hypovolemia said:
Mr.K. said:
On a purely mechanical level you can't hold out a 4 hour pace, our entire body works on a work - rest/regenerate cycle, that is why we can live for so long.
If you halve your sleeping / regenerating period your body will start to deteriorate, sure it wont become immediately apparent but you will be walking around with increasingly shoddier build quality, effectively shaving years off your lifespan, not to mention the strain on your sanity.
The thing is nobody knows if it actually works like that. There is only one way to find out: You make a couple of groups consisting of randomly assigned people and have every group sleep a different amount of time per day. There are countless practical problems with a study like that and it's unethical to boot. After all, how can you make someone sleep 4 hours every day when you are convinced that it will cost that person 20 years of his lifespan?
The next best thing are correlational studies that would have to control pretty much everything in your life to see if the amount of sleep has any effect on your health. And that sounds like a lot of fun.
You do bring up a very interesting point, a 90 year old man that had regular 8 hour sleep wasted 30 years sleeping(1/3 wasted), the same man would only waste 15 years with 4 hour cycles(1/6 wasted).
But he most likely wouldn't make it to 90, then again in our last decades we become rather useless, so the 8 hour man has a long "wastefull" life while the 4 hour man has a short "active" one.
The work / regeneration cycle is not in question, the part we don't know are the extremes.
Howmuch time do we actually need for sleeping, can it be varied depending on our exhaustion, howmuch of the sleep is actually useful and howmuch is wasted on transitions in sleep cycle.
Those studies are useless data unless you fully control the environment, with humans that just isn't doable, but it's worth a shot...
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