Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: On Science

I’ve gotten some feedback regarding the fact that I should continue this experiment for scientific gain. I appreciate the sentiment, as well as the implied compliment (I find it complimentary, anyway) that I am maintaining scientific purity. Alas, though, I am not that pure in my execution.

When I set out to do this little test, I wanted to approach it with an analytic mindset. I wanted to find root causes of symptoms and treatments, and to bring a little more light to the odd phenomenon of polyphasic sleeping.

Now, I have told myself that while it would be nice to find that polyphasic sleep is a safe, sustainable alternative to a monophasic lifestyle, ultimately, I’d like to just provide accurate information on the topic. In my initial research, I saw a striking lack of well-documented or cited information, especially pertaining to references to support medical effects or “facts” about polynapping. So, while I wanted to experiment myself, I also wanted to make some of what I learned easily available to the casually curious internet consumer.

Now, to me, the most important part of this was providing well-cited sources for my information. I wanted to make sure to dig deeper into internet rumors, blog postings, and forum quotes to see if information came from reliable sources. I aimed to provide backing for my claims, or label them as speculation if they are as such. (If I have not done this elsewhere in the blog, please let me know about it, so I can fix it).

With that in mind, though, I am not a sleep scientist. As much as I wish I could claim that I’ve been doing this usefully for science, I’m not really helping scientific pursuit of polynapping research in any meaningful way. My methods are scientifically flawed and full of bias. I have no control or even baseline measurement. All my “measurements” are qualitative and subjective in nature. And I’m not working towards verifying a given hypothesis. Heck, I don’t even have a hypothesis. All I’ve got is a personal goal to achieve.

Because of all this, I’m not really helping science much. I doubt my information would be more than a footnote, if that, in a peer-reviewed article. My work may be supported with scientific research (when I make claims, anyway), but I just want to make it clear that what I am doing is not science. :)

-sean