3 ms·
Do you mean that smart people need less sleep to be able to perform a particular task, or that smart people need less sleep to perform at their own peak? The a
by lunchbox 18y ago
Do you mean that smart people need less sleep to be able to perform a particular task, or that smart people need less sleep to perform at their own peak?
The above analogy leads more naturally to the first conclusion. Give a smart person a cognitive task to perform, and gradually deprive him of sleep; eventually, his performance will be reduced to the level of the average person.
It's less clear how the second conclusion would hold -- that smart people are incrementally affected less by sleep loss than average people. In other words, a priori, I don't think there's much reason to believe that a smart person would be impaired less by losing an hour of sleep than an average person would.
- anuraggoel 18y agoI wasn't aiming to go that deep, but to answer your question I meant the ability to perform any given set of tasks. Deriving the second conclusion needs a lot more data. Assuming there is no analog for swapping to disk, the biggest missing piece is the rate of GC. Is it the same for everyone? Additionally, is a given person's GC rate constant? When I go without sleep for two days, I usually need more sleep than when I missed sleeping for just a day. Does this mean there is more memory to reclaim? Or that my GC rate has been impaired? Or both? More interestingly, how do 'brain-building' foods and activities affect sleep requirements?