Slashdot Mirror
Sleeplessness Impairs Memory
Anne Marie writes: "According to a new study on the interaction between memory and lack of sleep has yielded tantalizing results: not only is sleep necessary for the chemistry of laying down memories, but periods of extra sleep cannot "make up" for lost sleep. The implications for the IT industry where sleeplessness is a constant reality of employment are manifest." By morning, I will probably have no idea I ever posted this.
When I was entering college (1993), my father advised me to keep up with my daily sleep, since "you can't regain the sleep that you lose." His college education was in biology and human physiology, back in the late 1960's, so the information is potentially that old. I suspect that medical researcher's have known something about this phenomenon for years, and that this is just a continution or follow up study.
Hopefully though, people, especially academia and the technology fields will start taking this seriously, and try to accomodate the fact that we need adequate sleep (and a little recreation) to function at optimum levels of congnition and mental efficiency.
To email me,subtract my nick from my email address, starting with the second character. (hint: adto.uiuc.edu is wrong)
there are old programmers and bold programmers, but there are no old bold programmers...
Arm yourself with knowledge.
i will save this in depth, and inlighting analysis next to the several reports that state that suguar has no effects on human chemistry. *grin*
If you read carefully, you'll notice the various studies mentioned are actually on skills.
Stickgold only suggested that it may affect all
types of memory.
Rote learning, learning concepts and learning hand-eye coordination skills are different things.
What I find personally is that taking short naps help when learning concepts- you understand better. Whereas for rote learning - stuff I just memorize but don't have to link and understand, sleep doesn't really help much, and in fact I better make sure I've got the stuff solidly memorized before sleeping - if not I'll probably forget half of it.
When learning motor skills, studies have already shown that participants will reach a plateau and stop improving, only after participants slept then only they could improve further to another plateau.
Cheerio,
Link.
That explains all of the freakin' re-posts of Slashdot stories. I figured there was a logical explanation outside of laziness. There you have it.
The truth is out there, Scully.
Well I can speek for myself. ;)
A few years ago I was working mostly at night (sometimes shifting for day) and it was very difficult to sleep 8 hours every day. I was usualy sleeping 5 or 6-hours. That lasted for 2 years.
In the end I got very tired ("walking zombie" is a better term) and quit that job.
But things had not ended here.
First: it was nearly imposible for me to get to bed before midnight. I took me 6 or more month to get over this.
Second: It's easy even now (after 3 years) to not sleep at night. Sleep doesn't come easy even if I'm very tired. You know the mind keeps rolling...
And finnaly I experience some kind off long term memory loss (I think).
So it's true: Oversleep won't help you with the lost sleep.
Just another coder...
My Mum told me this 45 years ago.
I was going to apply for a grant to do blindingly obvious research, but I forgot. My thesis was to have been called "Starvation and eventual surcease in the food-deprived."
The original Doctor Dark.
Hmmm, let's say your typical senior citizen it about 70, and started her professional life at about 20... that'd be in 1950. IIRC the CS job market wasn't quite as big in 1950 as it is today ;).
Seriously, though, it remains to be seen whether the current generation of programmers (that's uh, me too) is coding itself into an early grave. Too bad we can't decouple our big brains from our scrawny bodies. I know that in another few years of sitting my (increasingly fat) ass in front of a CRT all day and all night and things are gonna start getting pretty ugly round here...
If you're not wasted, the day is.
If you're not wasted, the day is.
I noticed that. Most of his posts display similarly disjointed grammar. It appears that his irregular sleeping pattern is seriously degrading his ability to communicate effectively. =P
As for me, I'm worthless without my beauty rest. When I go to bed early I wake up more naturally the next morning, and I feel wonderful for the whole day. When I (as is more usual) go to bed late (11:00pm, midnight, etc.), I generally feel slow and groggy the next day. I especially noticed this when I was bartending, and I had similar experiences while in school (those late-night or all-night projects :/ ).
There will be exceptions to every study. Excpetions do not, however, negate the results of a study. Perhaps our poor gramatically-challenged Ektanoor is such an exception. Such a situation would not mean that the study is pure crap, though, as our thoughtful and forthright Ektanoor so boldly asserts. From both personal experience and observations of people I work with, I can testify to the veracity of the study. But then, I've always been a 'normal' person, physiologically.
ciao,
Matthew Vanecek For 93 million miles, there is nothing between the sun and my shadow except me. I'm always getting i
Truck drivers having regulated sleep as a safety issue. Out of all the industries known for sleeplessness, I'd think a regulation for medical workers would make much more sense than for IT workers ever would.
Thanks man! Good post. I was going by a different personal rule of thumb: IF I lived to be 75 years of age and IF slept 8 hours a day then 25 years of my lifetime were wasted in dreamland. Lifespan is too short. Play hard and set yourself a goal for retirement at 50 instead of 65. :)
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
You know, it's almost 6:00 AM here, and I was just wondering if I should get a few hours of sleep instead of pulling yet another all-nighter and forcing myself to stay awake until later tonight. I think I just made my decision.
why not read the study and figure out what it's saying before you decide on poor anecdotal evidence that the whole thing is bullshit?
fact is that you might be right, that no matter how much you lack sleep you still know your name. but that doesn't mean that there aren't memory effects, just that the memory effects aren't so drastic that they make you forget your name. these things you list do not exhaust memory, and moreover you might be surprised if you ran a study looking at them...
there wouldn't really be a research literature on this kind of thing if it was that easy.
story posted.... 01:58AM it is now almost 6:00 AM and there are almost a hundred comments.... looks like a healthy nights sleep at slashdot to me.... ::disclaimer:: i work 3rd shift, and dont always sleep during the day, or afternoon for that matter, and i may have a highly distorted view of reality
I think the point is that employees aren't really positioned to advocate for themselves powerfully. Official regulations can bring employers into line as far as unreasonable demands on the sleep schedules of people who do not feel that sleep deprivation is beneficial. And certainly as a consumer of medical care I hope the people working on me get the benefit of governmental intervention. This does not mean that the SWAT team is going to bust in on you if you decide not to sleep for a really long time.
In other words, you might see this as sinister governmental intervention, but very few of us have the power to hold down all of our interests. Sometimes governmental "meddling" is one of the best ways of ensuring that people don't get screwed over.
Take, for example, the policy that cuts into your ability to buy and own human slaves. Damn the government for that, right?
i can't remember the last time i slept
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Never send a man where you can send a bullet.
Actually, all the presidents won the election
I always check Slashdot right before settling down to study...talk about demotivitating...
www.code-fix.com
The article is talking about your ability to remember info, not to continue thinking. Assuming you already know how to code, caffeine acts as a stimulant and keeps you from feeling drowsy. Now, I wouldn't pick up "Teach yourself x in y days" and short myself on sleep, assuming the article is correct.
My parents told me a zillion times to go sleep earlier to feel better next day... guess i just had to read it once in slashdot to believe it.
Local time: 4:25am.
Going down for sleep NOW!
Note that the study gave 2 days of rest between the first test / learning period and the 2nd period. This is drastically different from the usual 5-10 hours between stopping cramming and writing the exam.
I know that after an exam I lose much of the material I studied the night before.
Also note that this wasn't raw memorization, it was a learned activity, so we might get different results if the subjects had to memorize arbitrary, random etc. pieces of information.
Cyano
Don't like my sig? I don't either.
I guess that's why so much software is like the zombies that write it. At least coders will forget the mess they created though.
It's the user that gets blessed with the total recall.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I know a dot-com millionare - he sold his company to IBM just in time :)
His motto for life: "Sleep is for the weak". It seemed to work pretty well for him.....
Heh.. people seriously don't know how to just take a joke. If I was really gonna become critical I would of simply said the US military has done very long studies, Using psych units to prove that it effects your memory over long periods of time. For instance if you dont sleep 96+ hours your memory will be effected and this is not because you can't remember its because you aren't thinking about retaining anything. You are really thinking about when you're gonna get to sleep. Needless to say errors will be made etc.
Anyone whos ever been to war or in a war simulation (ie: next door neighbor playing large quantities of loud music) knows that the longer you play that loud music, keeping your enemey awake; the quicker he gives in.
