A new study adds to the evidence
that sleep deprivation has a significant effect on our day-to-day functioning.
The authors warn that if we have slept poorly overnight, we are twice as likely
to commit errors, some of which may well be very costly.
Having a good night's sleep is key
to maintaining both physical and cognitive health. Our bodies know this
instinctively, and researchers have proved many a time that this is true.
For example, at Medical
News Today, we
have covered studies showing that sleep protects
vascular health, helps maintain brain
health, and may even give the immune response a boost.
Conversely, poor sleep may lead to
cardiovascular disease, contribute to
depression, and increase a person's risk of
diabetes.
Some researchers have also warned
that sleep loss can affect aspects of our memory and visual perception so
severely that driving after a sleepless night can be as dangerous
as drunk driving.
Following on from such evidence,
researchers from Michigan State University's Sleep and Learning Lab in East
Lansing have conducted further research on sleep, attention, and higher order
cognitive functioning.
Their findings, which feature in
the Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General, show that sleep loss has an important
effect not just on how well we can maintain our focus, but also on how well we
can follow complex procedures — an aspect that they refer to as
"placekeeping."
Sleep deprivation can be 'risky'
For their study, the investigators
recruited 138 participants, whom they split into two groups: 77 people stayed
in the laboratory overnight and had no sleep, while the remaining 61
participants slept at home.
The evening before, all of the
volunteers took part in two tasks. The first one measured their reaction time to
a particular stimulus, and the second one assessed their placekeeping abilities
— that is, how well they were able to follow the particular steps of a complex
process even with repeated interruptions.
On the morning after, each
participant had to repeat these tasks to see how their performance compared
with that of the previous evening. The researchers found that the participants
who had experienced sleep deprivation struggled
significantly.
"Our
research showed that sleep deprivation doubles the odds of making placekeeping
errors and triples the number of lapses in attention, which is startling,"
says study co-author Kimberly Fenn.
"Sleep deprived individuals
need to exercise caution in absolutely everything that they do and simply can't
trust that they won't make costly errors. Oftentimes — like when behind the
wheel of a car — these errors can have tragic consequences," she warns.
Although it may not come as a
surprise that lack of sleep reduces a person's ability to focus, the
researchers note that their recent study shows that sleep deprivation actually
affects higher cognitive functioning, interfering with memory recall to a large
extent.
"Our findings debunk a common
theory that suggests that attention is the only cognitive function affected by
sleep deprivation," says first author Michelle Stepan.
"Some
sleep deprived people might be able to hold it together under routine tasks,
like a doctor taking a patient's vitals. But our results suggest that
completing an activity that requires following multiple steps, such as a doctor
completing a medical procedure, is much riskier under conditions of sleep
deprivation."
Michelle
Stepan
"After being interrupted [as
they were performing complex tasks], there was a 15% error rate in the evening,
and we saw that the error rate spiked to about 30% for the sleep deprived group
the following morning," notes the first author.
"The rested participants'
morning scores were similar to the night before," she adds. This finding,
the investigators argue, should serve as a warning to people who experience
sleep loss not to underestimate the effect that it can have on their daily
lives.
"There are some tasks people
can do on autopilot that may not be affected by a lack of sleep. However, sleep
deprivation causes widespread deficits across all facets of life," Fenn
emphasizes.
Source: Medical News Today
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