Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain

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.

this might explain how "power napping" (<30min) can help so much when you are sleep deprived even through it's too short to really count as sleep. I wonder if you can find that when sleep deprived people power nap a "flush" happens then

There’s a phenomenon we have known about since at least the late 1980s when Race Across America riders were using it.

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.

I used to do adventure races of 24 or 48 hour duration. can confirm that after 20+ hours of endurance you 100% start having microsleeps and hallucinations. 20 mins sleep is all you need to get going again for a few more hours.

Seen any pink elephants?