Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Lack of sleep - new personal insight into

I have four kids aged nine to three.  This means that for the last decade I have basically been constantly  sleep deprived.  I haven't given it  that much thought, it's just the way things are for most parents I suppose.

Lately the kids are beginning to grow older. A three-year old is significantly different from a two-year old.  The last week I have had almost enough sleep, so  yesterday something happend that gave me reason to pause:
  • I started the day smiling
  • I had a brilliant idea
  • then another
  • I felt wonderfully fresh
  • In the evening I still  felt need for input, so instead of going to sleep, I watched a movie (the insider, a wonderful movie with a script much more ingenious than I had noticed the first or second time I saw it) .

Then I went to bed, and I had still two more ideas:

  • The last decade or so I believe that I have basically learned how to function adequatly even when significant parts of my brain is shut down due to sleep deprivation.  When I do get enough sleep I become euphoric and immediately use the surplus energy to do something that drain myself of energy.  This means first off all that my tiredness is actually self-perpetuating and secondly that the statement that people need less sleep as they age might be due to higher tolerance for the degradation of cognitive capacity than actually being able to do the same things as before with less sleep.
  • The final idea was about how to use models of infection (like the ones  MIDAS people are using) to model customer demand for media content  in situations where demand is driven by social interactions.

I obviously need to get more sleep ;)