The Duke's Discoverage

Does polyphasic sleep actually work? If it doesn’t, why would Tim Ferriss advertise it and claim he has benefited from it?

After all, he explicitly says:

 ”I have used both the ‘Everyman’ and ‘Siesta’, detailed in this chapter, with great success. I reserve anything resembling ‘Uberman’ for emergency deadlines only.” 

Tim Ferriss wrote a great book on how to optimize your work-life by outsourcing all tasks that you don’t actually need to do yourself and focusing on providing maximal added value with minimal effort. With this kind of an offering, of course the book “The 4-Hour Work Week” (or 4HWW) became the #1 NYT bestseller.

I just got a hold of his new book called the “4-Hour Body” which has even more amazing claims on how the human body and even genetics can be tweaked for unbelievable results. As I am no expert in these topics, I can only say that he seems to base his claims on things he has accomplished himself with the aid of experts. To the question why these things are not commonly in use he explains that the main reason is because of the inefficient nature of the marketplace and academia.

Personally, I think the most unbelievable claim is that you can sleep for two hours (in 6 sets of 20 minutes once every 4 hours) in 24 hours and be totally fine. In contrast, Dr. Piotr Wozniak who has a program on increasing memory (called Supermemo), is very much against polyphasic sleep and says that he hasn’t seen a single person who has actually achieved the wanted results.

Many blog posts document these results, so it makes me think why people would want to do this and why Ferriss would want to put his name on the line if it couldn’t be done — especially as he claims that he does it himself. Check out Ferriss’ links in the Uberman section of this page for different viewpoints: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/gear/#uberman  

Funny thing is that Ferriss has Wozniak’s writings as a reference. Is it there to say that the reader is a dork if he doesn’t check references? Wozniak writes in conclusion:

“Whoever claims to be on a perpetual polyphasic schedule must be either suffering from a sleep disorder, or be a liar, a mutant, or a person with a mulishly stubborn iron-will that lets him plod through the daily torture of sleep deprivation”

— basically destroying what Ferriss establishes through pages 287-292 of his book.