Batman manages his sleep in increasingly awesome to downright dangerous ways. Welcome to Trick Theory, the channel where I put my science degrees to work analyzing the real-world science behind our favorite characters that never needed it in the first place. Batman has a nearly endless amount of tasks that he places upon himself, which includes patrolling Gotham City each night, studying and solving all manner of cases, training sessions, board meetings, press events, and Justice League meetings, making it seem near impossible for him to ever get a full night's sleep, at least if he was able to sleep normally. Instead, Batman's sleep schedule has been shown as being rather erratic to extremely minimal, and I mean that. Several comics and shows like Beware the Batman show that he, on average, gets about 4 hours of sleep a day while using a specific high-protein diet blended with all the greens, broccoli, and experimental brain-enhancing drugs someone could ever want to down in 5 seconds flat, ultimately allowing him to get away with sleeping a lot less most days before he ultimately would have to crash, a crash that he has cleverly

figured out a way around ensuring that he can remain alert at pretty much any part of the day, 24/7. So, when a Gotham or Justice League-level threat decides to break out, he's never caught sleeping on the job. What is the clever and scientifically studied but high-risk way that he has decided to manage his sleep? Normally, Batman's day sees him working as Bruce Wayne, managing Wayne Enterprises during the day, going to press events, charities, and having the occasional hot date to keep up his Playboy image. Then, as night falls, we see him donning the cape and cowl for what has been mentioned by Gordon in Batman's first year on the job as being between the hours of midnight to 4:00 a.m. And from what we see in films like Batman Begins, Bruce is shown in his earlier years to then sleep until around noon. And assuming it takes him a full hour to get back to the Batcave, shower, eat, and go to bed, we can assume that Bruce is getting around 7 hours of sleep from the

hours of 5:00 a.m. to noon, but this is just the beginning. As not too soon after, a more experienced Batman has been shown to work far more and sleep far less as he begins to operate within the Justice League, taking on missions during the day and night, all the while juggling his duties as Bruce Wayne and keeping a watchful eye over Gotham, let alone the rest of the world. So how does he do it? How does he learn to sleep for what has been shown as him pushing it to three or even as little as two hours a day? He's still human after all, one who still had to down a large triple latte while blasting a kid's food song to stay awake. One thing that helps is that he doesn't actually need to make constant appearances as Bruce Wayne on a daily basis in that his role at Wayne Enterprises and public appearances are much more occasional at best. And once he became established in Gotham, he doesn't actually go out as Batman every single night as much as he tends to go out.

whenever he's needed to get into Bruce's eventual circumnavigation of this essential part of staying alive. We need to first understand what does sleep actually do, why does Batman even need it, and thus how is he able to play around with it. Sleep essentially is the time when your brain gets to play the role of a housekeeper. Well, there's no consensus on why our bodies actually need to sleep. We know that it's during this time that our brain pulls out its checklist, going through a body-wide cellular repair, synthesizing new proteins to fix damaged tissues, and cleans up what is called neurog garbage or waste products and toxins that build up in our brains that interfere with your ability to think and pretty much do anything. But perhaps sleep's greatest benefit is this: this is the only time where your brain processes new information, learns, consolidates experiences into memories, and ultimately, if you're trying to learn anything like math or a backflip, this is the time where your brain builds up the

neural connections necessary to do it based on what you actually did to learn it. As it goes about deleting bad connections that cause you to mess up, and given how much Batman is said to train and spend his time studying everything from engineering a Hulkbuster to Martian lore, he can actually get away with not resting. Even worse is if Bruce was to actually skip out on sleeping entirely like he's thought to do. He would run into a massive problem. You see, sleep-deprived individuals often do much worse at learning new tasks, processing new information, looking like they're even there. And over time, something extremely dangerous begins to happen. Since your brain doesn't have sufficient time to wash out its toxins, a certain very sticky protein known as beta-amyloid begins to build up more and more, forming clumps of what is called brain plaque, clogging your nerve connections, making you extremely forgetful, unable to think, and shoving you towards diseases like Alzheimer's. Not to mention the biggest hurdle Bruce had to figure out wasn't just how he could get

