This reminds me of Goodhart's law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
A healthy amount of sleep is a great target and measure, just like staying within a healthy weight range and lots of other biometrics.
I think Goodhart's law applies to people gaming the system or juking the stats to inflate a measured number causing the number to lose meaning. It doesn't matter what you do, getting enough sleep is important.
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[0] - somehow they exist and they don't use it as a personal holodeck to escape reality, which tells me lucid dreaming must be overrated.
I've had over 100 lucid dreams, although none recently. My crowning achievement was summoning Socrates that would teach me things using the socratic method (only asking questions). The thing that blows my mind today is I was able to take away real value from these conversations even though I supplied both the questions and the answers.
Why didn't I use it as a personal holodeck to escape reality? Reality is a bigger, more interesting, and more exciting place than inside my own head.
Not surprising - whenever we think, we supply both inputs and outputs ourselves :).
If I had that level of vividness of dreams and I could make them lucid, I'd definitely want to sleep more than I do now, to push experiments such as yours to sleep time. I mean, from what I read about lucid dreams, in best cases you have enough control over it that you could essentially use it as a sandbox prototyping environment!
Lucid dreaming is actually a skill anyone can learn.
Edit: Now that I think about it, the population is probably less than anyone. Anyone that can get a goods night rest can learn how to lucid dream, and anyone that routinely enters REM sleep has a decent shot at it.
I really, really, really wish vividness of mental images would be trainable. I so want it.
Color is rare. I mostly don't even notice in most dreams except a very few where it's central, like the one time I saw a colorful dreamcatcher-like crystal mobile-thing after waking from a dream and enjoying still having it from my dream, only to wake up and realize that they were both dreams. Doh!
I keep believing I can learn to visualize based on the fact that seeing is hallucinating. We take samples of light and imagine that we're actually seeing the world when really we're guessing that's what it is and synthesizing what we see. A great example of this was when I came back from a tropical vacation and back in the city a leaf blew past my feet. I swear I clearly saw a small lizard (like I'd testify that I saw a glimpse of one) as I had been seeing for the past few weeks. I saw the leaf on the second glance. So if I can conjure a lizard, I can draw some cylinders and wires eventually.
My internal audio reproduction seems to be quite good (which would be great if I could remember more music, or at least whole songs, to play on my internal jukebox :/ - sometimes I do remember more when dreaming). I think recall/visualization/etc. is affected by limited working memory capacity and how working and long term memory interact; I suspect that is often the major limitation when awake also and would still apply to some extent when asleep (although things can clearly work somewhat differently when asleep).
I do believe that a majority of people can visualize fairly easily since it seems like most people can describe the appearance of someone they just met when not looking at them, which I am unable to do (most days). Yes there are non visual tricks to do that, but it does seem like many people do that type of thing effortlessly and also for things they are less likely to have previously learned tricks about. When I do know someone better I seem to be better able to recognize their distinctive style of movement than most people.
Dreaming is strange... lately I haven't been wanting to be aware of my dreams at all since I often end up with events looping while I am increasingly paralyzed (and of course everyone else want me to do something). I've noticed this seems more likely to happen on days I take baclofen (as a help stay asleep sleep aid), but it happens at other times also and happened occasionaly before I ever took baclofen.
Well it worked for Socrates in that way too - he just happeed to be awake :)
Maybe you're blessed with effortlessly getting enough of it, which in case congratulations. A lot of the people around you are not.
One thing I'm not saying is you should maximize sleep. Just get enough, and get good quality. Maybe that's our misunderstanding.
First, targeting a metric may create a counter productive stress that can make you sleep less.
Second, the device, and the process, may induce a sleep of lesser quality.
Last, always targeting numbers doesn't force you to listen to your body, an ability that our society is losing more and more. You don't need "8h of sleep". You need to sleep at the time and duration that your feelings indicate to you. Failing to do that result in plenty of problems, including oversleeping, sleeping at bad hours, neglecting diet related to sleep, ignoring light, not adapting to punctual overloads, etc.
Now, yes, Goodhart's law is more about cheating a system. But it's kinda what you do: you try to bypass your natural way of calibrating with sleep and only see a metric. We do that for a lot of things: food, sport, work, etc. And because of that, we behave erratically.
It's oversimplification. Those signals are dependent on light, among other things. And unless you live with no electricity they may fool you.
I live in Scotland - during the winter we get 8-ish hours of daylight, during the summer we get more like 17,(to the point that it doesn't actually get properly dark at night). Routine is far more important here than natural light.
Also, your arguments center on a metric being used as a substitute for making positive changes, rather than being used together alongside positive changes. This can happen with any measure/target. For example, if you set a target of 0 cigarettes smoked per day, sure, it's possible to just stress about the target and end up smoking more. That doesn't mean the target is bad, it just means it needs to be accompanied by action to make it useful.
This has been false since March 2016 when Fitbit introduced sleep stage analysis based on heart rate variability. I work for Fitbit but don't speak for Fitbit. Check my comment history for a link to a help article with details.
Indeed, it is. From TFA: "In the case study on orthosomnia, researchers found that patients had been spending excessive time in bed to try to increase their sleep numbers, which may have made their insomnia worse." (emphasis mine)