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Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity

Posted by Hemos on Fri Feb 11, 2000 06:49 PM
from the this-explains-my-college-years dept.
Science
SL33Z3 writes "Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have found increased brain activity in areas of the brain that otherwise stay inactive. The longer the students went without sleep, the more activity was found. Research found students to have better recollection after long periods of sleep deprivation. Check out the release here. " Heck, combine this with the news about caffeine and I'm all set!
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[+] One in Ten Americans Are Chronically Sleep Deprived 329 comments
WirePosted writes "A CDC research study released this past week indicates that the physical and mental health of many Americans is being adversely affected by a lack of sleep. According to the study, a part of the organization's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, one in ten US citizens are consistently failing to get enough sleep every night. Almost 40% of the people surveyed didn't get enough sleep for more than a week every month. The article notes that this trend can have far-ranging implications for health beyond simple fatigue."
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  • How about too much sleep? From personal experience, if I sleep more than 7 hours, I'll feel lazy the day after. I find a good night of sleep is around 6 hours, if that's what I get, I'll be in great shape for coding.

    Although I get an average of 5 hours.. but hey, combine that with coffee and you've got maximisation of time and efficiency :)
  • Where did you read that? It is totally incorrect - acethylcholine is a neurotransmiter, like serotonin and dopamine, for instance, and it is the one responsible for muscle contraction (and regulation of heart rate). It doesn't come in food, it is syntesized at the synaptic terminal from choline and acethyl coenzime A.

    And about cells dying and others taking place - that's also not true. Neurons have several axons forming synapses, and if one dies, the axons go with it - if one were to take it's place, it would have lost all the connections of the previous one. And since learning, memory, our personality, etc, is all due to the way the various axons are arranged, after some time we'd have these parameters altered: different personality, loss of memory, etc, and that does NOT happen.
    Sure, brain cells die, but with aging, and they are not replaced with new ones.

    -- Electron
  • Yeah, but you think you're doing a great job too, when in fact you're probably not doing as well as you thought.

    But yeah, that would scare the hell out of me. Four days on and three days off? Geez, how long can someone's body take punishment like that?
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • Sleep deprivation also causes hallucinations.

    Severe sleep deprivation resembles an acid trip.

    More brain activity is not always a good thing, unless you like having your neurons cross-linked.
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • 60 hours of no sleep, 6 hours of sleep, and another 60 hours of no sleep...

    I was trying to stay awake for the whole week, and failed. But I had a lot of fun, anyhow...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].

  • The extra activity is hallucinations..

    Ask any Crack/Meth/Coke-head.

  • *Mild* sleep deprivation seems to enhance creativity -- but there's a falloff rate there...

    You know that if you stay up past the point that you "get sleepy" that eventually the sleepiness wears off, and you get what is commonly referred to as a "second wind". This process seems to continue (at least for me) in a cycle (get sleepy, get nth wind, get sleepy, get n+1th wind, etc...) where the lengths of time between periods of sleepiness (aka: the "winds") get shorter, and the periods of sleepiness get longer.

    Now, I've noticed that at some point, (generally halfway through either the 2nd or 3rd wind) I seem to be a heck of a lot more creative. I also get a heck of a lot more work done.

    But, it gets increasingly hard to concentrate on a single task - my mind tends to wander a lot as the condition wears on.

    Coffee (and I'm assuming other stimulants as well) seems to have a lengthening effect on the "winds", but when it wears off, the "winds" shorten dramatically. (sort of like what we're all expecting to happen to Dick Clark - at some point he's going to age 60-100 years in a matter of minutes...I hope he's on camera...)

    This is just personal observation, of course, and has absolutely no medical founding (IANAD)

    (Sort of like the observastion that while I don't tend to eat red meat much, I crave it when I'm injured - almost like I'm looking for raw materials to rebuild the broken parts...)

    And yes, I'm aware that this post tends to ramble a bit...I'm on my 4th wind and ready for bed ;)

  • I'm currently taking a class called "the Neurobiology of Sleep and Dreaming" so I know a bit about the subject at hand.

    First of all, there are parts of your brain that have increased activity during sleep, especially in the brainstem (note that most researchers sperate sleep into slow wave and REM, since REM is really strange, but this statement applies to all sleep).

    Second of all, past sleep dep studies have shown that the main symptom of sleep dep is. . . feeling sleepy. Yes, cognitive functions are impared, but significantly less so than expected (it is suspected that most of those effects are due to attention problems rather than actual cortical processing issues).

