SwellJoe, I'm with you in that the "debunkers" seem quite dogmatic. Then there are people who have had personal success with polyphasic sleep and rave about it, typically doing it for a period of months but not on a permanent basis. Science doesn't have a lot to say, and everyone else is left wondering what to think.
References I found enlightening about the actual practice of it (in favor of it) are the book Ubersleep:
I've read enough anecdotal evidence to be convinced that when it polyphasic sleep works, it works -- that after a potentially rough (and potentially impossible, depending on the person) period of adaptation, the practitioner is not significantly impaired in day-to-day functioning. Skeptics' arguments usually boil down to "it's unnatural", "you can't get something for nothing", or "it didn't work for me".
In terms of needing to set an alarm, I don't know if the body can learn a polyphasic schedule or not; even if it can, the reasons busy monophasic people use alarms to regulate their sleep would apply all the more so to polyphasic sleepers, and I get the sense polyphasic sleep is a sort of "unstable equilibrium"; and if the body can't learn it, that still doesn't mean it's unnatural.
Science could come along and discover a long-term deleterious effect of getting so little sleep, in which case I'd be all ears, but it seems doubtful. I hope the science catches up, though, and we figure out what the deal is with sleep, so we don't have to argue quite so irrationally. There's a lot of interesting recent work on whether being unconscious for eight hours is mostly a behavioral adaptation rather than a biological necessity.
My general philosophy is "if it works, do it", and it definitely works in some instances. Reducing total time spent sleeping per day isn't like smoking cigarettes, it isn't going to slowly poison you. Lots of people get very poor sleep and are definitely impaired during the day, more so than a skilled polyphasic sleeper would report, and they aren't doing long-term damage.
The debunkers are cultish because the proponents are cultish. Just like atheists are cultish in response to cultish cults.
If reducing delta wave sleep by 10% significantly decreases performance on memory and reasoning tests, why should reducing delta sleep by 90% fail to decrease performance?
Lots of studies are done on sleep, but they are never as extreme as polyphasic because it would be considered unethical to perform those studies. Those few insane people like me who actually did go polyphasic don't get scientifically tested.
It did work for me but I recognized that my performance had decreased because at the time I was in memorization-oriented schooling and using Anki to manage my memorization tasks. With the help of Anki, I could see quite clearly that my memorization abilities had decreased.
It was also never a natural state. It was a constant state of heightened autonomic response - fight or flight. Especially at nighttime, my body was surging with corticosteroids. This stress response is what provides the capability to stay awake so long, but it comes at the price of high-level thinking and memorization.
Typically in nature, humans will adopt polyphasic sleep in times of war and other extremely stressful situations. This is adaptive because their life is threatened. This is not the case for the modern knowledge worker.
There is tons of science on sleep. The polyphasic people base their theory on the outdated and discredited idea that we only need REM sleep. This has been categorically disproven by modern sleep researchers. Slow wave sleep provides many benefits, the most clear being improved memory but also better performance on other cognitive tasks.
References I found enlightening about the actual practice of it (in favor of it) are the book Ubersleep:
http://www.lulu.com/content/2649551
and Hacker News threads like this one:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=673726
I've read enough anecdotal evidence to be convinced that when it polyphasic sleep works, it works -- that after a potentially rough (and potentially impossible, depending on the person) period of adaptation, the practitioner is not significantly impaired in day-to-day functioning. Skeptics' arguments usually boil down to "it's unnatural", "you can't get something for nothing", or "it didn't work for me".
In terms of needing to set an alarm, I don't know if the body can learn a polyphasic schedule or not; even if it can, the reasons busy monophasic people use alarms to regulate their sleep would apply all the more so to polyphasic sleepers, and I get the sense polyphasic sleep is a sort of "unstable equilibrium"; and if the body can't learn it, that still doesn't mean it's unnatural.
Science could come along and discover a long-term deleterious effect of getting so little sleep, in which case I'd be all ears, but it seems doubtful. I hope the science catches up, though, and we figure out what the deal is with sleep, so we don't have to argue quite so irrationally. There's a lot of interesting recent work on whether being unconscious for eight hours is mostly a behavioral adaptation rather than a biological necessity.
My general philosophy is "if it works, do it", and it definitely works in some instances. Reducing total time spent sleeping per day isn't like smoking cigarettes, it isn't going to slowly poison you. Lots of people get very poor sleep and are definitely impaired during the day, more so than a skilled polyphasic sleeper would report, and they aren't doing long-term damage.