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Capla comments on Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping - Less Wrong Discussion
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I agree with your skepticism. The polyphasic community claims that they are able to make drastic reduction in sleep time because they go straight into REMs when taking a nap. This conflicts with a lot of my understanding.
It is my suspicion that they are mistaken about that, and that actually, if a person has acclimated to polyphasic, he/she isn't going into REM at all and that this is where gains come from.
Who do you mean with "the polyphasic community" exactly? Who's actually doing polyphasic sleep and claiming such a thing (e.g. hasn't read Stampi)?
There's the polypahsic society. They are more-or-less the representatives of consensus among polyphonic folks. (I think. Perhaps I'm misrepresenting them?)
Stampi is not very helpful for figuring out what polyphasic people are doing while they sleep. So far, I've yet to find a single paper that features a polysomnographic evaluation of someone doing uberman or everyman, much less one that does a basic evaluation of whether someone who has been polyphonic (long term) is exhibiting clinical symptoms of sleep deprivation. Both of those, but particularly the polysomnograph, would be very informative.
I've read some of the Polyphasic Society's website, and they make a different argument. Unfortunately it doesn't seem the website exists any longer (or now it's at a different location?), but the Internet Archive has the page I read. You can see that they claim something a little more sophisticated than that they go straight into REM (with the implication that REM is all you need, etc.). Likely, they do this because the REM claims are false for multiple reasons. I discussed this with ChristianKI on LessWrong a year ago. Beyond the REM claims, their newer claims are contradicted by the research in Stampi's book (see the link in the previous sentence for justification).
The reason you don't see studies about polyphasic schedules like Uberman and Everyman is probably because sleep researchers consider the idea to be so far-fetched that it's not worth doing a study. I have seen some polyphasic sleep proponents use Zeo, however. Look at the Polyphasic Society link I gave in the previous paragraph for an example.