<story><title>Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/thomas-edison-and-the-cult-of-sleep-deprivation/370824/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dasil003</author><text>One thing that having a kid taught me is that sleep deprivation really hurts my productivity as a programmer.  It may be that some people can sleep 5 hours and function just fine, I&amp;#x27;m not going to say everybody needs the same amount of sleep.  But when it comes to work ridiculous hours I&amp;#x27;ve yet to see someone regularly claiming 100 hours work weeks outperform me over any length of time.&lt;p&gt;If I can get in the zone and achieve peak productivity for 8 hours that is an extremely successful day.  If I do that and then get 16 hours of exercise, healthy eating, and sleep then the next day I&amp;#x27;ll have made more progress in my unconscious and hit a positive feedback loop where elegant solutions to difficult problems present themselves effortlessly.&lt;p&gt;Contrast to my youth where I&amp;#x27;d regularly &amp;quot;work&amp;quot; 12-16 hour days.  Then I had the mentality that 5pm is a half-day, so if progress wasn&amp;#x27;t great by then I still had another 7 hours!  This can lead to a negative feedback loop where you spend more hours trying to compensate for poor performance earlier.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not claiming this as a universal truth, some people probably have greater capacity than me, but I know how easy it is to fool oneself.</text></comment>
<story><title>Thomas Edison and the Cult of Sleep Deprivation</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/thomas-edison-and-the-cult-of-sleep-deprivation/370824/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>klipt</author><text>&amp;quot;Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain&lt;p&gt;The conservation of sleep across all animal species suggests that sleep serves a vital function. We here report that sleep has a critical function in ensuring metabolic homeostasis ... the restorative function of sleep may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.sciencemag.org&amp;#x2F;content&amp;#x2F;342&amp;#x2F;6156&amp;#x2F;373&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR: sleep is necessary, otherwise it probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t have evolved in so many different species. If you&amp;#x27;re really lucky (and a dolphin), you can get by with only sleeping one hemisphere of your brain at a time: &lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Unihemispheric_slow-wave_sleep&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>