Typos Explained

I have noticed lately that when I go back and read my posts a few hours or so after writing them, they sometimes have typos in them. Because of the content of my last article, I want to assure everyone that I know how to spell and how to type. Here’s the explanation.

Since November, I’ve been experimenting with polyphasic sleeping. The principle is that you sleep 20 minutes at a time, every 4 hours around the clock, and train your brain to go straight into the restoring REM sleep as soon as you fall asleep. Thus you get the same amount of REM in a 24-hour period that you’d normally get sleeping 8 solid hours. Plenty of people have succeeded with this, many more have failed. NASA is interested, so is the U.S. military.

One of the challenges is that your brain gets used to a 4-hour wake cycle; anything more than that and you feel tired, as if normally you’d been up for 16 hours. So it’s a trade-off. Your wake cycle becomes much shorter than normal, but you get multiple wake cycles in a day, ultimately having up to 22 hours of productivity each day.

Many people have blogged their experience daily on this schedule. I’m not going to do that, but I’ll say here that my results have been mixed, in that I have not been disciplined enough to get myself up every time my alarm says I should wake. I typically have one good productive night followed by one night in which I crash for at least a few hours. Due to a combination of factors and my own impatience, sometimes I’m scrambling to get my article posted before taking a 20-minute nap, and I’m doing it when I’m most tired. I get impatient, skip the spell-checker, and click publish because I know that it needs to be said.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be impatient, and I should wait until after a little sleep to publish the articles. I don’t trust spell-checkers because they miss many errors which happen to also be words in the dictionary. I tend to catch my own mistakes when I’m fully rested and re-reading my work. I’ll try to be more diligent.