this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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As someone who regularly doesn't sleep I am going to go ahead and say this is probably bullshit. Even pretending to sleep is better than not sleeping.
Upon reading the article I think the title is just misleading. What can be said is that regularly getting only 6 hours of sleep will cognitively impair you in similar amounts to not sleeping for a few days but is less noticable because you have time to get used to it. This does not account for the physical effects of not sleeping for a couple days. Calling it "just as bad" is a gross generalization.
Yeah, the key interesting bit there was that your cognitive performance declines, but you're not actually aware of it happening.
Currently imagining how fucking cool I would be if I could just sleep
What titles are not these days?
On top of that, the actual results are behind a paywall and can be very iffy. It sounds like there were only 12 people in the 6-hour group and in each of the other groups. And no indications about other traits like sex, smoking or other habits, and so on. Too small numbers to guarantee against statistical fluctuations. And the "significant" in the abstract may indicate that they used p-values to quantify their results, which are today considered iffy by a large chunk of the statistics community...