Triphasic Sleep: Day 16

This is part sixteen of my Triphasic sleep experiment. Please visit this page for more info.

Core sleep

Tweaking the core morning sleep from 6AM to 9AM was a mistake. If anything, it made getting up harder. I am starting to think my theory about an internal cycle that repeats continuously regardless of whether or not we are awake could be right. I had a dream this morning and I remember most of them, yet I did not wake up feeling refreshed from having REM sleep and dreams.

Naps

Since the afternoon nap at 6:30PM has been so successful so far, I kept it that way. It’s great as usual. Yesterday I tried 1:30AM to 2PM and had a hard time waking up, so I decided to do 11:30PM to 1AM as my midnight nap thinking that this might be in sync with my internal cycle. Stupid me, I went through the motion of having chinese tea right before I sleep. When I reflect on my past few nights, I realized that I had done the same thing every night before midnight. Perhaps that’s the reason why it’s so hard to wake up. Chinese tea has less effect on my sleep than caffeine, but it is significant enough when you are trying to fall asleep within 5~10 minute of lying down. Anyway, as I am typing right now, I pretty much kissed my midnight nap goodbye by doing this. If I write about oversleeping tomorrow, you’ll know why.

Learning

My learning isn’t stunted or anything by this, my daily improvement in Guitar hero 2 is a good proof of this and that’s only one area of learning I indulge in per day. People has remarked how fast I learn new and unknown things. I’ve always associated that with growing up with changing environment all the time. Moving around from house to house definitely contribute to some of that. Observing my flat mate playing Guitar Hero 2 though made me think otherwise:

“That’s awesome, you got 100% on easy, you should try playing on normal”

“But it’s too hard, I don’t know how to use my pinky yet.”

“Well, there’s no point of you to continue in easy.”

Let me introduce you to Alpha Female. She’s the type of person, who, upon missing a few notes, pressed the start button and selected quit or when left unmonitored, would kept on playing the easiest song and repeat the 100% performance. Alpha female also plays a funny game with my cat. You see, Lethe’d always sneak out whenever she opens the door. It wasn’t a big deal until I had to go fetch her from my neighbors when I return home one day. She complains that Lethe is always trying to sneak out whenever she opens the door and it’s hard for her to keep track. I then observed the following:

Alpha female would open the door very wide, position her bag intentionally so it blocks the door and proceed to take off her jacket. During which, Lethe has ample time, not to mention a crack big enough to fit a muck truck, to sneak out. Alpha female would then run after her, spend 5 minutes saying things to Lethe before bringing her in. Then she complains to me about it.

Anyway, back to the topic of learning. After I coaxed her into trying normal. I realized that her accuracy on trying normal mode on the first try is the same, if not better, than when I first started. So the observation is that our learning ability during a small fraction of time for hand eye coordination on previously unknown movements could be the same across age/gender/ethnicity. The only difference between me and her is our reaction to failure.

My reaction: “FUCK! I can do better than this. Let me try again and prove to you what I mean.”

Her reaction: “FUCK! This is too hard, I can’t do this.”

Or the way we tackled the learning process:

My way: “Let me play expert level first and see how I fare, then I will lower the difficulty if I failed too miserably. There’s no point in learning the easier ones.”

Her way: “I’ll start with the easiest one and just contend myself with playing it perfectly and repeat the performance.”