    Third, the need for sleep decreases as you age, although I can't point to any studies on sleep dep. in the elderly (it is known, however, that significant sleep dep. in the elderly mimics Alzheimer's in that it causes misdiagnoses).

    Fourth, I suspect the 17 days rat sleep dep. death figure is due to use of the water tank method of sleep dep., where a rat is placed on a very small platform in a tank of water, such that it falls in the water if it falls asleep. This is highly stressful in addition to depriving sleep. An experiment where the bottom of a cage was rotated (the walls stayed still, so the rat was bumped by the walls which woke it up and it had to walk some before it stopped) when EEG signals indicated sleep for the experimental rat (a control rat was also in the cage but was allowed to sleep; I did not suffer ill effects) showed that it took 30 days for the rat to die. That's something of a nitpick, but implies that stress might also be deadly.

    Finally, to counter the story of the DJ, let me tell you the story of the 17 year old kid who stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days) in an attempt to break the world record (dunno if he succeeded) in 1965. By the last day he was really sleepy but could still perform tasks (the kind that scientists give people, I don't know specifics). Afterwards he slept for 14 hours 40 minutes straight, then was fully recovered with no aftereffects. Also, Kales in 1970 performed an experiment where 4 subjects were kept awake for 205 hours. They suffered eyelid tremors and decreased performance (which was suspected to be due to lack of motivation) and had a big REM rebound (lots more of their sleep was in REM than normal) for 4 days, then also fully recovered.

    A good book on the subject is "Sleep" by J. Allen Hobson (an expert on the subject who works at Harvard).

    Brynn, who suspects that the DJ in question already had some stability issues
  • I think I'll stick to taking lots of Ginseng and Niacin, and coffee if I want increased brain activity.
  • So now I know why I always produce better code at 3 AM after drinking two liters of cherry coke...
  • So why not have glucose or other IV feeds directly into our brains?
  • It is well known that Lenin's Tcheka did systematize the use of sleep deprivation as a torture technique (among other ones) in its prisons, so as to have prisoners admit their crimes against the state. The technique has been used in all totalitarian regimes ever since. One advantage is that it doesn't leave obvious marks on the body of prisoners, when they have to be shown to the public during their "trial".

    -- Faré @ TUNES [tunes.org].org

  • XFS might be pretty cool. I could really use the GRIO (Guaranteed Rate I/O) whenever I trying to explain things to people. No more stuttering while I'm trying to remember what I wanted to say. ;-)

    --Joe
    --

  • Do you suppose we can get Stephen Tweedie to port ext3 to neurons once he's done?

    --Joe "Journal Neuron Not Found" Z.
    --
  • Without the aide of chemicals? Three working days...finally crashed out after coming home from work the third day.. It was odd, I'd start to grow very tired during the day, and then every few hours a wind would kick in.. I also had quite a bit of stress at the time, and was working with a new job, so that may have contributed to it..(and no, I dont recommend staying up several days in a row during your second week of work at the office..:]..)



    Driph
    "Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it.
  • In the days of Stalin, sleep deprivation was used as a method of torture to get information out of people. This is a lot more effective than physical torture, since a person who is deprived of sleep doesn't think nearly the same as (s)he does after getting some sleep.

    --

  • It's long been known, at least in the group of programmers that I associate with, that the best coding is done at the 2AM time. I've read tons of different studies throughout the years, one even in Popular Science, claiming that there is a reason for this. Basically, your instinctual skills kick in and you rely more on that than your "reasoned" judgement. Also, your brain activity is significantly higher (blood flow, brain waves, etc) at these times.

    Why? Traditionally, it is attributed to our carnivorous nature (anyone who claims humans are vegetarians has clearly not researched this well enough, only even in the last few thousand years have humans become omnivorous). Humans still contain the basic animal instinct to hunt. Hunting was best done at night obviously for the surprise effect (which unfortunately works both ways!), and hence a few hundred thousand years of evolution later and we are better coders at night.

    Of course, sleep deprivation is counterproductive, what I mentioned rather refers to working late. When I'm working on big projects I tend to get into the habit of working late and sleeping late. I can't count the number of times that working through being exhausted has resulted in bad code, regardless of time. If I'm tired at noon, I write crap at noon. I think the true mark of a coder is to dynamically alter your sleep cycles between "human" mode where you sleep at night and week up in the morning, and "machine" mode where you sleep in the morning and wake up in the afternoon.