Oh well, I guess the bait was set and he bit =)
Yep, let's get the government in here. They were the "pioneers" of the 5-hour work day in the 1930's on the Tennessee Valley Authority projects. Yep, I want to live in a company cottage and be told when I have to go to bed as well. This idea takes the idea of the "nanny state" to another level and unfortunately won't solve the problem of sleeplessness by itself. Sleep is hard to come by unless it is also balanced with a healthy diet and a decent exercise regimen.
Let's leave the feds to the jobs that they were restricted to in the U.S. Constitution.
This is a good reason why I do what I do the way I do it. Why does my employer (or anybody, actually) really need to get ahold of me at 7AM or 11PM no matter where I am? Answer: They don't. All this "business busyness" is really just a sham. The world won't go to hell in a handcart if someone doesn't get the latest information not now, but right now.
I also refuse to let my work intrude into my private life. There's work, and then there's life. I don't hate my job, I just love my hobbies/free time. I can't see why anyone would think that working on Saturday is better than going to an SCA event, or reading a book, or writing a story, or...or...or...
Thirdly, I have a metabolic weirdness (related to a neurological disorder) that causes me to physically need 9-12 h of sleep a night. If sleep is for the weak, then I'm a weakling. I might not (ever) be a rich weakling, but I'm a well-rested, youthful weakling. (All those people I knew from high school who went into high-paying, high-pressure, long-hours jobs now look 10 years older than me! Sometimes laziness pays--especially if you're vain. I really don't mind being asked which high school I go to.)
And I'll be a well-rested, youthful weakling long after all those dot-commie "sleep is for the weak" guys have become prematurely-aged, fabulously wealthy worm food.
Me, personally, I druther be po' than underslept. My memory's bad enough without any help.
The next person whose cell phone plays shxtty beepy music at me is going to find themselves with a cell phone with a Doc Marten faceplate.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Being a good example of an "insomniac", I sleep weird hours, worry my friends, and rarely get a good night's sleep.
:)
What I found out my first year of university (3 years ago) is that if I study for an exam until the early morning and then sleep a few hours, I will actually lose most of the information I learned.
Of course, it all depends on how much you already know before you start "cramming" the night before. Some of my classes are so boring that I used to "barf" the exam, meaning I'd hold as much information in my short-term memory that I could and then (brain) "barf" it on the exam page and leave it there. It is not uncommon for me to forget the entire exam within 24 hours after writing it (sleeping right after the exam probably doesn't help either).
Since then, I've been trying to "time" my sleeping hours (which I have a little bit of control over when I'm a bit over-tired) so that I wake up 16-20 hours before the END of an exam. That way I'll study, write the exam and pass out at exactly the right times.
This has a few risks however. Timing multiple exams is difficult, especially if they occur at the same time on successive days. I usually end up having less time to study for the second exam. This technique is also useless if you are writing two exams on one day (which hasn't happened to me yet, luckily).
Besides memory loss, there are a few other issues along with that. If I stay awake and sleep less than 2 hours, I tend to wake up more groggy than if I had never slept at all. So now I just stay up and crash when I get home.
Also, now that exam time is coming up I have one recommendation about caffiene. If you are going to consume large amounts of caffiene during exams, slowly ramp up your consumption. If you consume a lot of it early on, you will begin to "burn out" a lot quicker and be useless for later exams. However, if you are a regular caffiene (ab)user, this probably won't apply to you.
As a side note, I used to use caffiene to control my sleeping patterns in first year, which were chaotic at best). I probably averaged about 3-4 hours a night. Since then my short-term memory has gone to shit. YMMV.
If you ask me, I'd say that sleeping is the most important thing you can do to prepare for studying. If you can get it, DO IT.
Good luck during exams!
rLowe
PS> Did I mention I'm in engineering?
----- rL
A better idea would be to require managers that set impossible dealines to sleep as little as the people that have to meet the deadlines. --Eric
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Tyler Durden didn't sleep, and he turned out fine! He made a great movie.
it is Geek Code
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I post links to stuff here
due to the university's regulations, high doses of caffiene can't be tested on people
If you ever need a volunateer for an "after school project", give me a call. I will glady intake massive amounts of caffiene for the ahem "good of science"
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
You are standing on the west side of a small white house. There is a mailbox here.
open mailbox
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
There is a theory about memory that the things you learn has to be repeated in your brain in order to 'stick'. Think about it, you learn a new name for a person and immediately goes on talking, or you learn the name and has some a few seconds doing nothing. In the first case a lot of us forget the (damned) name.
There is also a theory that we're dreaming all the time, even when we're awake. The brain is constantly doing random assoications and this helps refreshing memory. But at daytime, when a lot is happening and we're conscious, most of this random activity gets quickly depressed. (but sometimes we daydream, or we suddenly thinks about something totally unrelated to what we're doing at the moment.)
Combaining these two theories we come to my point. In sleep very little is disturbing the brain, which is then free to do it's random(?) memory refreshing thing.
And if this is correct, then that is why lack of sleep is disruptive for memory.
So... you present an alternate explanation for the results: the disturbance in the sleep patterns of those individuals asked not to sleep after exposure to the patterns, rather than the lack of sleep suffered by said individuals, caused the lack of learning.
That's an interesting hypothesis, perhaps one which could afford some study. I don't think it's so obvious as to make the previous study 'obviously biased'; frankly, based on what other knowledge I have about the functions served by sleep, I'm inclined towards skepticism.
Nonetheless, you might do well to find a grad student looking for a thesis project and suggest it, after doing some research to find out if this subject has been addressed previously.
And btw, I didn't claim to be smarter. I was trying to imply that you can't afford the loss of learning that you do suffer due to your sleep habits any more than I can.
I guess this explains why there have been so many reposted articles lately.
blog
now such wonderful sites as Thinkgeek will go out of business due to lack of sales of caffeine...
I read about "daily cycles" of sleep, and being someone who habitually feels crap in the morning, decided to try it. I found it seems to work.
Basically, the body goes into a sleep mode about 10pm. This mode lasts until about 2am. During this period, the body is most relaxed and quiet. After it starts waking up, sleep is more shallow.
I've usually liked staying up late to do mental stuff/work, because I'd feel more focussed and relaxed, esp. around 1am, but would feel awful in the morning. I see now that the 'late-night-focus' was because my body was in 'deep-relaxation' mode, ie. the time when it was most adapted for deep-sleep. By morning, I'd not only missed the deepest relaxation sleep period, but would still be in bed when the body was passing from light-awake (2am-6am) to medium-awake (6am to 10am). So I'd be trying to wake up at 7 -- a few hours after my body's most sharply-awake period had already passed.
I've started experimented with going to bed at 10, and found I wake up naturally and very refreshed and clear at 4.30-5am (much more refreshed than I do at 6.30).
So instead of cramming a few late night work hours, there's the alternative of taking an early night and working from 5-7am, straight after having had the deepest sleep possible.
Anyway, I must sound really "sad" advocating 10pm bed time... and for many it's just not possible, but for those who are interested, see Chopra.
PS. I once stayed up 56 hours for work... at least I think it was work... can I remember?
i stayed up for 72 hours once and ended up sleeping after that for 20-21. try telling my body that extra sleep doesn't make up for missed sleep, eh?
eudas
Blessed is he who expects the worst, for he shall not be disappointed.
The solution is cats. I have two of those little bastards and I haven't needed an alarm clock for years. Every morning they wake me up without exception at 6 AM to be fed.
By the way, I do have an auction going on Ebay right now if anyone wants them.
We'll see this story again as the slahdot editors forgot that it had just been posted.
Just a little ribbing... nothing to serious.
I can't remember exactly, but I thought I saw this story two weeks ago, and I seem to remember posting this exact same response, but I'm not quite sure.
you my friend need sleep
I ask because resource shortages are going to push two and three 8-hour shifts onto more and more companies trying to compete in the marketplace and I would be interested to see if this is likely to have a broad detrimental effect on society...
It seems that in our hyperactive I-need-it-yesturday society that everyone's more busy than ever before and working longer. Cell phones, pagers, and PDAs keep us all connected on the go. IPOs pop up every day, and new ways of tracking them 24/7 are innovated all the time. Then we drive home to greet the computer for more infodiving and work. Yet have we actually asked ourselves what the consequences of all this technology is?
