The Myth of the 8 hour sleep...

Cat naps...Einsten and Edison used cat naps to solve complex problems. Ask yourself a puzzling question and then take a cat nap. Try to remember your dream.

Edison used to take a cat nap with a heavy ball in one hand..when it fell and hit the floor he would wake up and remember what he was dreaming.

But, i time travel while sleeping and it takes me a good 48 hours to teleport to and from Sirius, and shag some alien hotties.

Unless he's training large primates, I think you meant Guerillas.

except cats sleep 17 hours a day... They are only awake in small intervals.

fuck that

sometimes I sleep for 14 hours sometimes more!

you do what your body tells you

if its less its less.. of its more its more

not everyone is the same

some people are day people some night owls

I agree with this. Most of the workdays I'm sleep-deprived to a higher or a lesser degree, so I doze off easily and quickly, but during vacations or long idle periods, when I sleep enough, I start to notice these four-hour blocks of sleep, waking up and feeling like getting up, and then wanting to sleep again.

It's tragic how this modern schedule patterns seem to be designed to fuck us up...

DIDN'T even read all of page one replies, BUT, in case NO ONE mentioned the REASON we sleep to begin with, it IS TO RESTORE OXYGEN levels to the body, REPAIR tissue ( grow same for the youngsters ) and WHEN/IF you sleep MORE than 8 hours, you begin to USE UP the stored oxygen, and will yawn to try to replace same when you do wake !

Eagle

i sleep between 4-6 hours, no probs here

bollocks.

I know for sure, from long boat trips, catnaps are the way to go. I've gone for weeks standing four hours on four hours off watch. Two 3 or 3 and a half hour naps on the off watches, then you tend to just stay up the rest of the time. I would always feel much MORE rested after long trips, rather than eight hours at a pop on land.

Yeah...meth has that effect...

We don't repair tissue and grow whilst awake?!

If you dont know the function of a process, dont fucking guess -- use the interwebz.

(btw, there isn't an oxygen cupboard hiding behind your lungs - oxgen is taken in, and used. If it were otherwise, I could stay underwater while my oxygen cupboard deals with the rest.)

Function of the Yawn
There are a lot of reasons for yawning, and they are not all related to fatigue. One theory behind yawning is that it works to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide by bringing in fresh air and quickening the heart rate to flush out the system. Other theories include the yawn as an evolutionary show of (literal) teeth, and the time-tested yawn as an expression of boredom. However, none of these really explain the yawning that happens at times of tension or nervousness. Robert Provine, professor of science at University of Maryland, says, "Monkeys make yawn-like gestures that we know are hostile or aggressive actions. Subordinate animals never yawn in the presence of the alpha male."



Read more: Causes of Yawning | eHow.com [link to www.ehow.com]

crack will keep you awake... lol... JJ

Four hours or so, then up for an hour, then another 2 to 4 hours is my normal routine.
They could have just asked me.

I am nocturnal atm... its a real pain... soon as the sun peps over the horizon though.. I'm out like a light

this

you dont need a schedule or some scientific mumbo jumbo

I seem to need nine hours of sleep minimum or a I feel bad

From above link:

During this waking period people were quite active. They often got up, went to the toilet or smoked tobacco and some even visited neighbours. Most people stayed in bed, read, wrote and often prayed. Countless prayer manuals from the late 15th Century offered special prayers for the hours in between sleeps.

A doctor's manual from 16th Century France even advised couples that the best time to conceive was not at the end of a long day's labour but "after the first sleep", when "they have more enjoyment" and "do it better".


Ekirch found that references to the first and second sleep started to disappear during the late 17th Century. This started among the urban upper classes in northern Europe and over the course of the next 200 years filtered down to the rest of Western society.

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The reasons for the change on the BBC website aren't convincing. Does anyone have any clue as to what really happened?

Strikes me as strange that everyone got on board. People - in my experiance at least - hate change and doing what they're told.

Were there any major worldwide events that co-incide? social/political/cosmic (yay! I squeezed in some sun doom!)? 17thC isn't a topic I'm familiar with.

NO! You must visit your local pill pusher for some of those perfectly safe sleeping pills.

I sleep 7 to 10 hours a night. 8 1/2 is best for me but I don't set an alarm because these days I don't have to on most days.

My whole life if I got less than 5 hours sleep, I'd feel a little sick the next day at some point. A stomach ache plus fatigue.

