So biological garbage collection pauses then? skip sleep, and the brain tries to run gc cycles during runtime. Causing attention and performance latency spikes. Evolution wrote the original JVM.
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Essentially these guys try to stay up for the first few days and then sleep less than 8 hours after that. Way less. Many of them end up hallucinating by the end, and only their extreme fitness levels probably save them from just dying from lack of sleep.
The trick is that waking up to daylight makes you feel more rested. So the teams would have their riders sleep 2-3 hours from just before dawn until dawn so they would wake up to sunlight. Physiologically the difference is small, but psychologically it’s much bigger.
Some of the effect of power napping is likely the same sort of trickery, just as caffeine is partly trickery and partly adrenal.
Is that actually a thing, rather than just hearsay?
The only marathon I ever did was cram for a couple finals and playing computer games between them and after. I was working on 72 hours when the blue on my monitor started to ripple and decided it was time to go to bed… almost an hour after it started.
And in particular if you abuse epinephrine enough. Caffeine blocks the sensation of fatigue, epinephrine does it even moreso, and up until I was in college, when my roommate told me about it, could be purchased from truck stops as an “allergy medication” but truckers use it to pull double shifts. If you keep taking it you will feel fine right up until you keel over.
South Korea has places you can rent a computer. Some are 24 hour. There was a case a while back where a middle aged man stayed awake for around 50 hours and died at his computer. Officially he died from lack of sleep.