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Barely suppressing my horror at the word 'connectome' to make a relevant comment:

As a new (6 months) parent, I can confirm anecdotally that lack of sleep profoundly messes with the brain. Even getting your normal duration of sleep, but punctuated with lots of short waking periods, makes it almost impossible to function in highly demanding intellectual tasks for any length of time.

And if you have any underlying mental issues (hint: you do), you better believe those are coming to the surface when you've been chronically sleep deprived for 3 months.

Long story short: for the love of all that is good, sleep well. If there's something stopping you, find a way to get help or get away for a while so you can get some real sleep. The ability to think properly comes back remarkably quickly after a good sleep.

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For better or worse, 'connectome' is a legit term used in the field. It's relatively newish (quickly skimming the literature, first mention was in a 2005 article). It follows the naming convention setup by 'genome', and includes many variants:

- genome (set of dna material in a cell)

- exome (set of exonic dna material)

- transcriptome (set of all messenger RNA)

- proteome (set of proteins in a cell)

- interactome (set of all interactions in a cell -- protein, small molecular, etc)

- metabolome (set of all small molecular compounds / interactions in a sample)

- connectome (set of all connections in the brain -- e.g. a wiring diagram)

etc etc

While we're all on the same team, there's also a distinction in the functional connectome (often as determined by fMRI) vs the structural one (determined by viral tracers and electron microscopy). Of course the goal is to see how the two relate. The one described in the article is functional.

Yep, it is, and "functional" means undirected in this context, as contrasted w/ "effective" or directed. These graphs are often defined by stats like Granger causality as well as some partition of the brain.

There's a Prof. named Sporns who has a lot to say about this.

I have never slept well my entire life. 4-6 hours a night is my average. It doesn't seem to impact me... I have always felt great, and I have always coded on complicated things without issue.

There has to be a ratio difference for people.

Sleeping little != sleeping poorly. I only sleep 5-6 hours in a normal night. But usually very restful (not fitful or waking up a lot) hours.

I second this statement. I did polyphasic sleep for months with a very rigorous schedule, sleeping 4.5h/day, eating well, doing exercise, coding a lot, learning lots with great retention. After the adaptation period I felt great.

Otherwise, I usually sleep 7h - 8h, and that's restful. However, I once had to endure 2 months of pain, waking up every 1h - 3h and having to walk around at night. In total, I slept 7h - 7h30 ... but felt extremely tired, I had trouble remembering words, had no energy, was confused, and found it hard to think ...

Same here. In fact, when I sleep for 8-9 hours, I am profoundly less sharp and productive.

That said, I'm only 20, and I don't want to wreak havoc on my future health. Difficult stuff.

Similar here. These days I usually sleep around 6 hours (used to be 5.15ish). If I sleep longer repeatedly I start to get migraine like headaches. Weird, but at some point I decided it's not worth worrying about.

Have a large glass of water before sleep (real water, no soda or juice). A lot of issues and tiredness after long sleep is caused by dehydration.

Sadly I don't think that's the case for me. I drink too much water if anything.

yes, even I have observed this to be a phenomenon, I have seen people who sleep barely few hours a day but they are energetic and can solve tough problems and stuff like that.

do you sleep during the day? When you sleep 4 hours for couple days straight do you wake up easily with no fuzzy head or anything like that?

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