In Praise of Slumber

New York Magazine has a terrifically interesting article on sleep research, and the overwhelming scientific consensus that even moderate reductions in shut-eye can do serious damage to our mental speed. In one study, "the University of Pennsylvania’s David Dinges did an experiment shortening adults’ sleep to six hours a night. After two weeks, they reported they were doing okay. Yet on a battery of tests, they proved to be just as impaired as someone who has stayed awake for 24 hours straight." Yikes. In another, we learn that "Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine. In one experiment...sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81 percent of the words with a negative connotation, like cancer. But they could remember only 41 percent of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like sunshine or basket."

We also get some data on the commonly heard, and totally accurate, complaint that schools start too early. "in Edina, Minnesota, an affluent suburb of Minneapolis...the high school start time was changed from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30. The results were startling. In the year preceding the time change, math and verbal SAT scores for the top 10 percent of Edina’s students averaged 1288. A year later, the top 10 percent averaged 1500, an increase that couldn’t be attributed to any other variable." And yes, as anyone who's ever stayed up all night and felt voraciously hungry in the morning knows, sleep deprivation stimulates your appetite, and makes you fat. "Three foreign studies showed strikingly similar results. One analyzed Japanese elementary students, one Canadian kindergarten boys, and one young boys in Australia. They all showed that kids who get less than eight hours of sleep have about a 300 percent higher rate of obesity than those who get a full ten hours of sleep....In Houston public schools, according to a University of Texas at Houston study, adolescents’ odds of obesity went up 80 percent for each hour of lost sleep. "

The risk of reading this article is that you'll do what I did this morning, which is wake up tired, tell yourself that your place of employment wouldn't want you functioning at 60% capacity, nor becoming really fat, and go back to sleep. A little sleep research is a dangerous thing, particularly at 7 in the morning.