The question on every serious college student’s mind is how much sleep can we potentially skip out on to do some extra work, or to study a little bit more. We all care about our grades whether they are good grades or grades that are improving, and with finals coming up I felt the need to bring up the question about the risk or reward of taking that “all nighter” to study for your SCIOW exam. A lack of sleep can actually be detrimental to not only your studying and performance on exams and in the classroom, but it can also contribute to serious health problems and even death. While this sounds rather rash, and in most cases can be affected by some sort of confounding third variable, it is true that sleep deprivation can indeed cause premature aging, increased amounts of stress, heart attacks, strokes and more. All this according to an article on inc.com.
There are many flaws that could have occurred during this study. First off, there is no way of telling how many people this correlational study was carried out on. Not only that, it doesn’t even say if there was an experiment, it just lists a bunch of “facts” about sleep deprivation. However, in a study carried out by two PHD’s at UPENN, this same study gets done the “right” way. According to the professors at UPENN, namely Jeffrey S. Durmer, and David F. Dinges, in a study lasting over 5 years, randomly sampling 1007 adults ages 21 to 30 years of age, “The average sleep during the weekdays was 6.7 hours and on weekends was 7.4 hours.” Not only can sleep deprivation cause a vast number of Medical illnesses, it can also have an increased affect on physically hurting you. According to the same study form the University of Pennsylvania,
Accidents related to sleep deprivation have been estimated to have an annual economic impact of $43 to $56 billion.
The point of the study that was very accurately carried out unlike the first study mentioned, was to show that sleep deprivation is detrimental for operating in your every day life.
All this being taken into consideration, sleep deprivation is obviously not good for the human body. However, the question I want to elaborate on is how does sleep deprivation directly effect your test taking performance and ability to retain information. We’ve all been in the position before of being so tired in one class or another after a long night and just slowly struggling to keep our eyes open and eventually dozing off, missing any important information. This exact instance happened to me the other day while listening to one of Andrew’s very compelling and interesting lectures.
The area of the brain that needs to be examined to figure out the effect of sleep deprivation on studying would have to be the hippocampus. This is the area of the brain that is responsible for memory. Studies show that sleep deprivation has a direct impact on the hippocampus in an individuals brain. This results in a loss of memory and of course a loss of all the materials that you studied prior. Too little sleep can actually make your grades a lot worse, and can impact your health to a great extent. The hippocampus being affected by sleep deprivation could have an adverse effect on a persons cognitive thinking and processing skills. The ability to solve everyday problems and retain information become increasingly difficult the less sleep you have. Many studies show that the hippocampus is greatly affected by sleep deprivation, this negative effect makes it so a human being cannot function to their average potential.
How much sleep loss is considered sleep deprivation for the average human being? Could it be that missing only that one study night of sleep isn’t enough to have lasting effects on you? That statement would happen to be false. In reality, one all nighter could take as many as 4 days for your body to catch back up, until then one’s functioning is decreased greatly which could result on a poor grade of the test that you decided to study for all night, and future assessments that one has in that 4 day span. The bottom line is, the more sleep you miss, the worse you will do within reason. Staying up all night is not a good choice for a test, and you could only be hurting yourself in the long run.
I used to stay up really late at high school during my senior year and lacking of sleep makes me exhausted everyday. It is a bad circulation if people keep missing much sleep at night. Now during exam periods, I find students usually stay up all night to study and review. There could be people who work hard and get good grades of being all nighter but there are conditions that people do not do well on the test because lacking of sleep caused worse memorization. It is good that you tell a lot of results of what will happen when people lack too much sleep but more researches and studies could be done to further explore on your topic. Since the UPENN study is about adults from 21-30, the result could be limited because of the age range. Since most college students’ age start from 18, I think the range can be expanded so that the study sample can include more people. Also, within the study group, could there exist any confounding variables? Do these people have any habits, such as smoking, drinking alcohol? Could these affect worsen the result when people lack of sleep? You can do more researches relate to this topic.
As I read your post I immediately started thinking about one of my psych lectures. Two of the lectures this year were all about memory, storage and retrieval all of which can be linked to sleep and studying. In these lessons we leaned about how to encode information and store it in a way that it would be easiest to retrieve later on. My professor focused on the best ways to study. In general it is better to study with focus for 30-50 min and then take breaks, studying all night is actually detrimental to memory. According to the psych curriculum, or at least the lecture my professor gave, the brain can’t take in any new material after a around two hours. This means it’s better to study across a span of time than all at once, and it is also better to go to sleep. Overall psychology tells us that it is better to sleep than pull an all-nighter studying.
Interesting blog that is extremely relevant to all of us. I feel like at one point in time in a college students life, they have pulled an all nighter in an attempt to either complete an assignment or study for a test. My personal experience is supported by your evidence because I also found that my work greatly suffered on the nights that I stayed up very late. I actually found an interesting article on the Time Magazine website that discusses an observational study done with high school students. The study looked into the effects of sleep deprivation on high school students performance in all aspects of school. As you might imagine, they also found that students school work greatly suffered when they received a lack of sleep. However, one finding that I found especially interesting from this study is that teenagers function best on 8.5 to 9.25 hours of sleep. This statistic is shocking to me because I do not think I ever get this much sleep on a week night.