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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)
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!
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?
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.
For lack of sex, sleep, caffeine and Mexican food? No thanks, I'll join the control group instead...
Cheers,
-j.
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.
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).
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...
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?
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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
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 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
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...
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
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...
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
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 things are always posted twice on Slashdot!
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
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?
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