Well, this is not directly related to GTD or other personal development techniques that I follow on this blog, but it’s an interesting study. According to this article, sleep is the period when our brain it actually rebuild its cells. No sleep, no new cells… No new cells, more pressure on the existing cells to get the job done, and more weariness…

This is an interesting viewpoint. One or two years ago I was very attracted to polyphasic sleep, never tried it, but seemed like an interesting endeavour. By reading other people’s blogs about polyphasic sleep, especially Steve Pavlina’s posts, I think this is still a good thing to do. But in the light of the latest article, I’m not so sure.

It seems that being in good shape involves, at the first level, much more common sense, and a positive approach, than the “heroical” quests for aggresively changing some very old habits in the human being. Such as sleep, for instance. My personal view is that I can expect far more from a balanced, normal human being, than from a hyper-productive-and-effective-human, but extremely stressed.

I also must note here that the brain is not only involved in the general “smarty” thingie, but in our overall health and general performance as organical matter. So damaging the brain is lowering not only our IQ, but our overall surviving functions and our adaptive skills… So next time when you look amused at a soldier who hasen’t slept 5 days in a row, or at a mom who has not completely slept a night in the last year, maybe you’ll see things diffrently…

[tags]sleep deprivation, brain, study[/tags]