six40winks

about

This is a site exploring the polyphasic sleeping schedule known as überman.  This means sleeping 2h a day!  and I’ll be doing it for 6 months.

Polyphasic sleeping simply means that you sleep many times a day (vs. monophasic sleeping where you sleep once at night).  The most common sleeping pattern is 2/3 of the day awake, 1/3 of the day asleep. Like so:
monophasic sleep diagram
But I’m sure you’ve all heard of bi-phasic sleep (or the famous Siesta) which looks something like this:

biphasic sleep

 

and is sometimes used in certain latin countries.  But perhaps a less well known is triphasic sleep (also known as Everyman sleep):  A 4.5 hours major sleep episode and two 20-minute power naps.

triphasic sleep diagram

Yet some people chose to go further. The first recorded attempt to change dramatically our sleeping patterns was performed by architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller.  He coined the Dymaxion sleep schedule (Four 30-minute naps a day — one nap every 6 hours) … which meant sleeping a total of 2 hours per day.  Multiple variations around this schedule have been tested by people around the world.   However there is little actual data describing these experiments.  My goal is to share the first 6-month long set of polyphasic sleeping data for this schedule:

uberman sleep schedule

about the author:

I’m a 33 year old scientist, programmer and entrepreneur.

At age 12 I was reading astrophysics books about the universe (La mélodie secrète, Trinh Xuan Than) and two years later I discovered Quantum Mechanics (Le cantique des quantiques, S. Ortoli). Obviously I did not understand even the principles of it but was fascinated by the unsolved mysteries of the universe.  I did an MSc in Theoretical Physics (with some neuro-physiology in my final project) and after a gap year went on to do a PhD in Quantum Information at Imperial College, London.  In paralel I also collaborated with Engineers Without Borders and explored small scale renewables.

After completing my PhD I went on to work in the renewable energy industry.  With my engineering and modelling experience and my self taught programming skills I have now started my own company to help spread renewables around the world.

On this journey, my fascination with the great questions of the universe and the mind have not withered, and I’m always eager to explore new fascinating projects like polyphasic sleep.

 

about the site:  This is a wordpress blog (a free and open source PHP-based blogging platform).   The contents and pictures of this site are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. (or CC-BY-NC).
Creative Commons Licence and is hosted at Webfaction using green energy powered servers.

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