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Research Suggests Pulling All-Nighters Can Cause Permanent Damage
First time accepted submitter nani popoki writes "Skipping a good night's sleep can cause brain damage according to a new study. From the article: 'Are you a truck driver or shift worker planning to catch up on some sleep this weekend?
Cramming in extra hours of shut-eye may not make up for those lost pulling all-nighters, new research indicates.
The damage may already be done — brain damage, that is, said neuroscientist Sigrid Veasey from the University of Pennsylvania.
The widely held idea that you can pay back a sizeable "sleep debt" with long naps later on seems to be a myth, she said in a study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Long-term sleep deprivation saps the brain of power even after days of recovery sleep, Veasey said. And that could be a sign of lasting brain injury.'"
...Shit.
Sleep deprivation has been a natural and common occurrence throughout human evolution. It seems highly implausible that "an all-nighter" would cause permanent brain damage in any meaningful sense.
... as I read this at 1 AM when I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow. Heh. "Tomorrow."
Dec2103 Cut and Paste from internet (I didn't record where): Sleep deprivation has long been established as a helpful tool for the treatment of patients suffering from depression. However, how and why it works are still unknown. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have indicated that large-scale brain network connectivity, especially in the so-called default mode network, seems to be changed in depression. Bosch et al. investigated whether sleep deprivation could influence this brain connectivity. They discovered that sleep deprivation decreased functional connectivity between a brain area called the posterior cingulate cortex and the bilateral anterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, connectivity between the dorsal nexus, a region that plays a crucial role in the pathophysiology of depression, and two areas within the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was increased. These sleep deprivation–induced changes in resting-state connectivity indicate a shift in dominance from a more affective to a more cognitive network. This shift toward improved cognitive control should be particularly beneficial in depressed patients who suffer from rumination, negative anticipation, and excessive feelings of guilt and shame.
work in progress
i hav ben workin ovr nights fer many years an it hasnt fected my inteligents one bit
More like Seroquel
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Not all of us like to pull all-nighters.
For some of us, our brains refuse to stop going overdrive until our mission / project is over.
Since my college days, whenever I am in a mission for something, my brain kicks up to the overdrive, and even if I sleep, it still keep churning and churning, resulting in me having really lousy sleeps, with imageries of what I was doing, what I am going to do, what I ought be doing (some times they are " hints " from the sub-conscious) kept on flashing up in my dreams.
For example: I may be in the middle of a very difficult and confusing debugging job.
After non-stop eyeballing the codes, countless re-and re-re-running of the resulting compilations, I get tired and hit the sack.
But in my dreams, images of the screens popping up, with texts (source code) scrolling up and down and sideways, with my "dream self" doing the "virtual debugging" inside my dreams.
It's a goddamn fucking torture, man.
That is why sometimes I rather pull an all-nighters to get the job done, rather than having those un-ending-loop of imagery invading my sleep.
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Research Suggests Pulling All-Nighters Can Cause Permanent Damage in mice. The study was done on mice, not people. While it's an interesting first step, it is not in anyway conclusive that the results also apply to humans.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
It never said that the brain damage it gives you is as dramatic as you're making it out to be. It is actually miniscule damage. But that minuscule damage could cause very minor memory loss, such as forgetting one thing in a test or forgetting something on your shopping list.
I remember dreaming at a keyboard, and when I snapped awake, I had found that I had typed words from my dream into my code. I decided that it was time to go home at that point.
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If a population had a few night owls that stood guard all night, there is no reason why those 'owls' couldn't have slept in the back of the cave during the day.
Also, sleep deprivation may be less of an issue for those genetically inclined to need less sleep. Lack of sleep may take its toll in a different way than purely lowering the IQ of those participants. And clearly, for some, there may be no obvious issues at all. A slightly reduced life expectancy may be testable, but if something unrelated kills you first, you'll never know.
I know some folks who like smoking so much that they dismiss any information that says it's bad for you because they don't want to believe it. Then again, some folks smoke until their 90s, never get emphysema, and eventually die of old age (knew one of them).
I also know some folks who appear to be addicted to all-nighters (like a runner's high, they apparently get some sort of high from staying up too long)... Then again, most of them smoke too, so maybe there's some sort of correlation.
Me, I'm not taking any chances on smoking or any unnecessary all-nighters. Sadly, unlike cigarettes, sometimes all-nighters are necessary (but not many).
> anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable
> in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.
I think that's overly vague. Us animals have very resilient bodies. Our muscles get damaged during exercise but years of hard exercise doesn't wear our muscles away.
The article itself (or at least the blurb) is sensationalist in its use of "brain damage".
If I never did any all nighters, ok, maybe I would have avoided some "measurable" but insignificantly small amount of damage, but I would have failed some important exams and missed some project deadlines.
Similarly, I won't be giving up drink just because some study says it's not good for the brain.
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Staying up all night drinking? If in hindsight it still seems smart, you may have brain damage...
Tell me about it. By pulling a beer binge 1-2 times a week I got a nasty brain fog and couldn't think clearly during challenging tasks anymore (programming, schoolwork, etc). Also alcohol wrecks the quality of sleep, making the problem worse. Finally been able to curb that stupid addiction.
but damn, was it fun? I'm asking.
Yeah, there's always many sides to these things. It's really whether you ask from a doctor or a philosopher. Drinking can indeed be fun and relaxing too. And the truck driver gets his income by pulling the crazy all-nighters.
I hope everyone could gain as clear mind as possible.
What?
The older I get (I'm 47), the more staying up late affects me. And by staying up late, I mean anything past about 11:30. Staying up after midnight literally makes me feel ill the next day -- my joints ache and I generally feel unwell.
When I was in my 20s I had to make myself go to bed -- listening to the BBC at midnight was my usual routine, and getting up at 6-630 was no problem.
I dunno, Mr Researcher Man, isn't it your job to SHOW that it's a sign of brain damage?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Well yeah. The night owl was up on guard duty while Gronk The Mammoth-Chaser was doing his lumber mill impression in the back of the cave, and Gronk's wife, kept up by the snoring, wanted "someone to talk to."
Sounds like you are another one of the vast majority of folks who simply lack self awareness or perception. Try paying attention, for a change.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
It's no surprise that cutting down on sleep has negative effects. The short term effects have been evaluated experimentally - people without sleep are less capable of resisting junk food, irritable and less alert.
The strange thing is that there's *never* been an attempt to characterize the advantages. I saw some notes in the posts above about experimenting with radios, listening to the BBC, etc. which are things that probably hone your mental abilities. If you pull all nighters studying to get into a good school and succeed, then you spend the next 4 years interacting with smart people and good professors.
A couple of times a year, I stay up all through the night and go to work the next day. I find that it's not too disruptive, and that I get a bit more contemplative during the second day. It's not something I do on any kind of regular or planned basis -- it just sort of happens ... I can't sleep, so I read a book or futz around on the computer or mess with musical instruments and before I know it, dawn comes and it's time to go back to work. It's almost like one really long workday, with a really long lunch break (overnight) in the middle of it. I have to wonder what nurses and doctors (who sometimes have to work very long shifts) think about this.
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Posted by samzenpus on Thursday March 20, 2014 @12:32AM
Have gnu, will travel.
from "may" and "could" to "can."
I wouldn't go as far as that, but considering that sleep is garbage collection, that a lot of living creatures risk their life every time they go "offline" to perform it, and that it's the only occasion for nerds to have satisfying interaction with the other sex (in their dreams, that is), I am sure treating sleep with RESPECT.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
The discovery that long-term sleep loss can result in a loss of brain cells is a first, Veasey said. "No one really thought that the brain could be irreversibly injured from sleep loss," she said. That has now changed.
I thought cells were constantly being reproduced in the human body. If so, I'm not so sure what so "irreversible" about the damage.
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It's about strange sleep patterns.
It's not about "All nighters".
The article says:
Veasey and her colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania medical school wanted to find out, so, they put laboratory mice on a wonky sleep schedule that mirrors that of shift workers.
They let them snooze, then woke them up for short periods and for long ones.
Then the scientists looked at their brains -- more specifically, at a bundle of nerve cells they say is associated with alertness and cognitive function, the locus coeruleus.
They found damage and lots of it.
...
This is how the scientists think it happened.
When the mice lost a little sleep, nerve cells reacted by making more of a protein, called sirtuin type 3, to energize and protect them.
But when losing sleep became a habit, that reaction shut down. After just a few days of "shift work" sleep, the cells start dying off at an accelerated pace.
Yes, it's mice, not people. And yes, it says that once doesn't cause harm. It's after days of this that the protection mechanism shuts down.