Lack of sleep sometimes comes from those who can't "turn their brain off" or just can't drop everything and go to sleep. Even worse, there are those who won't let themselves obtain more than 7 hours of sleep. (Oddly enough, they don't care as much about the level of caffeine or nicotine in their blood.)
So who's to blame? Ourselves? Of course not, it's society's fault for having larger expectations in this day and age. But how did society get this way? Surely the God of Civilization didn't whisk his/her magic wand and Poof! we're all overworked and underslept.
Yet we don't really see how detrimental these little details are until we find a study on it. We just figure we can shave off minutes of sleep to achieve just a bit more productivity. Then we go back to replying to posts about the oxymoronic Microsoft Usability Labs.
Basically, we want to change society but without changing ourselves.
Enough ranting, I just think that we to take two minutes away from productivity and take a look at how we are in the mirror. Are we really taking care of ourselves, or are we working ourselves into an early grave? Is what we do necessary, or is it really expendible? As we find out here, I guess sleep isn't as expendible as we might have thought. Perhaps there's more to it, but I'll find out later.
I need to go to sleep.
I was more productive and better rested than I think I have ever felt before or since. I assume everyone has a different rhythm their body would shift to if allowed, I am curious if anyone else has done this, and what their experience was like.
Dave
They needed a study to figure this out? Everyday I hear totally insane studies like, "smoking linked to cancer," and "absentee fathers lead to criminal children," etc. You'd think they'd have a better place to spend their research dollars.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It's not obvious that you've contradicted the research. I suppose that one could look up all the references and check, but it would be helpful if you would have provided a synopsis of your argument. As it stands, it's not clear that any of the papers you sited refute the claim that the first night of sleep is necessary to learn improvements in procedural memory from a days practice.
In general, with research that is experimental and has little theoretical foundation, unless you duplicate the experiment completely, it's possible that you would have results that might seem contradictory. Without a good theory, any small variation in the inputs could effect the output of the experiment, and with something as complicated as the human brain, there are often many inputs.
Chris Mesterharm
You know,as an Englishman of irreputable history in the 'memory destroying activity dept', i have (had) a great awareness of the lack of sleep theories touted by social policy influencing groups. and i think that it is a scam sir! What a load of.....poopoo! Obviously the powers at be would love for us all to stay longer in bed. Less cost, you see. Less trouble. All the best things are acheived in the state of sleeplessness; art, music, philosophies and anything that is really important... The less you sleep, the more you live. listen, that old bitch Thatcher only had four hours of sleep a night, but you can bet her memory was as good as the saint peter.
confusion is my direction as i am everywhere...
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
and you can throw them against the wall like an alarm clock too....
Arm yourself with knowledge.
This is absolute garbage. The government is not your mother. It is not the government's responsibility to tell you when to go to bed. What next, a Federal Ass-wiping Committee?
The fact is, kids, if you don't like what you're doing, and if you don't like how your current employer is treating you, do something radical: QUIT!
That's right! Quit your job!
You can quit your crappy job and maybe even get a new one! Look at your legs -- there's no chains! Nobody is forcing you to work those hours. Don't like your schedule? Quit!
Now sure, you've got those bills to pay, but do you really NEED a Mercedes? Rather, think about it this way: is your Ikea furniture worth dying at 40? Is your snazzy condo worth a heart attack?
Sell your junk, quit your job, and go find an occupation that won't kill you.
And for those of you that don't, that continue to work 80 hours a week for $75K a year, please stop your whining.
Those of us who are trying to enjoy our brief little lives are really tired of your bitching.
http://unxmaal.com
I find that if I work out for 30 minutes during the day that I can fall asleep without a problem, sleep for six to eight hours, and wake up without an alarm clock. Something about being active during the day helps you sleep, I think. (Of course, having the eight kilo cat jump on you at 6am doesn't hurt either. He's my backup system. Waking up is a process, not a product.)
By morning, I will probably have no idea I ever posted this.
/.
Hah. So that's why stories sometimes get posted twice to
Trickster Coyote
Reality is but a dream
Ideology is for ideots.
heh. losing material after the exam....30 seconds after a calculus exam i forget everything i ever learned about calculus (btw what the hell *is* an integral anyways???) me and my friends refer to this as the "gaa-oooosh" (pseudo-onomatopoeia of toilet flushing) phenomena...anyone else??
Yeah, but we forgot.
-
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
P 2 P___H U M O R
great comedy company.
Well - I can say lack of sleep but I also can say "major unrecovery"... and as for recovery - I think that sliting a few luser throats will do - especially if you let them bleed to death on the SCSI cables or on the fibers...
Ah - don't forget to paint the data-room walls with their blood too. Works wonders for the evil spirits in the hardware.
Remember the mantra: "All Software Sucks, All Hardware Sucks"
--
I try to get at least 10 hours of sleep per day. It makes me far more productive than those annoying workaholic fools who BRAG that they get 5 hours sleep per night.
For lack of sex, sleep, caffeine and Mexican food? No thanks, I'll join the control group instead...
Cheers,
-j.
dang time zones. had me worried there for a second.
Yeah, and I'm sure that corporations will institute such changes out of pure altruism...
I *wish* I could do without an alarm clock.
Alarm clocks are the bane of my existance. The difference between how I feel if I wake up to an alarm clock and how I feel if I just wake up when my body is rested is unbelievable. So why don't I just rearrange my schedule so I don't need an alarm clock? My natural waking period is from slightly before noon to ~2am at night. I've tried modifying it, but I end up slipping back into this schedule whenever I have a vacation. Grad school and most jobs aren't very accomodating to such a schedule.
Waking up to an alarm clock leaves me feeling like I were a tooth just ripped out of someone's mouth, blood-covered and nerve dangling. Anything that's too gentle doesn't wake me up (music). Anything that's within arm's reach I learn to turn off in my sleep. If my life gets hectic enough, I am capable of getting up, walking across the room, resetting the alarm for noon, and crawling back in bed without ever actually waking up.
The unfortunate reality is that, no matter when I get up, my mind and body don't really wake up until when they want to. If I force myself out of bed before 10-11 am I will be clumsy, slow-moving, weak, and slow of thought until at least 10-11.
If forced to sit through a lecture, I'll almost invariably fall asleep. It's somewhat ironic that I can fall asleep in ~5 minutes during a lecture, no matter how much I resist, while it usually takes me up to an hour to fall asleep when I crawl in bed around midnight. Heck, I fall alseep driving easier than I do in bed.
The only really happy solution is to stay awake until I am dog tired and then sleep until my body is ready to get up. My body physically wants at least 10 hours of sleep a night. When I'm maintaining a regular workout schedule, it wants even more.
Somewhat OT, but still tangentially related...
There's a very interesting story by J.G. Ballard about a society in which clocks were outlawed because people felt enslaved by time. Most people used resettable timers to keep track of necessary intervals, but as a whole, schedules were very lax. The story follows the protagonist, who was obsessed with clocks and imprisoned for such, on his search for timepieces.
zeke
Bravo! If only every article had someone providing this kind of supplementary research. -SS
SoulStriker
SoulStriker
Am I wrong? Prove it.
I perform well with that amount of sleep, I perform less well when I sleep more (I get headaches when I sleep longer). If I start cutting into my sleep I've noticed a progressive degradation of skills.
I kind of kept records the last time I took myself out to the "brutal" level of sleep depravation. Due to circumstances I ended up working 60 hours straight. The first 24 hours were not too bad, I do that from time to time and have no apparent ill-effects.
Over the next 24 hours I became progressively more single-minded in what I was doing. Little distractions like the phone or even the paperboy dropping off the paper would shock me out of the little world that had entranced me.
The last 12 hours were interesting. Part of the work I was doing involved addition and subtraction of numbers out to four decimal places and looking for trends. Normally I can do this in my head quickly and accurately. I had to dust off the calculator and CAREFULLY enter data. I no longer had enough of an attention span to keep track of addition and subtraction, much less look for trends in reams of data.
