Given the tendency of our society to insomnia and little sleep, it is worth thinking about what this life leads to. Theory and Practice retold two articles on sleep deprivation experiments from the German magazine Focus.de and the British website Psyblog.
The fact that lack of sleep is not the best option for a healthy lifestyle is nothing new. Learning becomes more energy intensive and concentration decreases during work. But much less is known about how sleep deprivation affects memory quality, events or faces. “I was surprised at how little research is being done on the relationship between sleep deprivation and distorted memory of eyewitnesses to crime,” said Stephen Friend, a leading researcher at the University of California, Irvine. He and his colleagues attempted to study this problem in more detail.
For the experiment, scientists invited 104 students to the laboratory late at night. Half of the subjects were shown a series of photographs of the same culprit - a pickpocket. Then some of them had to go to bed, while others stay awake all night. With the other half of the subjects, everything was done in reverse order: some of the people did not sleep until the morning, while the other enjoyed a healthy sleep, and in the morning they all received photographs of conditional criminals.
At the next stage of the experiment, all participants were offered texts in which, with the addition of false details (such as the color of the criminal's hair), a pickpocket from a photograph was described. After that, all subjects had to describe the offender and mark the details they saw in the questionnaire.
“If you didn't sleep well yesterday and then noticed something interesting on the Internet, be prepared that by telling your friends about it, you will unknowingly lie to them”
As a result, the experiment showed that visual memory deteriorates significantly with a lack of sleep. Those people who saw the photographs and texts after a sleepless night were much more likely to get confused in their testimonies than their rested colleagues. For those subjects who saw the photo before a sleepless night, the results were average. This demonstrates how important sleep plays in the ability to remember information, the researchers said.
The distorting effects of poor sleep patterns may explain why real-life testimonies are so often different from each other: sleepy witnesses simply had false memories. Such findings have important implications not only for criminology, but also for people who subject themselves to chronic sleep deprivation. The lack of sleep introduces a person into a special state of consciousness, in which the perception of the surrounding reality becomes indistinct, and many details are reconstructed by the brain again when trying to access information again. So, an important event for us can completely change accents, passing through memory streams. If you didn’t sleep well yesterday, and then noticed something interesting on the Internet, be prepared that by telling your friends about it, you will unknowingly lie to them in some details. Going out on the street sleepy, do not try to make important decisions in the future and start things that will require recalling in the future. Instead, the best solution is to take a nap.
Irregular sleep of eyewitnesses should be taken into account by law enforcement agencies - and their opinion may be assessed as less reliable. Further experiments to investigate the relationship between memory and sleep deprivation will focus on how exactly insomnia forms a distortion of perception and remembered events.
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Poor sleep: eight hours of restless sleep is worse than four hours of healthy sleep
Waking up four times during the night for 10-15 minutes - such interruptions are already enough to ruin a person's day and make him grumpy. An interrupted night's sleep can be worse than just half a night's sleep, according to a study looking at a new approach to nighttime rest. Despite the fact that it is common for parents to get up in the middle of the night with their child several times, the effects of such overloading of the body have never been systematically studied.
Parents aren't the only ones suffering from sleep interruptions, explains Professor Avi Sade, who leads the study: “Doctors who may receive multiple night calls from patients may also experience the effects of sleep disturbances. These nocturnal conversations are relatively short - only five or ten minutes - but they break the natural rhythm. The effect of sleep interruption on daytime mood has never been studied. Our research demonstrates how short-term awakenings seriously harm cognitive ability and emotional background."
"The effect of sleep interruption on daytime mood and cognitive performance has never been studied."
During the study, subjects were awakened four times during a standard eight-hour night's rest. Each time they woke up, they were asked to solve a problem on the computer, which took about 10-15 minutes, and then they returned to bed. In the morning, the subjects were tested for intelligence, attentiveness, and mood. The results were compared with the results of tests on two other nights: one for eight hours without sleep interruptions and the other for four hours. The effects of artificial sleep interruption were comparable to those of a four-hour night. People felt more depressed, tired, confused, and lethargic. It was the effect of just one night of interrupted sleep.
However, the accumulation of harmful effects from such nights can be like a snowball, Sade explains: “Our research shows what only one night with disturbed sleep patterns can do. But we know that these effects accumulate, and therefore, parents who wake up three to ten times a night for several months in a row have to pay for night vigils with more serious sleep disorders. In addition to the physical effect on the body, interrupted sleep often has psychological consequences: parents often develop feelings of anger directed at their children, and then - a sense of guilt for these negative emotions."
