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What you know, or what you think you know about sleep.

Mark Anthony

I've heard a lot of things over the course of my life about sleep. About Rem cycles and how much you should get and honestly I don't know what to believe. So I'm opening it up to us archinectors to determine. The analysis drawings start now. Go!

 
May 2, 07 10:10 am
quixotica

I heard it's for the weak.

May 2, 07 10:52 am  · 
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toroid

"I'll sleep when I'm dead"

May 2, 07 10:52 am  · 
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postal

actually there was an interesting article on that crazy marathon guy...in wired a little while back...

instead of sleeping he runs... he averages something like 4 hours a night...

and then runs an extreme marathon...

human? i doubt it... i ran 1.5 miles, wieght trained a bit and played 30 min of Wii boxing last night... i was not about to wake up in 4 hours...

May 2, 07 10:57 am  · 
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bucky fuller had an interesting approach to sleep.

May 2, 07 11:35 am  · 
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snooker

So did Ben Franklin.....23 kids later!

May 2, 07 11:55 am  · 
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The thing I was always told in school was that if you were going to sleep more than 1/2 and hour, you should sleep in multiples of 3 hours.

I don't know about what happens after three hours (really, who got more than three hours of sleep as an architecture studnet?!), but I do know that if I nap for 45 minutes or 2 hours or something like that, I wake up completely disoriented and almost unable to function.

May 2, 07 12:28 pm  · 
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mdler

i have a theory of threes...

May 2, 07 12:40 pm  · 
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mdler

i think that after X amount of time you start REM. IF you dont get enough REM (the old stuff, that is), you wake up tired

May 2, 07 12:41 pm  · 
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mdler

of course I just made that up...I havent been sleeping well lately and have been a little crazy becasue of it

May 2, 07 12:42 pm  · 
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yeah, the 3 hour thing was supposed to be based on REM cycles, but there's always a good chance that it's urban legend. For instance, if you're supposed to sleep in multiples of 3, why has 8 hours been considered the proper amount for so long?

Or maybe it's just an average and everyone works a little differently and just needs to find their ideal amount based on trial and error.

May 2, 07 12:48 pm  · 
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mdler

my snooze is 7 min, I believe. I always end up waking up 2 min before my alarm goes off

May 2, 07 12:56 pm  · 
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mdler

even on the weekends I wake up at 7:43...

May 2, 07 1:02 pm  · 
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mdler

tumbles

wanna wrestle...

May 2, 07 1:09 pm  · 
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phuyaké

"I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death"

I remember a study a year or two ago (done by Yale maybe? I might have seen the link off of this site) where they found that the perfect nap consists of: slamming a cup of coffee, or whatever caffeine fix you use, falling asleep directly afterwards, and waking up about 30 - 45 minutes later. apparently that's how long it takes for the caffeine to kick in, so if you time it right when you wake up you'll be the most refreshed.

May 2, 07 1:22 pm  · 
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eastcoastarch03

back in my junior year of high school i took a psych class and really liked it. my book said that half of our dreams are black and white, and the other half are color. well, i have never had a black and white dream, well at least that i can remember. the trick to remembering dreams is to tell yourself to rmemeber them before you go to sleep. really does work.


anyone ever try to look in a mirror or something reflective in a dream and not be able to see yourself? weird.



May 2, 07 1:27 pm  · 
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eastcoastarch03

very true....

May 2, 07 1:36 pm  · 
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Lego Builder

when in rome

May 2, 07 1:51 pm  · 
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postal

phuyaka, i'm gonna give that a shot!

May 2, 07 1:52 pm  · 
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Mark Anthony

phuyaka, I tried to find the article but I couldn't it's worth a try though, I'll let you know how it goes.

Along with this, what's everyone's take on energy drinks?

I was taking red bull at the beginning of the year but it got to the point that I couldn't function without them so I stopped. I guess I was addicted to whatever is in them.

May 2, 07 2:27 pm  · 
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SuperBeatledud

I like it better than sex, except for when it's immediately after sex, sleep sex is def the best!

May 2, 07 2:31 pm  · 
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phuyaké

...I think that nap formula works well, in theory.
I never tried it, but I can see falling asleep immediately after chugging a large coffee being a little difficult... if you don't pass out before that first 5-10 minutes you'll only be asleep for about 15 before the caffeine hits.
there was also some NASA study on naps that was conducted for astronauts a few years ago. but I'm too lazy to look for the link now.

May 2, 07 3:16 pm  · 
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oe

I did alot of sleep research for motel project a while back. The rem thing isnt a myth, but after being awake for 24 hours or more your cycles are totally fucked and 3 hours isnt going to apply consistently. 36, 48 hours in you could drop into rem in microsleep or grog around for 6 hours without.

Basically what your brain is trying to do is reset itself. Its kind of like defragging a hardrive. Between resets all your neurons are slowing getting out of synch, scrambled, so every so often your regulatory organs have to purge. In the first few stages they juggle responsibilities so one at a time they can pulse out all the errors. Last to go is the cerebellum, which obviously doesnt do a total clean house like most of the others. Over the course of rem sleep your brain is actually moving backward through all the new memories since the last reset and sort of cataloging them, moving slowly backward through your life to decide what memories are relevent to other memories. This is what you experience as dreams.



So who has the no-sleep record? Freshman year I did 138 hours, beat that suckas!

May 2, 07 3:35 pm  · 
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oe

and you really work best with 4 hours sleep min. You can sustain 36 on 4 off for a week or more in extreme need, but you'll be fucked for days afterward.

Oh yea and no drugs. No caffine, no cigarettes, just eat plenty and drink cranberry juice (or whatever.)

May 2, 07 3:38 pm  · 
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postal

138? WTF! you were seriously able to sustain a pulse after being up for 5 days straight?

May 2, 07 4:05 pm  · 
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sedrik

My REM cycles are full of dreams about the CCTV building or the House in Bordeaux and sometimes I theorise about Junkspace and the early skyscrapers of Manhatten...

May 2, 07 7:54 pm  · 
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Apurimac

well, all i know is every night i sleep more and more, mon. morn it was 4 hrs, tues it was five, this morning 7. I gotta stop fubaring with my alarm...

May 2, 07 8:41 pm  · 
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Mark Anthony

haha sedrik I'm glad you picked up on the REM cycles too haha.

138 hrs is rediculous. After one day of not sleeping I could see that I wasn't thinking right.

Now to get back to the grind =\

May 2, 07 8:53 pm  · 
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oe
138? WTF! you were seriously able to sustain a pulse after being up for 5 days straight?

Not so much. I was hallucinating pretty intensly, and then my immune system crashed and I got insanely sick. I was a pretty fucking stupid freshman. Didnt know staying awake could practically kill you.

May 2, 07 9:39 pm  · 
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Mark Anthony

Awesome story. I hear a lot about lack of sleep in correlation with sickness.

May 3, 07 3:50 am  · 
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mdler

I realized that my alarm is set for 7:40, not 7:45 as previously stated. I have a nine minuate snooze. I believe that I recently had to re-set my alarm clock because it was unplugged this past weekend

May 3, 07 12:30 pm  · 
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mdler

I have only gone 3.5 days without sleep (water and food; no drugs). I ended up comming down hard in the middle of my masters thesis final review...basically couldnt talk about my project I was so out of it

Had a nice model, though

May 3, 07 12:32 pm  · 
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Mark Anthony

I got up early to go to a thesis review after not really having a lot of sleep the nights before. I slept today until 4pm and went to bed around 1am.

May 6, 07 8:25 pm  · 
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