Excuse me for pointing this out, but the word is guerrillas. It comes from the spanish term guerrilla, meaning "little war" which is how they described their struggle against Napoleon's occupying army.

When you said that your buddy was training gorillas in the jungle, I thought that you meant a park ranger, and he was adopting the sleep pattterns of the apes.

it's called a growth spurt.

and when it was forty below and we were sleeping in tents, we would peek out of our five-star sleeping bags hoping somebody else would wake up first and restoke the fire. Growing up in warm houses made us into wimps.

Sleeping has many uses, but mostly its goal is to restore various kind of energies to your being. Some people sleep a lot because one of their energies depletes too fast.
Don't believe modern medico-scientific bullshit about sleep because western science doesn't get sleep at all. Just ask top sleep scientist, they will tell you sleep is still a great unknown to them.

If you want to sleep less or sleep better, one advice, try to recognise where you are really tired and when you are not. People think they know what tiredness is but they don't, mistakenly interpreting other signals. You also to get rid of the fear of being tired.

Just my two cents

i never slept 8h, sometimes more, sometimes less and i take naps everyday like 45min or 1h30 max.

i don't understand the stuff about sleeping 8h a night, for me it's just to force us to stay awake in daytime like zombies and this is not nice most of the time.

something i noticed when i was at school, was that my brain is more powerful during a couple of hours and obviously not in daytime.

i used to go to sleep around 8pm, woke up around 1am and worked for hours than go back to bed and woke up to live like the others.

it was the best way for me, i did this for many years since childhood to adult life

also when i need to solve a problem, i sleep a bit, it works really well.

Uberman Sleep Cycle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Segmented sleep, also known as divided sleep, bimodal sleep pattern, or interrupted sleep, is a polyphasic or biphasic sleep pattern where two or more periods of sleep are punctuated by a period of wakefulness.

In Western civilization before the Industrial Revolution --("hmm" indeed), segmented sleep was the dominant form of human slumber since time immemorial, according to A. Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech. Over the course of nearly two decades of research --(Why are we just hearing about this now? and from the corporate media? will everyone's sleep problem's get worse in the coming months and a 'reason' is needed [see end]), Ekirch discovered extensive evidence of this sleep pattern in a wide variety of documents, dating from the ancient world until the nineteenth century. Typically, individuals slept in two discrete phases, bridged by an intervening period of wakefulness of up to an hour or more. Peasant couples, who were often too tired after field labor to do much more than eat and go to sleep, awakened later to have sex.[1] People also used this time to pray and reflect,[2] and to interpret dreams, which were more vivid at that hour than upon waking in the morning. This was also a favorite time for scholars and poets to write uninterrupted, whereas still others visited neighbors and engaged in petty crime.[3]

The human circadian rhythm regulates the human sleep-wake cycle of wakefulness during the day and sleep at night. Due to the modern use of electric lighting, most modern humans do not practice segmented sleep, which is a concern for some scientists.[4] Superimposed on this basic rhythm is a secondary one of light sleep in the early afternoon (see siesta) and quiet wakefulness in the early morning.

There is evidence from sleep research that this period of nighttime wakefulness, combined with a midday nap, results in greater alertness than a monophasic sleep-wake cycle --(maybe a that's a reason for high-society eurocrats instigating a change in pattern).[citation needed] The brain exhibits high levels of the pituitary hormone prolactin during the period of nighttime wakefulness, which may contribute to the feeling of peace that many people associate with it. It is in many ways similar to the hypnogogic and hypnopompic states which occur just before falling asleep and upon waking, respectively.

The modern assumption that consolidated sleep with no awakenings is the normal and correct way for human adults to sleep may lead many people to approach their doctors with complaints of maintenance insomnia or other sleep disorders. Their concerns might best be addressed by assurance that their sleep conforms to historically natural sleep patterns.[5] --(hmm, maybe this is all bollocks, the 'decades' of research we're only just hearing about now may be used to explain away adverse effects of all the shit we eat/breathe/etc every day)

Looks to me like we'd all benefit from a return to segmented sleep - Even ignoring the research, our ancestors were definitely more intelligent / less dumbed-down than we are today and they thought it was a good idea - at least up until the Indust. Rev.

Wow strong credible OP.

NOT.

HHAHAHA

I love the late noon siesta, its a real recharge