About 15 years ago I tried polyphasic sleeping for about two months. I was on a horrific work crunch and I threw myself into it. I believe my schedule was a 20 minute nap every 3 or 4 hours (I forget now), with one nap being two hours instead of 20 minutes, a total of about 4 hours a day.

The first week was horrible, but then I got in the groove and I actually functioned and got work done. I'd often wake up a minute or two before the alarm went off.

There were a lot of problems. If I ever found myself killing time, eg, waiting for a test to run, and not actively doing something, I'd want to crash badly. Sometimes I'd be in the zone working a bug in my code and my "time to take a nap" alarm would sound and I'd be tempted to keep working. I learned it was important to stick to the sleep cycle even if I was feeling alert. It was terrible for family life because if I had to, say, take the kids to the zoo on Saturday, I'd have to schedule it to fit my sleep pattern, and it wasn't always possible.

I don't want to sound racist, but your last sentence is something that struck me as something oddly european/american. At least in Asia it is just normal to take a nap somewhere for 30 minutes or so. Just imagine what you could've achieved if napping wasn't a problem :-)

I'm european but I really like the asian culture where napping is in general socially acceptable.