After having somebody pick me up and drive me into work for a meeting (there was no way I'd have been able to drive the 12 miles to work safely, I wouldn't have fallen asleep I don't think, I was almost wired at that point, but I had no concentration at all) I realized I could remember almost none of the conculsions I came to, fortunately I anticipated this and scribbled everything down on a note pad.
Looking over the data later after getting some sleep was a bit shocking, the work looked alien. I knew the work was mine. I only had the fuzziest recollection of doing it.
What about self control?
When I didn't have a job (about 5-6 years ago), I would eat when I would want to eat and sleep when I wanted to sleep.
It didn't make me wise.
It made me fat and goggy.
Now I just eat at set times and sleep at set times. I am (now) 15 pounds underweight (on the height scale) and work 2 full time jobs and very active all the time.
I don't know if it made me wise. It has made me feel better both mentallity and physically.
So wisdom comes at the price of ones phyiscal health?
Sloth? Gultane?
(Just because it is spelled wrong and grammicail incorrect doesn't mean you don't understand the message)
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
I had a buddy who decided that rather than getting some boring work study job in the library, it'd be easier to sign up in a long term research study in the food and nutrition department.
They wanted complete control over his input and output, so they gave him a gym bag with thermoses full of a special liquid nutritional concentrate which for the year became his sole source of sustenance. He also had latrine containers into which he had to put all his piss and shit. We'd all go out for Chinese and he'd be slurping his nutritional goo.
Every two weeks he'd go to the lab and get to eat something different -- two pounds of American cheese. There was a catch to this treat -- it was radioactive.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What is that tagline?
TK
They'll do whatever gives them the most profit. IT is a seller's market (where the employee has a lot more negotiating power than the employer). Finding clueful workers is very difficult, and chasing them away by having bad work policy/environment is a good way to lose money to your more reasonable competitors.
That applies to any industry, but in IT, it is particularly extreme.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yea you make a good point. But you have to consider; how would the medical field pull out higher profit marges for "helping" people?
Also you state that their would be less misdiagnoses and mistreatments, which is probably true. But yet again you fail to consider what would happen to all the lawyers with this huge amount of decrease in their work load?
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
I, too, have done research on sleep before and found that a lack of sleep can actually cause people to score higher on verbal tests than they would if well rested. I think I originally saw the article on Slashdot. I decided to test this theory and for the past year, all of my papers are written between two and six a.m. Although it's true that I many times don't remember what I wrote the night before, apparently it must be good because I'm continually scoring As now.
the boby's circadian rythm cycles, and in fact gets about an hour behind each day. (and then attempts to reset with bright light)
so, in other words, if you always go to sleep at 12m, and always wake up at 8am, you will find yourself getting the urge to wake up later and later, and to go to bed later as well.
for revolving shift work, the best method is usually 1st shift for a period, then 2nd, then 3rd, then back to 1st, to take advantage of the lagging circadian rythm (hopefully with the workers at first sleeping after they get home, and gradually shifting to sleeping 8 hours or so after they get home, then a shift switch, so they are back to sleeping right after they get home).
yay, 7 years of college good for something.
semantics are everything!
that Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity.
I would say one may suffer.
To add some fire to the discussion. Once I heard about one guy, in St. Peterburg if I'm not mistaken, who suffered from acute form of insomny. You know what he did to pass the sleepless nights? Read the Big Soviet Encyclopedia (there is also the Small SE). Up to the level he could cite any page from it in any way and form. Yes, this may not be exactly the memory process related to learning (this is more "photo" memory) but still it is indirectly related to it.
So I would be more careful doing such studies...
Let me compliment you on a unusually good post.
I personally don't have access to my sources, since I've been out of school now for over fifteen years, but back then I did some literature research into this very subject too.
I remember a study which is very suggestive, which probably you could find if you have access to a good library. The study purported to show that the length of time between an event and the next REM cycle affected your ability to recall it accurately. If you were sleep deprived, you would remember things that occurred just before you got to sleep pretty much as well as you would during a normal cycle. Things that happened a long time before you got to sleep would not be recalled well or at all. Thus if you (like I used to when I was young) work for thirty or forty hours straight, you would remember the last shift pretty much as well as a normal shift, but the first shift would be recalled poorly. This pretty much also fits with my personal experience.
Another way to look at this is that time to REM sleep is the limiting factor in long term recall.
This would jibe pretty well with the study of medical residents. Medical residents who worked long shifts would learn pretty much the same as those that worked short shifts, just that most of the learning that occurred would be from the end of the shift. The beginning of the shift is for the benefit of the hospital, not the resident.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
No one's ever heard of senior citizens who are hackers or programmers, right?
Charles Babbage?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
If you read the article, the research was on procedural memory (such as learning a new juggling pattern, or getting better at Tetris), and had nothing to do with declarative memory (such as remembering what the capital of Algeria is), or episodic memory (such as remembering that you already posted a particular Slashdot story 2 weeks ago). I see from most of the comments that people are implicitly assuming that we're talking about declarative memory. So you can go on sleep-depriving yourselves without worrying about forgetting important facts (as far as this particular research is concerned).
...of course you would, it's for my own good...
but periods of extra sleep cannot "make up" for lost sleep.
:(
It's true...I slept for 16 hours today to try and make up for not sleeping any for 2 days since I had been to tired to get first post. I planned to sleep alot to make up for it, and get first post today...but instead I forgot and got #71.
*sniff*
,
faeryman
I think i read this in a Boy's life a couple years back (my mom somehow signed me up for a life subscription for like 7$, I think BL gets all it's $$ not from subscription, but from ads..anyways) in that issue, they talked about how studies said if you cram in late afternoon, your memory "cycle" comes around the next morning and you can more clearly remember than had you, say crammed at 11:30 the night before. HAD you crammed the night before at 11:30, and the class was in the late afternoon, you'd be in luck, b/c that's when the 11:30pm memory cycle comes around. Probably not horribly scientific, but if you're somatic enough, you just might believe it and magically have edionic (photographic) memory for a while.
sorry, studying for a psychology test
moox. for a new generation.
The article is pure junk. The described experiment looks much like an amateur doctor trying to check his own stereotypes on how people should live instead of a real scientific analysis, where time frames vary, people are set into several working scenarios and different rythms of work/sleep are set.
Right now I'm in the second day at work. Slept 4 hours. And feel ok except that is a bit cold (temperatures drastically dropped here). Probably I'll remain in the place for one or two days more. Having sleeping cycles of half-four hours between worktimes of 4-15 hours. I didn't forget anything I should do, what I read yesterday or what I did and should do.
And for nearly 10 years I have never seen such things as the crap written in these news...
The only moment when memory does really start to suffer is when you get three-four days without taking a nap and you worked like hell. And, after sleeping, I don't see that I really forgot about anything noticeable. I even remember some details I usually wouldn't note in a normal rythm.
I had rythms on sleeping 2 hours on full 20 hour worktimes for more than a week. The limit of sleepless I reached - 5 days. I also slept two days in a row. And don't see where this guy is making the point.
One thing I'm sure. Each person has his clock. A bioclock that says "you can stay N hours awake, but after that sleep X hours". That's a steel rule. However this clock ranges from people sleeping 3-4 hours to others taking 12-13 hour snaps. These last ones are not lazy. Their rythms demand such long hours of sleep.
Some others, like me, have nearly irregular sleep clocks. One thing I know is that if the brain says "time for a good snap" then better to do it. Besides I and two guys here are typical night owls. I only feel my good working rythm at night, while in the morning or evening I feel sleepy quite frequently. Even if I slept the whole night. Day before yesterday I did so. Came to work and also slept the whole morning. And the next night was a run down to 6 in the morning...
Besides, there are people that suffer a rythm very similar to "Napoleon's syndrome". They can only sleep in very short moments and do not have a fixed sleeping rythm at all.
In front of this, the article is tantalizing for its nonsense...
that was actually really funny. thank you
shaolin punk, activist post-industrial
Very few shift workers actually get enough sleep at night^H^H^H^H^Hday ;-); they have to fight their own circadian rhythms and the drudgery that most shift work comprises.
While to the best of my knowledge there haven't been any studies on shift workers in particular, there have been numerous studies in Scandinavia, where the high latitude and short winter days mimic many of the conditions shift workers experience. It's an interesting question to explore, while the human race self-immolates as it slowly descends into a new corporate dark age.
