Sleep and sleep deprivation

A detailed Summary of Sleep and sleep deprivation

October 1999, the movie Fight Club was released. The story was about a man that suffered from intense insomnia- 4 months of consecutive wakefulness.

Sleep is the biological process that a person spends almost a third of their life doing. After decades of research, we still cannot say we have a full understanding of this process. One thing that is safe to say is that it has a function; considering the large amount of time that organisms spend on it, if it was not adaptive, it would not survive through evolution. As for what kind of function it serves, there is still no definite answer (Pinel 1999 [Rechtschaffan 1998]). But there are two main theories that are trying to explain what we do know so far.

The first theory is the Recuperation Theory, which is the way most people perceive and explain sleep. It sees sleep as a repairing process that reverses the imbalance of our system caused by daily activity. It assumes that activities during our wakefulness disturbs our body's homeostasis. The common concept of needing more sleep to 'catch up' previously

Speculation towards sleep reduction

Even though the recuperation theory is more widely acknowledged, it seems the circadian theory explains more of the picture. For example, the recuperation theory would predict sleep deprivation would cause serious physiological dysfunction, but research shows that is not the case (Pinel 1999 [Karadzic 1973, Horne 1983 and Martin 1986]). But of course there is research that challenges the circadian theory as well. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep deprivation has been reported to lead to various personality and motivation problems (Pinel 1999 [Dement 1960]) and also memory deficits for certain learning processes (Pinel 1999 [Karni et al. 1994]), which would be against the circadian belief.

There have also been studies of polyphasic sleep- sleeping many times each day for short duration instead of a long, continuous sleep, inspirited by the legend of Leonardo da Vinci, of how he napped 15 minutes each 4 hours each day. Surprisingly this legend was replicable (Stampi 1992); which suggested that if the efficiency of sleep is raised, the amount can be reduced with minor side effects.

Another reason why negative effects of sleep deprivation are exaggerated is due to the effect of microsleeps. A person's cognitive abilities for demanding tasks like abstract reasoning and spatial relations are not effected even after one night of sleep deprivation (Percival, Horne & Tilley 1983), but in fact when faced with less demanding tasks like driving, a person would easily drift into microsleeps, thus leading to serious problems. It has also been reported that even for sleep deprivation up to 72 hours, there was no effect on strength or motor performance, except for reducing the time to exhaustion (Van Helder & Radomski 1989).

The second study was done my Friedman & Mullaney 1977, in which 8 participants systematically reduced their s

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Category: Science