Polyphasic sleep
The term polyphasic sleep was first used in the early 20th century by psychologist J. S. Szymanski, who observed daily fluctuations in activity patterns.
It is the traditional daytime sleep of China,[7] India, South Africa, Italy,[8] Greece, Spain and, through Spanish influence, the Philippines and many Hispanic American countries.
[citation needed] In modern times, fewer Spaniards take a daily siesta, ostensibly due to more demanding work schedules.
[12] Historian A. Roger Ekirch[13][14] has argued that before the Industrial Revolution, interrupted sleep was dominant in Western civilization.
This was also a favorite time for scholars and poets to write uninterrupted, whereas still others visited neighbors, engaged in sexual activity, or committed petty crime.
[14] He draws evidence from more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern in documents from the ancient, medieval, and modern world.
Ekirch does not advocate for this, stating that the current uninterrupted sleep pattern is the ideal schedule for the modern world.
[24] Scientific American Frontiers (PBS) has reported on Stampi's 49-day experiment where a young man napped for a total of three hours per day.
[25] Stampi has written about his research in his book Why We Nap: Evolution, Chronobiology, and Functions of Polyphasic and Ultrashort Sleep (1992).
EEG microsleeps are measurable and usually unnoticeable bursts of sleep in the brain while a subject appears to be awake.
Nocturnal sleepers who sleep poorly may be heavily bombarded with microsleeps during waking hours, limiting focus and attention.
[32] The brain exhibits high levels of the pituitary hormone prolactin during the period of nighttime wakefulness, which may contribute to the feeling of peace that many people associate with it.
[33] In his 1992 study "In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic", Thomas Wehr had seven healthy men confined to a room for fourteen hours of darkness daily for a month.
They found that, in free-running conditions, the average duration of major nighttime sleep was significantly longer in young adults than in the other groups.
The paper states further: Whether such patterns are simply a response to the relatively static experimental conditions, or whether they more accurately reflect the natural organization of the human sleep/wake system, compared with that which is exhibited in daily life, is open to debate.
