I've always wondered whether or not modafinil (provigil) or other drugs are effective for long-term avoidance of sleep without major side effects. Does anyone on LessWrong have experience with modafinil that they would be willing to talk about? (PM if you would prefer not to discuss publicly).
I enjoy the feeling of sleep because my primitive mammal brain needs it, but on an intellectual level I hate every hour that I give over to sleep. It feels too much like death because of its unavoidable encroachment. All too often I'm not ready to surrender the hours to sleep that could be spent learning, or reading, or anything else that I want to do instead. I also hate the tiredness that I'm punished with when I try to steal a few hours from the night. The tiredness persists for most of the day and prevents me from doing any serious work if bad enough (coffee can bring me out this, but it wears off and is not a good long term 'solution' to sleep).
Anyway, to be more on-topic, I would not be surprised (but disappointed) if sleep were far more necessary and needed than a quick first-pass would show. Its omnipresence throughout the animal kingdom (a form of sleep can be observed in a freakin' nematode#Sleep_in_invertebrates)) as well as the fact that we don't observe any full exceptions to the requirement of sleep suggests that it is not trivial for life as we currently know it to evolve away from needing it.
Gwern is a lesswrong contributor who has recorded his experiences with modafinil, it might be what you're looking for.
(not yet studied in mammals)
The ratio of the strength of a synapse between neurons and the total potential (from all incoming synapses) needed to activate a neuron may be all that figures; the absolute values may not be important (this is the basis for computer neural networks, though temporal effects, firing rates, and who knows what else also matter in real brains).
So you can renormalize (multiply by some constant 1) and see almost no difference except for perhaps greater susceptibility to noise. But at least the amount of physical material needed is smaller, and the energy needed is smaller. It's more efficient.
In flies and other simple animals studied so far, this definitely happens during sleep. Maybe it happens in humans also. (remains to be studied).
In any case, be careful committing to some REM-sleep only 3hr/day-with-naps sleep schedule, just because you may feel fine at first, when the exact utility of non-REM sleep isn't completely known.
Via.