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Research Suggests Pulling All-Nighters Can Cause Permanent Damage

Posted by samzenpus on from the we-can-sleep-when-we're-dead dept.

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.'"

20 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Oh... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...Shit.

    1. Re:Oh... by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yeah, also: oh, bullshit.

      If this were true I wouldn't even have a brain left.

      I bet there are so many caveats here that the truth of this is almost certain to be lost in the noise. People differ so much, I tend to take it with a very large dose of salt when someone tells me such and such consequences are inevitable. People smoke their entire lives, no cancer. Others, bang, almost right away. Some people have immense physical stamina. Some enjoy the night. Some like the day. Some think kids are the most wonderful thing in the world, others think they're the purest form of annoyance. Some people live for sex, others don't care.

      And then there's the stats angle... Headline: "your chances are TWICE the nomal fella if you (fill in the blank)", when it turns out that the chances for the normal fella are one in ten thousand, and yours are now a whopping 1 in 5000. Yawn.

      Nah, not buying it. Think I'll skip sleeping tonight and play with my radios. :) 80 meters is open all night, and it's pretty quiet (in the atmospheric noise sense) now!

      You know what probably REALLY gives you brain damage? Superstition.

      --
      I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    2. Re:Oh... by milkmage · · Score: 5, Informative

      did you actually RTFA?

      LONG TERM sleep deprivation. As in your lifestyle - swing shifters, etc. Not the occasional amphetamine binge, or caffeine fueled cram/D&D/gaming session.

      never mind the actual experiment they conducted where they found neurons destroyed in the brains of mice that were kept on a wonky sleep schedule.

      our bodies are TUNED to be active during the day, sleep at night.

      probably contributes to jetlag.. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... "Although circadian rhythms are endogenous ("built-in", self-sustained), they are adjusted (entrained) to the local environment by external cues called zeitgebers, commonly the most important of which is daylight."

    3. Re:Oh... by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Funny

      You know what probably REALLY gives you brain damage? Superstition.

      Fortunately a lucky rabbit's foot gives 100% protection against this effect.

    4. Re:Oh... by asylumx · · Score: 3, Informative

      The article isn't about whether you sleep at night or not, it's about whether you skip sleep regularly.

  2. sounds implausible to me by stenvar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:sounds implausible to me by pipedwho · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      I doubt a single all-nighter is going to cause a measurable change to your long term brain function. However, anything that takes a small toll, may become measurable in aggregate after a given number of occurrences.

      Regarding human evolution; people generally sleep when it is dark. And with no unnatural sources of light, historically sleep deprivation would not have been anywhere near as common as it has become in modern society.

    2. Re:sounds implausible to me by artor3 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Being eaten by tigers was also common and natural. Natural is not a synonym for healthy.

      This study is a long way from proving anything, but I suspect a lot of people will just dismiss it entirely because they don't want to believe it.

    3. Re:sounds implausible to me by khellendros1984 · · Score: 3, Informative

      About all that could be really said is that any damage from sleep deprivation didn't tend to kill our ancestors before they bred.

      --
      It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
    4. Re:sounds implausible to me by Concerned+Onlooker · · Score: 5, Funny

      "Natural is not a synonym for healthy."

      Unless, of course, you are the tiger.

      --
      http://www.rootstrikers.org/
    5. Re:sounds implausible to me by infolation · · Score: 5, Funny

      Anyone who's had children knows that sleep deprivation, and all-nighters, are routine during the first two years.

      Although, arguably, bringing up kids involves a certain amount of inherent brain damage anyway.

    6. Re:sounds implausible to me by squiggleslash · · Score: 3, Interesting

      And it's implausible that people being eaten by tigers cause death, right?

      There's nothing wrong with the GP's analogy. Sleep deprivation may have been common, but it's not like every human being suffered from it. As a result, like numerous other natural factors, from the plague, the numerous historical waves of lead poisoning (ancient rome, 19th Century plumbing, 20th century car exhausts) to "being eaten by tigers", the mere fact we've survived it doesn't mean that it's harmless.

      But yes, it's (probably) exerted some minor evolutionary pressure, though not the pressure you appear to think (and you're claiming the GP is "biologically illiterate"?)

      This is about minor but very real brain damage. If our bodies have not found a way to adapt to childhood lead poisoning, which has a much greater affect on the brain, then it's pretty safe to assume that human beings have survived in spite of this, not finding some way to make our bodies stronger. A more plausible solution to how we've survived as a species despite numerous natural attacks on our ability to think clearly is that we've evolved, or always were able, to deal with a certain amount of poor thinking, to route around brain damage rather than fix it.

      Is a slightly impaired brain going to prevent the person whose brain it is reproducing? Some would argue the opposite. Will it prevent that person from living? No, because they still function enough to perform the basic tasks required in any society to live, and because the social constructs we've evolved to want and demand provide a minimum level of support for every person. Will it make it harder for that person to bring up their offspring? No, again because they'll still function enough to perform the basic tasks required in any society to live, and because of the aforementioned social constructs.

      The tigers, if anything, are more likely to have had a significant evolutionary effect, in that nobody survives being eaten by one, and so it would stand to reason that we've developed more traits related to avoiding being eaten by tigers than about repairing or preventing brain damage.

      --
      You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
  3. Well that's lovely by jonnythan · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... as I read this at 1 AM when I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow. Heh. "Tomorrow."

  4. Dec 2013 Research by mynamestolen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. No shit ! by Taco+Cowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
    1. Re:No shit ! by gargleblast · · Score: 4, Interesting

      with my "dream self" doing the "virtual debugging"

      Then there are the nights you do real debugging.

      I modified an overnight cron job that downloaded sales from and uploaded prices to shops. Woke up at 2AM thinking "that program will not work". Logged in remotely and looked over a plethora of failing jobs. Stopped them, edited the program, set it running again, watched it run for a while and then went back to bed. What had I remembered? Not putting a double-semicolon on a new entry in a case-esac statement.

  6. In mice by EvilSS · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. This is true by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. Ah! Dream Coding... by camperdave · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  9. The older I get the more it kills me by swb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.