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gwern comments on When Willpower Attacks - Less Wrong
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Do we know of any actual cases of sleep-deprivation death?
I note that while rats will die of it, mice and pigeons won't; and Randy Gardner went 11 days without sleep, and I can't find anything about any long-term health problems (50 years later, he sounds perfectly hale & healthy in http://www.gelfmagazine.com/archives/sleeping_in.php - note also he probably could've gone more than 11 days if the descriptions of his press conference at the end as being 'lucid' are to be believed).
Reading about sleep deprivation studies and the 'micro-sleeps' that occur in many species, I wonder if the processes making up sleep might be analogous to garbage collection: you can have 'stop the world' GC schemes, or incremental ones
(The one human example I did find was 'fatal familial insomnia', but I don't think anything can be safely inferred from a rare genetic disease like that.)
A fatal genetic disorder which makes sleep impossible
While the article is interesting (thanks for posting the link!), the disease doesn't appear to cause "actual cases of sleep-deprivation death".
It's hard to be sure-- the deaths could be simply caused by lack of sleep, or what's causing the inability to sleep could also be causing additional damage.
This reminds me of that sleep schedule where you sleep about 3 hours a day total in 20-30 minute increments. From what I've read, a bunch of people (mostly nerds) have tried it, but few have succeeded.
I gave it a try one summer. Toward the end, it did sort of work, but my general conclusion was that you were permanently on a lower level of mental functioning (which seems to accord with Stampi's results). The experiences I read online generally either didn't have a good test of mental functioning available, or were focused on creativity - which I figure is something that could well be boosted by the slight delirium/loss of inhibition one sometimes experiences...
Hmm. I wonder how a cost/benefit analysis would work out. On the one hand, you have a lot more time to make up for the mental deficiency, but on the other, small differences in mental performance can add up really quickly. (Anyone who has spent a day chasing a bug that would have taken them five minutes had they just thought a little more clearly will understand this.)
It'd be difficult to estimate. Intelligence is valuable; even the most basic minimum wage job can be done better if you're more intelligent.* And then there's the schedule disruption - more than one polyphasic sleeper has cited that as a reason to go back to monophasic.
So you want to be someone with a flexible schedule & undemanding job. A good method for freelancers, I suppose, or students (eg. GPA correlates higher with 'conscientiousness' than IQ; consider http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/05/do-elite-us-colleges-choose-personality.html ); positions where consistency can be more valuable than peaks.
* claimed in Murray's infamous The Bell Curve; I have no particular reason to disblieve it
One of the arguments for polyphasic sleep is that some inventors, like Edison, did something like it. Were they trading off intelligence for creativity? Also, you get more time immediately after waking up, which is supposed to be a good time to work.
Well, there are issues with anecdotes: http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm#Thomas%20Alva%20Edison
I couldn't find any. On the other hand, Wikipedia claims that total and indefinite sleep deprivation is "impossible" to achieve, possibly even under torture, due to microsleep and extreme tiredness enabling brief ordinary sleep in almost any circumstances. Other reported ill effects of SD might be linked to the cause of the sleep deprivation instead.
However, that doesn't answer the question of what might happen to an average human who was sleep-deprived by whatever method, as far as possible, for a really long period of time - months, not days. I expect there would be physiological or mental damage of some kind in (almost) everyone. That doesn't mean there isn't a way to negate those effects and do away with sleep one day - it's just a question of how narrowly we define the "consequences" of sleep deprivation vs. "removable side effects".