-- Anne Marie
The solution is not clear. I don't need the nanny state government telling me when to go to sleep. It is already enough that they run as much of my life as they can. This is absurd. It is my body and I will do with it as I please. I thought a woman would understand such ideas. I guess a woman only has the right to choose abortion and not to regulate her own sleep schedule free from government interference. Are we in a race to become as pathetic as the French government?
Stuart Eichert
Stuart Eichert
The lack of sleep has no effect on memory.
1. you don't forget where your bed is.
2. you don't forget you're tired.
3. you don't forget your name.
4. you don't forget how low your stock is.
So you might forget what you ate or wore but people who do get enough sleep forget those things.
This article is bullshit.. next.
I dnot ndee seppl, atfer 3 alnlighetrs thres nhtoi ngworong wtih mr
:cool:
:cool: caffine
well, as I understand it, science has recently discovered that our brain's memory functions are much more complex than first thought. not only does it sort memories by cross referencing them [which is what intelligence is all about], but it also stores items it deems relevant in specific areas that seem to be getting the best oxygen and nutrient supply. Sort of a semi-permanent OS upgrade, I guess.
What the article does not address at all, is just exactly which type of memories are affected, to what extent and in which order. Let's face it, biological/organic systems never function 'cross-board'.
Therefore, if our brain develops data loss or even bad clusters, they are usually location specific, before starting to slowly spread.
And my wild guess is that the location that is affected is short term memory. So, even if the test subjects would have had proper sleep, their short-term memory might have still gone blank.
Seems people don't teach in schools that the best way to remember stuff is to store it in the long-term memory. And to force you brain to store data there, rather than in interim processing areas first, all you need to do, is come up with an image or association that your brain already knows and which you use frequently - your brain will immediately dig a thick set of synapses between that new data and well known one and hence store it long-term.
I used to invent sentences that were sort of funny and rhymed and then associate them with data i needed to pass exams in hated subjects [physics, chemistry...]. guess what, i passed with flying colours and still remember every single piece after over ten years - but forgot plenty of stuff about subjects i liked [maths, jogfry, etc.]
So, it's all about remembering by association, not processing while sleeping.
Well, that may not be true for long.
____________________
Ni!
I survive on 8 hours caffine a day? Is that the same thing?
Seriously though, " getting a good night's sleep helps people retain some of what they learned that day". I only learn things at night, so I must get a good days sleep sometime. Trouble is lectures arent timed right.
First, you can indeed make up for lost sleep by sleeping more; it'll make you feel better the next day; it just won't help you remember the previous day.
Therefore, if you had a traumatic experience in your life, don't sleep! Then, after about a day of this, get really drunk. 14 hours later, you'll have slept like a baby and you won't remember a damn thing. Isn't science great?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Actually I am Anne Marie. I figured it would be faster to rev a new account up to 50 than bring my old account down - that's how much karma I have.
And yes, I do search for comments containing my nick.
--Shoeboy
The link between sleeplessness and memory loss has always been intuitively known for eons.
:P
This doesn't seem true for me. When I get 8 hours or more of sleep I feel groggier all day. When I was programming all day and getting 6 hours or less of sleep my memory worked much better for weeks at a time. I really enjoy sleep, so I'm usually groggy
I wonder if different brain chemistries yield different results...
I've got a brother who drives trucks. From what I've heard, the regulations force truckers to stop when they are still not tired, and then get up in the middle of the night to start driving again, when they then are sleepy.
Along with the fact that they are routinely ignored, and truckers are given jobs that are impossible to fulfill if you follow the regs.
Regulations for just the IT industry would, quite frankly, be really stupid. If you want to regulate everything, I could see the justification, though it is still not a good idea IMO, but just IT? Why are they special? Because they're in such high demand they can choose not to work long hours and still get hired, but choose not to for more money?
You have yet to prove that the study was indeed biased. No, the study does not apply to 100% of people on the face of the earth. Your little analogy of the person reading the SE does not prove the irrelevance of the study, it merely shows that there is an exception to the general conlusion. I know someone at a startup company who rarely gets more than couple of hours sleep a night. That person claims to be unaffected by lack of sleep, yet whenever he gets a full nights sleep he remarks about how much clearer he think.
As a side note, there are some people who are able to perform amazing mathematical calculations in their heads; stuff like 365,365,365,365,365,365 X 365,365,365,365,365,365. Most people would need a calculator to get a result, however, a select few do not. That does not mean that calculators are useless, it just there are exceptions to the human norm. It is similar for this study. There may be a statistically small portion of the population for whom the study fails, however, that doesn't mean that the study is biased or inaccurate.
One further note, if you are have as intelligent as you so elegantly stated, then why aren't you able to get your work done within normal business hours.
I was told about the following theory by a psychologist, and I've read about it elsewhere. Our sleep is divided into cycles of about 1.5 to 2 hours. At the start and the end the sleep is very light, it is easy to wake up, and that's when we may have dreams. At the centre, the brain and the rest of the body are in deep rest. Not surprisingly, if you're woken up at the centre of the cycle, you'll feel like shit, perhaps for the rest of the day. So you should time your sleep so that there are full cycles.
You can find your cycle duration by noting how long you sleep spontaneously. The only problem I don't have a solution for, is if you sleep for six hours exactly (or a similar coincidence) - are there 3 cycles of 2h or 4 of 1.5h?
A further problem is if (when) you cannot decide when to fall asleep. But according to the psychologist, it is better to stay awake until the next potential start of a cycle than to force yourself to sleep. Again this makes a lot of sense from the common experience.
But don't trust me - I screwed up last night's sleep for some extra work, ignoring all these cycles, so I may not be in the best shape to explain this. Anyway, do try it out, it just might work for you.
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
> Amazingly enough, alcohol, under some circumstances, will also improve memory
;-)
Unfortunately, Late night drinking sessions help you remember your Ex's phone number at times when you probably had better not be calling her!
Pilots have specific rules about how much sleep they need and how many hours per month they can spend piloting.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I don't think this research is going to stop me from binging and purging sleep aka sleep cameling.
Why can't they explain why if you oversleep a ton (10 hours or more) that you stay tired/slow all day???? That's what I would want to know...
Enrico
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
If your filesystem keeps timestamps from local time (FAT does), it could be interesting to study the statistics of source code.
What was the mean time of the source files? What's the distribution? How does it compare to that of the binaries?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
He must have forgot. :>
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
If so, compilers should check for it:
foobar.c: line 11402: Warning (703) Code written at 3:47 AM
The purpose of the hazing ritual known as internship has nothing to do with teaching anything to the doctor-wannabe. It is a rite of passage that serves as a barrier to entry to the profession, and a source of slave labor to the medical institution. There are already jurisdictions in the US that limit the number of hours that an intern may be required to work, a trend I hope to see spread to the rest of the country.
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Check this&l t;/a> out from NPR's "All things considered (story at the bottom of the page). It also notes a German study which differentiated on what type of sleep was necessary. I was surprised to hear it was non-rem sleep.
speaking as someone who worked at a medical school...that wouldn't help much. Most of the doctors I knew were boneheads too start with.
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
Every time I put more threads to sleep() in my java programs, my manager tries to tell me that I'm losing memory, not the other way around.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I started having that problem when I took my current job as an IT administrator. Sitting all day isn't healthy, but there are things you can do to prevent the "but rot" problem (I was gaining major pounds for a while, and couldn't sleep at night because my body just wasn't tired).
So, for me the solution was to buy a weight set and force myself to workout every night for at least twenty minutes, plus whatever other exercises I can force myself to do. Not only does it help me sleep better, but I've taken off fifteen pounds in a couple of months and I'm still dropping. It's nice to be able to put my pants on without sucking in my breath in the morning again.;-)
Bite my yammer.
First Post!!!!!
sign me up when you get the grant...I'll work for above said conditions : ). If anyone knows anything about a government "pizza CAN be a 5 food group food"/pizza only diet study, let me know, it would sure be a whole lot cheaper than buying it myself.