adequate time for his brain to sleep, but for how he could get enough of certain stages of sleep, namely the third stage and three or deep sleep, and the fourth stage known as RAM rapid eye movement. Normally, as you sleep, you go through what is called N1 where you actually fall asleep, then repeat the next three stages over 90min Cycles being N2 where your muscles relax and your temperature drops, as you finally get into the deeper N3 stage where your body essentially restores itself, and then enter into REM where you dream and your mental housekeeping happens. If Bruce was only to sleep for the 4 hours he was said to achieve, this would allow him to at least go through the cycle about 2 and 1 half times, and heck, Bruce could be one of the rare individuals born with a unique adrb1 mutation that literally allows someone to sleep for Just 4 hours, with their brain being easier to Rouse and stay awake longer without suffering any of the effects of sleep deprivation. Some of these individuals may even live

longer talk about op, but Batman being Batman didn't stop here and decided to take everything a step or five further, opting for a much more dangerous polyphasic schedule. Sort of as much as this has me thinking about flirting with less sleep like I did when preparing for my anatomy human caver lab final. Batman has mastered something that science is just beginning to understand: being polyphasic sleeping, which is when someone breaks up a regular once-per-day or monophasic sleep schedule into many sessions spread throughout the day. Such as someone sleeping merely 3 hours at once, a time followed by three 20-minute sessions spread throughout the day for a total of 4 hours of sleep, known as the everyman's schedule. Triphasic sleep, where someone sleeps an hour and a halfish three times a day, or the one that is most likely to catch our raging billionaires' attention being the D Vinci or uberman sleep schedule, where an individual takes six 20-minute naps throughout the day, totaling a max of 2.

hours of sleep. You might be thinking that with this sleep schedule, there is no way that Bruce could get the adequate amount of N3 deep sleep and REM sleep needed. After all, these are the last stages of sleep, and they only get longer the longer you stay asleep. Well, with someone doing shorter and shorter naps throughout the day, their body will still crave and even prioritize squeezing out whatever they can. They will still end up falling into those much-needed N3 and REM stages, given that they just don't last as long as their body adapts to their new short schedule. Basically, when Batman finally gets some shut-eye, his body quickly and more efficiently enters into REM sleep. But one caveat that Bruce needs to be careful with is making sure that most, if not all, of these 20-minute naps happen at the same time of day every day to maximize his overall sleep efficiency. A problem that would generally be okay with his schedule during the day, but he may come up short when night falls, as he never knows when

he'll be running out of the cave, and to that, Batman had one ingenious idea to solve this problem. As crazy as Batman's sleep schedule would be, it seems that Bruce's sleep schedule, as he got more experienced at being the Batman, took an even greater turn as he started doing something much more experimental known as micro sleep. This is where Batman, whether he's sitting in his chair, reading a book, or looking at Case Files on the back computer, purposely falls unconscious for 15 seconds or often much less, rapidly regaining consciousness as he continues to work like nothing happened. Basically, his brain just randomly decides to take a break and checks out. As he may appear to be awake, but in reality, his brain is answering something, a much-needed N3 and REM sleep. If you've ever found yourself doing the old head nod in the middle of class only to snap back awake, that is micro sleep, and most people may not realize it's happening. But the major problem is that this would be nearly impossible for an individual to follow indefinitely.

alone for more than a few days at once. Looking at Batman's schedule as Bruce Wayne has nightly habits, and taking into consideration the enormous amount of physical and mental activity Batman does, there's a very low possibility that even an uberman routine would be enough time for him to fully recover without Alfred yelling at him to go to bed. Batman's final sleep routine in his more experienced years is likely to be something of a hybrid of everything he's learned, where he sticks to a more polyphasic routine using a regular 3 to 4-hour sleeping block whenever he gets back from a night out, followed by short naps to micro-sleeps throughout the day, only deviating and sleeping less as the job demands, basically as much as he can get and as little as he feels he can get away with. But if none of this was very interesting, then I saved an interesting fact for last. One way that Bruce lowers the amount of sleep he needs to make sure he's good to go for the ridiculous feats of strength that he

has to pull off day in, day out, is through special meditation practices that allow him to enter a state known as NSD-R, or nonsleep deep rest, that has some of the benefits of regular sleep and may cut down on his sleep time. As he then goes out and lifts more than his own plot armor, as we go over the science of Batman's ridiculous strength in this video. Keep in mind though, it's just a clever trick. See you in the next one.

The SCIENCE Of: How Batman Manages His Sleep

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