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gotdistractedbythe comments on Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Dave Asprey claims that you can get by fine on five hours of sleep if you optimize it to spend as much time in REM and delta sleep as possible. This appeals to me more than polyphasic sleep does. Link
Also I was intrigued when xkcd mentioned the 28 hour day, but I don't know of anyone who has maintained that schedule
Dan Aspey claims he can do well on 5 hours of sleep, and then makes a further claim that any other adult (he recommends not trying to do serious sleep reduction until you're past 23) can also do well on 5 hours. To judge by a fast look at the comments, rather few of his readers are trying this, let alone succeeding at it.
Do you have any information about whether Aspey's results generalize?
I am under the impression that nearly anybody who talks about sleep is guilty of Generalizing from One Example.
Not really.
There are by now some quite extensive studies about the amount of required or healthy sleep. Sleep is roughly normal distributed between 5 and 9 hours and for some of those getting 5 or less hours of sleep this appears to be healthy:
Jane E. Ferrie, Martin J. Shipley, Francesco P. Cappuccio, Eric Brunner, Michelle A. Miller, Meena Kumari, Michael G. Marmot: A Prospective Study of Change in Sleep Duration: Associations with Mortality in the Whitehall II Cohort.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2276139/pdf/aasm.30.12.1659.pdf
So probably Dave Asprey is one of those 1% for this is correct.
Some improvements (or changes) may be possible for most of us though. You can get along with less sleep if you sleep at your optimum sleep time (which differs depending on your genes esp. the Period 3 gene) and if you start to sleep quickly.
Polyphasic sleep may significantly reduce your sleep total but nobody seems to be able what the health effects are. It might be that it risks your long time health.