    I think the survey was taking a more narrow slice of this, not quite what the submitter had in mind. Still interesting and provacative though. Remember, if its ambiguity raises too many eyebrows, a clarification will probably follow.
  • Yeah I like it when you can talk with the dead people after not sleeping a week. That and tlaking to your feet, those cut ups...

    Is this a good idea to tell people:

    (define direct_relationship(sleep, brian_activity))

    proc less_sleep
    begin
    inc brian_activity
    end

    oh god I need a little more sleep...

    for(i=10;i100;i+=10)sleep(i);

    when:: little_sleep(me) :- well_screw(me)

    segmentation fault... woof woof

  • Well, at least we know the MPAA isn't losing any sleep...

  • Its not easy getting a fully packaged/ready to go neurotransmitter into the brain just by swallowing a pill. The blood-brain barrier keeps most stuff like that out. You can't give them a dopamine pill easily. You can try L-dopa, building blocks though.
  • The "blurb" is very misleading. Sleep depravation is not a good thing as it suggests.

    "Subjects had fewer correct answers and omitted more responses when sleepy than when rested."

  • that if you stay up long enough, your brain will just explode from all that activity? (it would if this were a Hollywood movie, I bet.)

    What a mess.

    (on the serious side, do we really know what sleep is for, anyhow? Perhaps this is similar to a hard drive thrashing when the filesystem has gotten too fragmented. More overhead required to the do same thing...)
  • sleep deprivation, in extreme cases, can cause hallucinations, even long after you have slept again. It is also possible that it can change your personality. Such as one radio DJ who stayed awake for 16 (i think) days. He began hallucinating, even after he had begun sleeping again. His wife said he had "changed" he had become more withdrawn. They were divorced about 3 months later.
    I'd say sleep is a dangerous drug

    -Serfer
  • I seem to have problems sleeping often - I just can't fall asleep. My body tends to want to stick to a 30 hr waking day, and a 14 hour sleep. I routinely skip sleeping one night, every other night for weeks on end. If I can't fall asleep After 2 nights I give up and start taking sleeping medication. Your brain really can't function properly after a lot of sleep deprevation because it starts to change your thought process which is what the article was getting at. It should not be taken as an incentive to try to stay awake all the time.

    "I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

  • Well, maybe LSD doesn't have many side effects, and maybe it does, but it has at least a few, including flashbacks.
  • Does anyone know if it has any side effects like acid, or if it's once-off?

  • In extreme cases, brain cells can even be killed by overexcitation, although personally I'm only aware of drug models for this phenomenon.

    Oxygen deprivation effects are partially due to excitotoxic effects. The malfunctioning (due to oxygen deprivation) neurons dump NMDA which causes neighboring neurons to self destrict. That's why there was interest in NMDA antagonists. That is anso a partial explaination for barbituate coma reducing brain damage due to hypoxia (if the barbituates don't kill you, of course).

  • It's also well known that sleep deprivation decreases life expectancy. Remember the DJ in 1959 who spent 200 hours on the air without any sleep. Then they found he was permanently brain damaged. He had increased brain activity all right but he was a vegetable. Ever since then when a radio station wanted to pull a stunt like that they had the DJ taking intermittant naps.


  • I have many episode of sleep deprivations before, and I took acid many times in my younger days too.

    What I can is that those two things are NOT the same.

  • Ha, it only goes to show that brains and muscles have a lot in comon.

    Muscles fire (contract) individual fibers to provide the needed amount of force. A fiber either fires, or it does not. After a fiber fires, it needs to rest and heal.

    Sore muscles result from many fibers needing rest and healing. Muscle fatigue comes from many fibers having fired, and few being left available to keep the work going.

    The speed with which muscle fibers recover is proportional to their level of conditioning. So an athletic person is ready to go again sooner that a sofa-spud.

    What does this have to do with brains?

    A conditioned brain is able to recover from effort more quickly, while a stagnant one needs a long weekend.

    A brain that has used up it's 'normal' operating capacity (analog to 'conditioned' fibers) will start to recruit typically unused areas to keep the work going. Sleep deprivation is a way of keeping the normally used areas from getting adequare recoup time, thereby forcing the 'lazy' areas to take up some slack.