I think that more than anything, your body, when set on a regular schedule of anything, adapts and does well under those circumstances. Change them drastically, and things are likely to get massively fucked up. Example: I'm a student. Allergy Season happens, I take benadryll (3 capsules). I've never taken benadryll before, and the suggested max dosage at one time is 2. I find myself sleeping 18 hours a day for 4 days and posting on Slashdot at 2 am central time instead of sleeping.
moox. for a new generation.
No one's ever heard of senior citizens who are hackers or programmers, right?
"Wireless : LAN
Caffiene does improve memory, if taken during/before the event one is trying to remember, IIRC. My college psychology teacher conducted a study on a North Dakota campus that helped to prove this effect. The teacher's name was MacPherson, the campus was either UMD or NDSU.
Amazingly enough, alcohol, under some circumstances, will also improve memory. If one studies for a test and then drinks some beer afterwords (not during), they have a better chance of remembering what they learned. The theory is that alcohol intake helps prevent new input and thus allows what happened before be remembered better. For the non-drinkers, sleep will do the same thing. (Of course, this is the exception rather then the rule, most of the time, alcohol use, especially heavy alcohol use, destroys memory.)
Speaking of drugs that are bad for you and yet can improve memory, I believe nicotine also does so. I remember reading a few years ago in a scientific journal that researchers had discovered the pathway that nicotine uses to help improve memory.
For the caffiene study, the effect was a moderate amount of caffine, due to the university's regulations, high doses of caffiene can't be tested on people. I'm guessing the study involving alcohol had a simular restriction.
If that's the case, then why do people even bother to cram the night before an exam by staying up late trying to memorize? According to this they're just wasting their time!
Actually, that's what I always found. I never heard of any of these sleeplessness studies, but I always found I felt more comfortable taking the test if I got plenty of sleep the previous night.
There was actually one test in high school I particularly remember, which I decided to stay up late and study for because everyone said it was a tough test. Well, I went in the next day, and proceeded to make an incredible number of stupid mistakes, so I took that as a lesson that sleep is a Good Thing (tm).
Now if only I could successfully apply that to my work life...
Haven't we known for a very, very long time that sleep deprivation impairs mental function? Not just mental speed and memory, but also motor function? IOW, if your mind is toasted, you're not going to remember much?
What I wonder is how this affects those lucky bastards with some form of eidetic memory. Doesn't it usually appear because the mind is always writing information into the "permanent databanks"? And if that's true, then would it be possible for somebody with an eidetic memory to eliminate sleep with a combonation of stimulants and meditation?
Probably not, but could be an interesting subtopic in a story. Bring the Illuminati to a new definition.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I recall a documentary on PBS a number of years ago that dealt with the effects of swing-shift work on employees. IIRC, it was an episode of either NOVA or The Brain.
The reserchers were looking specifically at workers in a mid-western mining operation (I think it was a Bauxite strip-mine). The results of the study showed that the workers were more alert, and slept less on the job if their shifts were rotated in the order days, afternoons, midnights, days, rather than the industry standard days, midnights, afternoons. This "new" shift rotation pattern caused productivity at the mine to jump by 22%, which caught the attention of Management. The workers were happy that they were getting better sleep and the accident rate at the mine dropped sharply.
The researchers also found that lengthening the amount of time spent in each segment of the cycle to 3 or 4 weeks, rather than the usual 2 weeks, also improved the efficiency and restedness of the workers.
To email me,subtract my nick from my email address, starting with the second character. (hint: adto.uiuc.edu is wrong)
holy crap im tired.....
yawn x 6.02 x 10^23
it's odd how I ALWAYS comment to people about my lack of memory and how I "dont" have a memory. I now know the answer. i am appalled.
This explains the frequent reposts on /.
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
Now that its right out there, what does this mean for doctors, nurses, and anyone else in the medical field? Will 36 hour shifts even exist anymore? And what about pilots with their overtime? If this can be turned into a documented cause for a long term ailment, will people sue their employers for overworking them or making them miss sleep?
This could be due to the fact that you loose the whole train of thought thing. I know that when I'm writing a some SQL inner join and left joins and all that crap and take a 20 minute break it KILLS my productivity. Things get even worse if I can't finish up a query and have to take of for, oh lets say, thankgiving and they take the server off line for the weekend. I feel sorry for whomever picks up the bill for my current project.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
Here is a case just reverse. I just sleep and sleep and have the least bit of memeory to show for that. Maybe too much of sleep too hampers memory.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
If you think that doing term-papers in whatever odd subject all night is tough, or coding all night for a week or two on some project, just wait for your children to be born. That's when real sleep deprivation sets in...
And yes, I'm very much speaking from experience. But you know what? I think you CAN make your body adapt to fewer hours of sleep, but it's really hard. If you're used to 8 hours of sleep every night, start getting only 7,5 hours for a month. At first you'll be tired, but after the month your body will have gotten used to it. Now reduce to 7 hours for a month and so on. Sooner or later you'll hit your personal barrier where the sleepiness affects you too much - need I say that you should stop then?
Doing this successfully requires you to continue to do so every day for a month, also in the week-end, which is exactly why it works so good when you have little children - they have no notion of weekends, anyway.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
The sleep pattern I use that works quite well(for about a month) is 3-4 hours at night, but then 3-4 15 minute power naps(fmpns) during the day. At the end of a semester on when I'm working on a big project I'll start using this sleep pattern. It takes me a day or 3 to adjust but afterwords I'm going pretty much non stop for 20 hours a day. Just have to make sure to schedule the naps. If you miss one it KILLS you.
About to catch 4 hours right now.
Humans are slow, innaccurate, and brilliant; computers are fast, acurrate, and dumb; together they are unbeatable
Or if you were running FreeBSD..........but.......then again.........your not listening
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I was a sleep apnea victim with initial symptoms around the year 1969, about 10 years before the disorder was 'discovered' and named by an Australian doctor named Sullivan. The disorder became severe enough by the time it was diagnosed (in 1989)that I was not getting any meaningful sleep at all for months at a time (I was diagnosed and successfully treated by a sleep specialist with a PhD in psychology. It wasn't until 1996 that I actually met an MD who knew was a CPAP was.).
So I have some first-hand experience of long-term sleep deprivation. There are about 5 years of my life for which I have no clear memory, and I lost at least two jobs and one wife as side-effects of my almost total inability to function. I regard the fact that I actually survived this disorder to be a low-probably occurrence.
I can vouch for the observation that sleep deprivation screws your memory. That was the thing I noticed first after my first night of CPAP-assisted sleep. I can still recall damn near everything that happened on the following day, but I have only dim recollection of the events that led up to my diagnosis and treatment, and essentially no memory of the two years prior to that. I kept a journal during that time, in part because I realized that my cognitive abilities were diminished; when I read the entries that I made during that period, it feels like I'm reading about somebody else.
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Anybody remember that slashdot article that said caffeine improves memory...maybe sufficient coffee offsets this...I dunno, I can't remember what the article said :)
Well.. as me and possible many others, when you are sleepy for tests or in work or when you're in school .. won't this mean that you won't remember anything from it?. Hint, stay home from school when sleepy, its no use going anyways :P
-Stskeeps, http://unrealircd.com
Seriously though, if I recall correctly it was actually rendered on 3 PowerMacs, which were brand new at the time. It might have been 2 and a half -- two from the graphics department and one used overnight from another department. I think at the time some of the staff were trying to find a nice distributed rendering solution so the (expensive) PowerMac that the managing director (barely) used could be put to use. I think the company was bought out and shut down before a solution was found...
I don't wake up to an alarm clock. I stay 8 hours but if I wake up to an alarm clock I'll be groggy all day and unable to code. A groggy programmer on the job is a pretty much worthless. They won't be able to do anything except read slashdot :). If you have to have your programmers in early for meetings and such I suggest setting aside a designated nap room.
What am I doing is denying a result that I don't like because the experiment is fully biased.
The experiment presents people with a rythm that, in any case, disturbs their biological clocks. Wether you sleep 1, 2 or 12 hours a day, you do it at night or in broad daylight. Now the average mass tends to sleep 8 hours a day at night. So what do we have here? You disturb ALL people and try to gather statistics. On the counter part of the experiment the average mass gets its time of due sleep. And you CONCLUDE that people should sleep those 8 hours a day. Isn't there an assymetry on results?
