As someone who regularly doesn’t sleep I am going to go ahead and say this is probably bullshit. Even pretending to sleep is better than not sleeping.
Upon reading the article I think the title is just misleading. What can be said is that regularly getting only 6 hours of sleep will cognitively impair you in similar amounts to not sleeping for a few days but is less noticable because you have time to get used to it. This does not account for the physical effects of not sleeping for a couple days. Calling it “just as bad” is a gross generalization.
Yeah, the key interesting bit there was that your cognitive performance declines, but you’re not actually aware of it happening.
Currently imagining how fucking cool I would be if I could just sleep
On top of that, the actual results are behind a paywall and can be very iffy. It sounds like there were only 12 people in the 6-hour group and in each of the other groups. And no indications about other traits like sex, smoking or other habits, and so on. Too small numbers to guarantee against statistical fluctuations. And the “significant” in the abstract may indicate that they used p-values to quantify their results, which are today considered iffy by a large chunk of the statistics community…
I don’t think the author has any idea what not sleeping at all even feels like.
Subjects who got six hours of sleep a night for two weeks straight functioned as poorly as those who were forced to stay awake for two days straight.
this is literally not what the study finds. chatgpt generated article. For digit-symbol-substitution, by the end of the study (14 days) they find taht the 6 hour group, when corrected at the rate of learning of the 8 hour group, performed as bad as the ONE night sleep deprived group. Note that this is entangling sleep’s effect on learning with its direct effect on cognitive performance. Also. for the serial-addition-substitution, after 14 days it was the 4 hour of sleep group that was as bad as the 1 night deprived group. maybe they only looked at the reflex-response task, where the 6 hour group barly scrapes into the 2-day-deprived group’s margin of error.
Here is the article to see for yourself: https://pomf2.lain.la/f/a09sl5sp.pdf. Note that when they say “linear” they mean “not saturating” as opposed to a strictly linear effect.
ALSO ALSO with respect to the subjective sleepiness thing, using the power model and then saying that its due to nonlinearity of the observation variable, but then looking at the subjective sleepiness score which is visually VERY SIMILAR and saying “yep thats linear for the 0hr group and saturating for 4hr,6hr” doesn’t pass muster.
Subjects who got six hours of sleep a night for two weeks straight functioned as poorly as those who were forced to stay awake for two days straight.
both of those things sound awful
yea this is bs because it’s taking 6hrs sleep across 2 weeks, and comparing it to a person who stayed up for only 2 nights (but no deprivation prior to those 2 nights). IRL sleeping 6 hrs is way better than not sleeping, you’d probably die if you didn’t sleep for 2 weeks