    Sleep deprivation cycles, along with an inter-disciplinary training regiment (variance in modes of thought, analytical, creative, perceptive, linguistic, mathematical...) is for the brain exactly like cross-training is for the body.

    And it sounds suspiciously like going to college. :)


  • I've always wondered exactly what purpose it is that sleep serves. It is obviously not just for resting our organs and muscles - I see no reason for the impossibility of creatures whose bodies need no sleep.

    It is obviously a necessity for the brain. Perhaps for consciousness to occur, there have to be periods of unconsciousness for some kind of routine "maintenance" that the brain's neural network performs on itself, somehow tied in with dreams.

    I have absolutely no background on this - the above is just my random musings as I started learning about neural nets and AI. I was hoping to start a discussion or catch the eye of someone who has studied this extensively. What is the current state of human knowledge about sleep? Is it still mostly a mystery?

    --
    grappler
  • Energy. That's why we sleep. [wfsrs.org] (NPR story here [npr.org])

    A few years ago someone wondered: "Why are there no higher animals which do not sleep?" It clearly would be of great evolutionary advantage to not have to sleep. So there must be some very basic reason.

    Answer: Brains use more energy than blood can deliver. The purpose of sleep is to recharge energy.

    Mixed with neurons are glial cells, which store glucose during sleep. They then supply glucose to neighboring neurons while the brain is awake, supplementing glucose from the bloodstream.

    When the energy is exhausted, neurons stop working properly. That's why there are hallucinations (particularly in pattern-matching neurons such as peripheral vision). It's probably also why the brain secretes chemicals which increase blood flow -- it's trying to get more glucose to keep functioning during whatever crisis is keeping it awake.

    So, why might areas which are normally quiet showing more active in this study? Maybe because the blood flow has been increased in the exhausted areas, and also the neighboring cells which were least-used are now trying to activate because their exhausted neighbors can't work?

    This paper does not seem to be on the net, so see Google search [google.com] of related comments.

  • As trauma victims lose recent memories upon sleep and some brain structures are devoted to REM, long-term memory storage, obviously there are some maintenance functions making use of sleep time. But those have been added to sleep during evolutionary changes to our brains.

    Even very primitive animals sleep, although they don't have the need for as much maintenance. Apparentlyt we're all suffering from the same energy delivery deficit.

  • it only takes about three days to start hallucinating. Things get real strange, it definitely warps things immensely. Great for brainwashing.

  • Of course you're right... I mean come on, anybody who has been sleep-deprived for a substantial period of time can testify that there is no worse feeling.

    True story: I've been through officer training for a certain Army (er... figure it out). As trainees we were sleep-deprived for 4 weeks: an average 5 hrs of sleep a day, with an occasional Sunday 6 or 7 --this while exercising 4-5 hours a day, doing chores, being on duty, etc. etc, for the remainder of the day... During Week 3 I was sitting in a nice, cozy, warm room taking notes for some class. At that point, I was halucinating at night or early in the morning pretty regulary (in fact this was a common experience among my class-mates). But that day, while I was taking notes, I fell asleep. Writing. Notes. I was woken up --by my trainer no less-- and found out that I had written down my dream/halucination/what have you. Not much, a dozen words or so and then a squiggly line trailing off...

    I should have kept that notebook. But I have never been more scared for my own well being before or since.

    Yeah, you go and try out the poster's theory...


    engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
  • when i program perl late at night i write tons of it nice and fast, and it works, but then the next day i notice tiny problems that i couldnt see when writing it, and even going over it... and yeah there are some algorthms i try to think up for doing certain things and i just get stumped ....wonder if like sleeping every other 15 mins would combine both fast simple code and complex problem solving and create a super human programmer? =)

    #----------------------------
    $mrp=~s/mrp/elite god/g;
  • i still live at home =)

    (selling software doesnt make me enough money yet heh)

    #----------------------------
    $mrp=~s/mrp/elite god/g;
  • It would be interesting to know the ages of the subjects. Did the youngest people do better while sleep-deprived?

    Also, how did the study compensate for time of day? Many teens do not function well until late evening, and some researchers would be mislead to believe that it was sleep-deprivation causing the increased performance, not simple circadian rhythms.

    In addition, I would expect people at all ages to have a small performance boost around morning -- when they would normally be getting up. This would be the body "thinking", "Crud, I guess I'm not getting any sleep tonight, might as well try to last until tomorrow evening".