Sorry but in my case ALL people do not have the usual sleep hours. I would not you that such things like the 25 hour bioclock, and other more weird rythms are well observed here. There are some who carry even a 32 hour clock.
A more correct study would be to carry also an experiment with INTTERRUPTED sleep. You give people after a 2 days run, only 2 or four hours of sleep. And on those who went to sleep at regular time, to also interrupt their sleep the same way.
This is simple and does not draws conclusions nearly impossible.
And before getting stupid flamebait try to weight your words. As you said you DON'T know what I do. But the fact that I work 4 days in a row does not mean you're smarter. Maybe the contrary is much more true. And what concerns reading the articles, do read them before posting. But I also have some knowledge about bioclocks (NOT newspaper biorythms) and things like work in Cosmos and my own work. And my conclusion is that the article is pure crapped bias.
What is it with the computer industry and impossible deadlines anyway?
Impossible people, usually. People who think N+1 trivial tasks take as long as N trivial tasks. People who think because it takes 15 seconds to fix a typo in HTML, it should also take 15 seconds to fix a subtle design error in the middle of a 23,000 line mound of code. People who simply refuse to understand the technology and what actually goes into the process. People who can't get over their control issues and thus feel they HAVE to set impossible deadlines or they aren't doing their jobs - in big companies this becomes an exercise in penis enlargement, I can schedule tighter deadlines than you. And so on.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
The article is talking about long-term memory, not just recall of something seen a few minutes or hours ago.
www.code-fix.com
Anyone see the irony in the medical field making these announcements about sleep and memory, while at the same time the people entering the medical field as interns an the like to learn are busy working 36 hour shifts and struggling for sleep?
Perhaps doctors would get better faster if they had time to sleep after the workday and establish what they learned in their memory? And at the same time reduce the number of people misdiagnosed and mistreated because the doctor hasn't had any sleep in the same time you've had two full nights' worth?
I'll make a bet with anyone that the field that made the discovery is the first to ignore it's implications...
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Let me get this straight though, basically what they're saying is that, "If you can't sleep, you will be wasted the next day". I hate to say this, but DUH.
Kris Felscher
Kris Felscher
We've got enough youth, how about a fountain of "smart"?
New guidelines must be set for how much IT workers can be forced to work without sleep. In the footsteps of pioneers of the 10-hour work day of the nineteenth century, we must today pioneer the 8-hour sleep day.
Uh, no thanks. However much I might wish to get more sleep (I only work 8hrs, but spend after-work time with my daughter, which leaves 9pm-> for me), I don't need anyone telling me how much sleep I *have* to get. That's my decision & my choice.
jred
www.cautioninc.com
caution, inc.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
FWIW, I have also found that reading stuff once or twice and then thinking about it a little before you go to sleep for the night tends to help with retaining material. At least, in my case, it worked much better than the times that I've stayed up and tried to pull an all-nighter in which you try to cram material into your head and attempt to remember it for that exam the next day...
;)
Of course, the real trick is being able to stay awake while reading whatever you're reading...
Reminds me of an actual funny line on SNL a few years back, during Weekend Update with Norm McD.
The news item was about an equally blindingly-obvious assertion that had been borne out by exhaustive research. "...if you're interested in the complete article, it's in this month's issue of the medical journal, 'Duh!'."
~Philly
Dang. If that wasn't a lame attempt at trolling I don't know what is.
:Caffiene does improve memory, if taken :during/before the event one is trying :to remember, IIRC. My college psychology teacher :conducted a study on a North Dakota campus that :helped to prove this effect. The teacher's name :was MacPherson, the campus was either UMD or :NDSU.
UMD *or* NDSU?
Should we assume that you were not one of the students who received the caffiene? :)
Does anybody else find it amusing that Ektanoor, on very little sleep, writes with the fractured syntax of an 8th grader while claiming he is completely unaffected?
It seems impossible to sleep with enough hours :(.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
~ The Irony is, The only reason I'm not at Berkeley right now is because I was on acid during my SAT's..
Sleep dep also makes it difficult to put long sentences together, whcih isn't very helpful when you have a hum paper do at 11 am, which i really should be working on.
--
The shareholder is always right.
What I see you doing is denying a result you don't like.
Remember, you don't run an experiment which changes multiple variables. Otherwise, tracking down the cause of a variance is nearly impossible without a huge sample size (sufficient to analyse on any one variable at a time). Looking at varying "time frames... working scenarios [and] rhythms" would have made drawing a conclusion nearly impossible. Each of these factors may be isolated later -- but the point of the study, that some kinds of learning don't occur without sleep shortly after the experience is gained, is most certainly made.
I don't know what you do. Maybe your job is so rote you can afford to not learn anything for 4 days out of five. I, on the other hand, cannot. And that's what this study was about.
(Huh? You thought it was just that you can't make up sleep? Maybe you should read the articles before you post!)
I did a research project on sleep deprivation (titled "The effects of sleep deprivation on academic performance", and no, I wasn't the test subject), so I know a bit about the field.
First of all, there are many different opinions, and little, if any, consensus about even basic things. Experts disagree about many things, and I've seen studies that completely contradicted the findings of this one.
Here are some highlights of my research
A study of surgical house staff and medical students found no effect of cumulative partial sleep deprivation on learning and long-term recall.
Browne, B. J., T. Van Susteren, D. R. Onsager, D. Simpson, B. Salaymeh, and R. E. Condon. "Influence of sleep deprivation on learning among surgical house staff and medical students." Surgery 115.5 (1994): 604-610).
A meta-analysis of 19 other studies found that partial sleep deprivation (less than 5 hours in a night) is actually worse than total sleep deprivation.
Pilcher, J. J., and A. I. Huffcutt. "Effects of sleep deprivation on performance: a meta-analysis." Sleep 19.4 (1996): 318-326.
There is a relationship between sleep quality and mood.
Pilcher, J. J., D. R. Ginter, and B. Sadowsky. "Sleep quality versus sleep quantity: relationships between sleep and measures of health, well-being and sleepiness in college students." Journal of Psychosomatic Research 42.6 (1997): 583-596.
The effects of sleep deprivation are cumulative, but can be reversed by two nights of "recovery" sleep (10 hours a night).
Dinges, D.F., F. Pack, K. Williams, K. A. Gillen, J. W. Powell, G. E. Ott, C. Aptowicz, and A. I. Pack. "Cumulative sleepiness, mood disturbance, and psychomotor vigilance performance decrements during a week of sleep restricted to 4-5 hours per night." Sleep 20.4 (April 1997): 267-277.
There, I've refuted the main claims of the new study, namely that sleep deprivation affects memory, that you can't make up for sleep deprivation by sleeping more on following days, and that a little sleep is better than none. Unlike most Slashdot posts, I've even included my sources.
Here's the lesson for the day, as master Yoda might say it:
One study does not a fact make.
Also, note that bit about partial sleep deprivation being worse than total sleep deprivation--that came from a meta-analysis of 19 studies, and was a very strong correlation. Perhaps pulling the occasional all-nighter is better than staying up a few hours late every night...
A Buddhist monk was asked why his master was considered wise. His reply : "When he wants to eat, he eats. When he wants to sleep, he sleeps."
By morning, I will probably have no idea I ever posted this.
and then you'll probably post it again.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I think being able to put a story on Slashdot's frontpage impairs memory as well....
I had a similiar experience that taught me to study from the right text book. Nothing like walking into a history exam knowing your chemistry.
I mean, this is sort of obvious. Ii'm sure that most people here have felt weird after staying up for six days straight on only jolt cola and penguin mints to integrate the damn win2k server with the samba/linux network architecture because your idiot boss cannot keep his mouth shut at the department meeting last month about how much his ability to work was 'impaired' by his not being connected directly to the server bank, because he thinks that talking to one of the 'big computers' will make his internet connection faster so he can browse pr0n faster...
Wait.. what was I talking about again?
For those of you interested, Nancy Kress wrote a novel called "Beggars in Spain" about genetically engineered people who don't ever need to sleep. They obviously have quite an advantage over regular humans, but they never dream.....
(Both Fatbrain and Amazon are not link-cooperative with it - it may be possible to get a direct link, but maybe it's 3:30 AM and I'm too tired to remember how - SORRY!)
