I have been too lazy to check if there are dedicated tests for sleep deprivation, but a timed test of something that you should be able to do quickly and easily would work, right? Sudoku, an easy crossword in your daily paper, any of the online IQ tests. IIRC somewhere in gwern’s comment history here he’s replying to a guy who did polyphasic sleep for a while who found that after about three days he couldn’t learn anything (or so he interpreted it based on being unable to learn any new Anki cards). Apparently one proper deep long sleep reverted that. Check brain workshop for a suite of tests anyway.
As before, I’ll suggest testing yourself against Gbrainy and dual n-back (as well as Anki, I suppose). I recently recovered my old polyphasic sleep logs off a backup CD I didn’t know I had, and unsurprisingly, my Gbrainy scores were consistently bad; not that I ever felt I ‘adapted’, anyway.
On a side note, I just finished up a few months of on-and-off melatonin use, recording nights with my Zeo. I haven’t updated my site yet, but the summary is: total sleep did fall by ~1 hour, REM fell by ~25 minutes, fewer awakenings, and morning feel was the same. So, I can definitely recommend Zeo for tracking things to do with sleep.
I have been too lazy to check if there are dedicated tests for sleep deprivation, but a timed test of something that you should be able to do quickly and easily would work, right? Sudoku, an easy crossword in your daily paper, any of the online IQ tests. IIRC somewhere in gwern’s comment history here he’s replying to a guy who did polyphasic sleep for a while who found that after about three days he couldn’t learn anything (or so he interpreted it based on being unable to learn any new Anki cards). Apparently one proper deep long sleep reverted that. Check brain workshop for a suite of tests anyway.
That would be http://lesswrong.com/lw/5n0/optimizing_sleep/44zu
As before, I’ll suggest testing yourself against Gbrainy and dual n-back (as well as Anki, I suppose). I recently recovered my old polyphasic sleep logs off a backup CD I didn’t know I had, and unsurprisingly, my Gbrainy scores were consistently bad; not that I ever felt I ‘adapted’, anyway.
On a side note, I just finished up a few months of on-and-off melatonin use, recording nights with my Zeo. I haven’t updated my site yet, but the summary is: total sleep did fall by ~1 hour, REM fell by ~25 minutes, fewer awakenings, and morning feel was the same. So, I can definitely recommend Zeo for tracking things to do with sleep.
My melatonin results are now up: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#melatonin-analysis