    --

  • but when im up over 24 hours and i start to write code it comes out one line right after another, and usually has less bugs

    I've noticed that I can churn out code efficiently while tired, but I have more trouble searching for bugs and trying to solve complex algorithmic problems [usaco.org]. Is the same true for you?

    I think our brains are designed to do repetitive tasks efficiently while tired, but are better at complex problem-solving while awake and relaxed.

    --

  • Contrary to popular belief, your brain is constantly regenerating brain cells. Brain cells do not live forever, they die and are reborn like every other cell in the body.

    There is a catch, however, and its the reason scientists once thot no brain cells could ever be regenerated... they need acetylcholene. Acetylcholene isn't usually found anywhere in your body except one place - the protective "lining" of brain cells. So when it goes to regenerate one, it rips an old one apart and builds the new cell inside, so it seems like no progress is being made. There is one food that contains acetylcholine, though. Fish! It really IS brain food! (I'm not joking, BTW) You can buy choline tablets too at health food stores. Lots of people call it a "smart drug" but it doesn't increase intelligence, it simply stops the brain from autocannibalizing cells when regenerating. Nootropics (smart drugs) is an interesting field. Most are just like caffeine spinoffs (keep you more alert) and a lot are just lies in a bottle, but there seems to be a lot of study done on acetylcholene.

    Esperandi
  • The ability of the brain to function following Slashdot deprivation appears to vary with the task at hand, and in some cases the brain attempts to compensate for the adverse effects caused by lack of Slashdot, according to a study published in the Feb. 10 issue of Flamebait.

    A team of researchers from the UCSD School of Medicine and the Zelot Affairs Healthcare System, San Diego used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to monitor activity in the brains of Slashdot-deprived subjects performing simple verbal learning tasks.

    They were somewhat surprised to learn that regions of the brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC) displayed more activity in direct correlation with the subject's sense of Slashdotness; the Slashdotier the subject, the more active the PFC.

    Furthermore, the temporal lobe, a brain region involved in language processing, was activated during flaming previous posts in troll subjects but not in Slashdot deprived subjects. Additionally, a region of the brain called the parietal lobes, not activated in troll subjects during the posting exercise, was more active when the subjects were deprived of Slashdot. The parietal region normally performs somewhat different functions in the learning process than the temporal region. Although subjects' memory performance was less efficient with Slashdot deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory.

    "Only in recent years have we begun to realize the prevalence and severity of Slashdot deprivation in our population, with a significant number of people doing first posts work, suffering from karma lag and so forth," said J. Natalie Portman, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the UCSD and the San Diego VAMC, and an author of the Flamebait paper. "Yet, we don't know very much about how Slashdot deprivation impairs sexual performance, and how precisely the brain reacts to lack of Slashdot. These findings are just a beginning, and as we learn more, perhaps will be able to devise interventions to alleviate the behavioral impairments associated with lack of Slashdot."

  • I more or less said that the brain works harder, not nessasarily better, or at least better for any sustained period of time. I would have to think it would be really bad long term, not just for your brain but your health would have to suffer. What good would a +2(Insightful) brainbonus due you if you were laid up sick all the time.
  • Although the depravation maked the brain work harder, pulling in other resources from other parts of the brain, the overall effect is actually quite dammaging. Not my field at all, however there was a pretty in depth article I read a couple of weeks ago that basically said there was a direct corelation between lack of sleep for extended periods, like 48 hours, and unrecoverable dammage to the brain overall.

    Me I take the safe route, I view non-sleep time as that annoying period between naps, and limit all non-sleep time as much as possible.

  • This is pretty accurate. That guy from the 50's ended up dying about a year later, can't remember if he did the deed himself but I do recall that he went off the deep end, not like shooting up a mall but divorced or left his wife, forgot the names of his kids etc., A full blown personality change.

    And if that's not really revelant, the folks from NYC would gain insight into how to finally kick the rat problem.

  • Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is a very real disorder.

    PH34R!