I have not read it, but I did read the short story it's based upon, which won a Hugo/Nebula a couple years back. The short version ws a very good read, so the book is probably quite good too.
Democracy - my foot! :)
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting what to have for lunch!
HTH! HAND
--
anyone else amused that this story was posted at 2 in the morning?
I am.
Chuckling off to bed.
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I post links to stuff here
..lack of sex had the same effect as sleeplessness apparently does. I wonder if we could get a govt grant to study the varying effects of sleep/sex/caffeine/mexican food on short term memory loss.
Are YOU listed?
What about public schools? Here in the state a high school student enrolled in Calculus, Physics, English, Economics or Government, etc. all at one time will have more homework than possible with this sleep limit. Our classes are roughly 7 hours total a day, homework can total 6 hours easily. If you add in four hours a day for work, transportation, and just getting up and showering you fall below the 8 hours. Note high school students are supposed to get 8 minimum and 10 optimum. These are the numbers released officially in my district for the explanation of why I can't work more than 8 hours a day on a weekend.
"I regret that I have but one life to give for my country. I'd feel safer if I had two or three."
Basically, the brain has a number of systems which regulate the flow of electrical impulses..the brain is a massively parallel computer. And just as a computer starts to fail if the voltage dips below a certain threshold, the brain starts to malfunction if your neurotransmitter tone drops below a certain point.
One of the things which will do this is lack of REM sleep. Another thing that will do this is a lack of the proper precursors to generate those neurotransmitters, or a temporary or permanent deficiency in synthesizing them.
Another thing that will cause problems is a lack of "plasticity" or an inability of the brain's mambranes to properly pass neurotransmitters.
So what does this mean? It means you have to eat (or drink) some of the right things.. Nothing nasty, but you may need to spend some money on 'brain food'. Don't worry, I'm not trying to sell you anything, you will have to go to your own health food store..
You'll have to take my word on this, but I know that these approaches work.
Lets start with some basics.. Your brain is effected pretty dramatically by what you eat, and what time of the day you eat it at.
Your body is a supremely complex, self-regulating system, and evolution has made it very good at moderating the effects of rapid changes in your environment on the brain.. But it also uses some of these changes to help you go through the daily cycle.. This is a cycle that nourishes you, renews you (through sleep) and regulates your neurotransmitters.
Basically, its a good idea to eat a high-protein breakfast, and try to get exercise in the morning, and then to eat a high carbohydrate meal at night.
Some people also take 5-HTP, the direct precursor of serotonin, around an hour before going to bed..GABA and niacin can also help.
This will help you sleep. Try it, you will see what I mean. 5-HTP and these other vitamins are relatively cheap, and worth it if they will improve your sleep. (Of course, your mileage may vary..)
This process works this way because of the way your body metabolizes carbohydrates. Your body allows for more tryptophan to be turned into serotonin in your brain in the evening than it does at other times of the day. This makes you sleepy and eventually, lets you go to sleep. While you sleep, the serotonin is metabolized into melatonin, and later, towards the morning, into tryptamines.. When the tryptamines predominate over the melatonin, you dream, the cycle modulates back and forth, and new nerves are created wiring memories into your brain permanently. And eventually you wake up. The more you have these periods of deep sleep, and the more you dream, the more "rest" you will subjectively feel you have gotten.
For men, a good emprical measure of "rest" can be derived from beard growth, because beard growth occurs in periods of growth hormone release, which only occurs during periods of deep sleep. GH release is very good for you. It will extend your body's ability to deal with stressors.. among other things.. When GH release slows down, at around age 30 or so.. you start to die.. (it takes a while.. but that is true..But enough of THAT. *lol*)
When you wake up, your brain shifts into wake up mode.. This means producing alerting neurotransmitters, the catecholamines..One of them is dopamine..the alerting and rewarding neurotransmitter..
A way you can increase catecholamines, is by taking catecholamine precursors like tyrosine.. or getting them in a good protein-rich meal. Exercise will also prime the catecholamine pump in a big way..
Alertness will improve your memory. "Smart foods" like DMAE can also help. DMAE is a close precursor of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that high levels of, seem to fuel the process of imprinting memories.. DMAE occurs in high quantities in fish..it can also be bought in stores.. Pure DMAE is a bit like coffee, but it wont make you jittery. It definitely improves memory.
Another good supplement to take is fish oil. It takes a long time to take effect, but taking fish oil gradually imcreases the ability of the brain's membranes to pass neurotransmitters. So ultimately, taking 5 or 6 capsules of fish oil a day will improve your neurotransmitter tone across the board..a very good thing. Its interesting to note that clinical depression is almost unknown in Japan where they eat lots of fish.
Anyway, I hope I've been helpful.. Slashdot is a great site.. have fun !
Chris
neurotech@iname.com
Sleeplessness = Memory Loss
Caffiene = Memory Retention
therefore, Caffiene is anti-Sleep!
BTW, I wonder what wonderful power source we could get by making a Caffiene-Sleep Reactor!
The link between sleeplessness and memory loss has always been intuitively known for eons. We've also known for quite some time that sleeplessness takes a toll on the workforce. According to some reports, 51% of Americans report that sleeplessness interferes with their productivity. People are going to bed late and failing to get up early, and not surprisingly, (according to that same source) a third of the population wishes they could nap on the job (and surprisingly, 16% of employers "endorse naps on the job" -- I wish I had that sort of employer).
Unfortunately, the outlook isn't good for people who fail to get their eight or so hours of sleep per night. Sleeplessness increases stress and raises bloodpressure (which can increase heart attacks), can precipitate ulcers, and can even promote alzhe ime rs. Sadly, very techies and engineers who are designing the technology that will preserve more information in the next few years than has been recorded in the history of humanity won't "be around" to see it happen, as debilitating diseases rob them of the ability to perceive the world they have constructed. What begins with immediate memory loss will ultimately be cemented in their old age.
The solution is clear. OSHA already has standards in place to prev ent RSI injuries in the workplace. Federal laws already exist governing how often and for how long truck drivers must sleep before returning to the road. New guidelines must be set for how much IT workers can be forced to work without sleep. In the footsteps of pioneers of the 10-hour work day of the nineteenth century, we must today pioneer the 8-hour sleep day. The safety of our IT infrastructure and ultimately of our fellow workers demands it.
-- Anne Marie
.. why so many /. articles get reposted more than once? :)
I am so tired of this type of thinking. Doesn't anyone realize how much destruction and waste it has caused? Just because something is a good idea, doesn't mean it should be required by law! The purpose of government isn't to micro-manage its citizens lives.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I wrote a research paper waaaaaaaay back in highschool (circa 1990) about sleep and dreams.
All of the information in that article was readily available 10 years ago in textbooks that were printed 30 years ago.
I'd hardly call this news.
SirPoopsalot
You wake up at Seatac. You wake up at La Guardia. Gain an hour, lose an hour. This is your life, and it's ending one second at a time.
Did the researcher discover any subjects who sleepwalked, created/organized/led underground anarchist organizations, returned back to the study center and promptly forgot about it?
So ka, NOW we know how Tyler got so much work done.
-- If the blues don't kill you, brother, they'll make you a mighty, might man.
The Pjammer Chronicles --
that memory has to be refreshed.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather refresh memory by sleeping than by getting an electric current run to each of my cells a few million times per second.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
My brain hurts; I'm going to have a big cup of strong black coffee, that always helps...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
...why things are always posted twice on Slashdot!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
you would remember seeing crap like this written in the news th last 10 years .. .
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I think they want us all to sleep so they can start the perl script that will take over the world. AWAKE!
Read through all the material, turn off the light and sleep. In the morning look at the material and be suprised at the recall. I memorized 6 chapters of American history in 20 minutes for a final exam. It was not perfect, only got a 97% on the exam.
I must need sleep, I can't remember which president won the election....Bush? Dukakis?
Fight Spammers!
The worst is when you are coding all night and you take a couple hour nap and then try figuring out where you left off...It's so much harder
If I started getting the recommended amount of sleep each night, all of my networks would go down. Sleep is for the weak. So are memories!
sleepiness impaires memory??
right.... and the next thing you know they're gonna say that drunkedness impairs my processor.
=)