lot of things that science can’t explain yet. Polyphasic sleep, and indeed much of sleep in general, is one of them. Sometimes the evidence just doesn’t line up and all we can do is more science. At some point we’ll be able to say, “Oh look, we were just thinking about it wrong; the evidence really does fit,” or else “Huh. I guess we were wrong before.” In the mean time I’m just going to suppress my rationalism and see where the ride takes me.
When Suby first read the article he took it a bit harsher than I did. I’ll admit it is somewhat infuriating, but then I pointed out to him the similarities between how the author feels about polyphasic sleep and how the two of us feel about religion. In short, we can’t believe that anyone would rationally buy into it. The author writes condescendingly because to him, there’s scarcely anything to debate. Never forget to put yourself in the shoes of the opposing entity.