  • hell yeah (Score:3)

    by MrP- (45616) <rob.elitemrp@net> on Friday February 11 2000, @04:08PM (#1283516) Homepage
    i always had a feeling that this was true, i program my best after i dont sleep for a while.... like if i am up for 4 hours and i start to program, im slow and i always get stuck one what to do next, but when im up over 24 hours and i start to write code it comes out one line right after another, and usually has less bugs... this also happened when i went to school, id do work right after and it would be a pain, but if i did it right before i went to bed it was fast and easy and i usually got better grades.... yay ill never sleep again! ::walks into kitchen from some coffee.... scares mom to death when she sees his lower eye lids all blue and hanging 4 inches down his cheek::

    #----------------------------
    $mrp=~s/mrp/elite god/g;
  • Please allow me to make a few comments about the slashdot moderation system:

    I think it works pretty well for what it's supposed to do. The problem is a) the nature of the site being general tech news; and b) the quantity of users. We can either a) give all users random moderation points; or b) give a limited group of users moderation points based on criterion such as being moderated up themselves; or c) a mix of both. I think this is best theoretically if tweaked properly.

    However, some problems exist such as a) the default linear setup combined with the fact that this is just a news site means lots of good comments at the end of the forum get lost; b) not enough people meta-moderate; c) people mark down comments that they do not necessarily agree with but may be valid points of view, or comments that are slightly off topic but are good extensions of the current conversation; d) people given moderation points often just want to get rid of them. This is a news site after all, and responsibility to the integrity of moderation isn't exactly a priority. Many people just scroll down a bit and moderate comments that vaguely look good. Why? Again, probably because this is just a news discussion site and expending the effort to read all the comments in a story would take many, many hours.

    So, I agree with you that it might be good to increase the moderation points available. However, this must be done in a manner that will give points to those who deserve them and not to those who will moderate posts down just because they do not agree with a point or those who will just moderate because at first glance the post looks good.

    In short, not enough people meta-moderate so at a macro level, increasing the amount of moderation points to everyone would be bad. It would be a bit better only increasing the amount to those who are consistently moderated up but that does not guarantee that those who moderated them up properly looked at their posts. So we either give a select group a lot of points and allow them to moderate - or we give the group at large a lot of points and hope that they use them wisely. Not enough people meta moderate so this is why such a system can seem broken. The bottom line? It's a discussion news site. Expending the effort is just too much in this situation.

    Even then, meta moderation does not give you the thread. This creates a problem because the moderation might be relevant to the post and thread that it replies to. The solution? Tell everyone to quote every time what they are responding to. This is done most of the time, so this is not too much of a major problem.

    There is also another improvement that I want. Randomly displayed threads. There are some very good comments that get lost in the noise because we only have an option for newest and oldest in threads or by themselves. This isn't a problem for the 100 comment stories but becomes a large problem for 250+ comment stories. The first problem with randomly displayed nested and threaded comments that comes to mind is that the flow of the discussion often comes linearly, even if not the same thread. However, I think it would be welcome to most slashdot readers. Anyway, to tie this into the moderation problems, it would probably have to be the default setting for proper moderation to occur. Either that or a the owners of the site generating a lot of noise about it.

    Wading through so much information and finding signal in noise isn't much fun. I usually just ignore moderation and scroll a lot.
  • Boy, I'd hate to be one of *their* test subjects. When these guys actually did get to sleep, the VA probably accidentally amputated their legs and then lost the medical records.

    The things I've seen at the VA Medical Center East Orange NJ, it wouldn't suprise me!

  • Post wrong? (Score:5)

    by DefConOne (17385) on Friday February 11 2000, @02:09PM (#1283519)
    My interpretation of the article is somewhat different than that of the poster. I think that the following line does NOT mean that "Research found students to have better recollection after long periods of sleep deprivation"

    Although subjects' memory performance was less efficient with sleep deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory.

    My interpretation of that line is that, overall, students had WORSE memory performance when sleep-deprived, but those students who had greater activity in the parietal region performed better than those with lower activity -- but still worse than they would have had with a good night's sleep. Am I correct in my reading?

  • Sleep Deprivation can also kill. (Score:5)

    by Winged Plum (65204) on Friday February 11 2000, @02:00PM (#1283520)
    Sleep deprivation can also kill you. I did a 12 page report on sleep and its effects on the human body, and have about 5 pages of stuff on sleep deprivation. A guy in the 1950's, I believe, did a radio show for 200 hours straight, and suffered SEVERE mental damage from it. Also, rats who have been deprived of any rest at all have died after 17 days. People with fatal familial insomnia, which causes the victim to be deprived of sleep for months upon months, will eventually kill after 9 to 12 months. If you want more information on sleep, deprivation, and disorders, e-mail me at mcnamarc@kirtland.cc.mi.us and I'll send you the report. I'll feel special, too. : )

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