Teacher Ratings

I am pretty sure that all of us some time or other have had the slow nod going on during class throughout our long years in school. Sometimes we even brag about how little sleep we get, but contrary to belief even though you feel like you are getting things done it probably isn’t as good as it could be and you’re probably not in the best of moods either. We all need sleep and maybe a little coffee for our peers’ sake.

In the Article Teacher Ratings, the study sought out to test their hypothesis that by sleep restricting students it would lead to inattentiveness, difficulty with work, and increased sleepiness. The participants completed a 3-week home-based protocol that were separated into two groups, the optimized group and the restricted group, where the optimized group had a TIB limit of no fewer than 10 hours per night and the restricted group had an 8 hours TIB (1^st and 2^nd grade aged children) and 6.5 hours (3^rd grade and above) per night. The groups were monitored by Actigraphy watches and daily bedtime and rise-time journals. The teachers were asked to assess and rate the children based on their performance during class.

The results concluded that by restricting the children’s sleep did increase their rating of difficulty in class based on the teachers answers to the various questionnaires.

I found it interesting that although they are a lot of very neat information on ADHD the experimenters clearly stated they didn’t want any students with ADHD to participate in the study but I honestly think that the study would be more interesting if the included those kids and compared them to the healthy children.

I think this will help the general public much like the previous article Bedtime Routine would. It would help inform parents and teachers of signs for children who are not getting enough sleep, and help create a more stable bedtime routine in order to maximize their performance in class.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

In the article False Confessions, they talk about how sleep deprivation is a key component to people falsely accusing themselves in crimes they didn’t commit, this happens in 15-25% of cases. This leads to a lot of innocent people been convicted and either spending a lot of time incarcerated or put to death for crimes they didn’t commit.

The study consisted of 88 students from Michigan State University who completed 3 laboratory sessions. In the first session they gave their basic information and they were given the instructions on how to go about the procedure, specifically the importance of not pressing the Escape Key on the keyboard. The button was located on the top left corner making it pretty hard to press. During the second session (7 days later) where the participants rated their sleepiness and were shown the warning again then half of the participants slept for 8 hours in the lab and others stayed awake. Then they completed another set of procedures and questionnaires. This took place a 3^rd day, after all the testing was complete the participants were asked to sign a statement which accused them of pressing the escape key some signed the form the first time but some took until the second time to sign the statement.

The experimenters found that sleep-deprived participants reported increased sleepiness and an increase in positive and negative effects than the rested participants, meaning that the sleep-deprived participants were more likely to sign the statement then the rested participants.

This study is can greatly affect the general public specifically law enforcement. If they decided to change the way they interrogate suspects in a different setting as well as during a different time of day and not for as many hours, then they would probably less people that would admit to crimes and less people losing years of the lives in jail.

Sleep Education

A lot of us are well versed in many different subjects from poetic writing to organic chemistry (poetry in its own right), but how many of us can say we truly know what it means to be sleep literate at this age, let alone as kids and teenagers. But learning is only half the battle.

In the article Sleep Education they set out to seek out the effects of a large-scale multilevel and multimodal sleep education program that would be based out of primary and secondary schools that were located in Hong Kong to try and help educate adolescents and improve their sleep habits. The Asian students were known for having worse sleeping habits than those of us in America and those in Europe. Can you imagine that there are actually people that get less sleep than we do? BLEW MY MIND!

With a participant size of over 7000 students the experimenters broke them up into a control and an intervention group, from there they set up two 40-minute workshops dedicated to teaching the students about the importance of sleep, how it affects you, contributing factors, and practical skills to help improve your sleep. During the intervention the students were asked to keep a sleep journal, they were also given various questionnaires to subjectively assess their quality of sleep.

In the end the majority of student’s sleep habits did improve throughout the intervention but only 32% of students reported that the program would actually motivate them to change their sleep habits. Which reminded me of the sleep journal we had to do for class and it made me realize that the students who didn’t think they would really change their sleeping habits had a good point. While recording my sleep for my journal it was always in the back of my mind I felt that I had to go to bed earlier to make sure I had a decent night’s sleep, but after I quickly returned to my old ways of staying up a little longer than I probably should. Which begs the question what can we do to really get motivated to change our ways and not only create new habits but make them stick as well?

I thought this article was important because it brings insight to the sleep habits of those across the world and how sleep habits are affecting adolescents at a very young age. I think this is very valuable information for the parents of adolescents everywhere so that they could maybe make changes to when and how their children fall asleep.

Don't Fall Asleep! Young-old Adults vs.Young Adults

At our age we all think we are Invincible and that we only need 4-5 hours of sleep and we can still perform at optimum levels. But according to the article Tolerate Sleep Deprivation we might not be as strong willed as we think, maybe, like most things we get better at it with age.

In the article experimenters sought to test and compare sleepiness, vigilance, and overall performance in young-old adults and young adults during a sleep deprivation period or vigil of 26 hours. To test their hypothesis of whether or not the ability to cope with less sleep is due to age they used 37 healthy participants, the participants started off with 3 baseline days with the usual 8-hour sleep time followed by a 10-hour awake period, this was their designated beginning Constant Routine. The rest of the routine consisted of the participants having to stay awake for 26 hours while being monitored by an EEG and an electrooculogram (EOG) to monitor episodes of dosing off and performance/attentional failures defined by slow-rolling eye movements (SEM). To measure performance, the participants went through a Reaction Time test. Then experimenters then recorded each participant sleep efficiency, sleep depth, and sleep continuity and compared them between the two groups.

In the end they found that even though the older participants had a lower sleep efficiency compared to the younger participants the older group had an overall more significant sense of alertness and reaction time (performance) than the younger group did.

This is probably one of my favorite articles we’ve done so far because I would have never guessed that the older you get you’re more likely to be more alert with longer periods without sleep. The article even helped explain the VLPO to me a little bit better and how it functions and relates to how we fall asleep. But I actually can’t be that surprised because when I think about it I can see it in my grandparents, my grandmother who is pretty spritely for anyone’s age really can stay up until like 11pm or 12am and sleep for like 4 or 5 hours and get up and start cleaning and I’m just like wake me up when the sun’s up. But my grandfather is not in too bad of shape but has some health complications and you are sure to find him in his chair with his blanket asleep at any time of the day.

This article is great for older people because maybe they don’t know why they can’t stay awake during the day and this could help them seek the attention necessary. It is also important for those our age as well, it serves as a lesson that contrary to popular belief we need as much sleep as possible in order to perform well in our day to day, also it gives insight for the future that staying healthy well into your older years can have some sleep benefits.

eReaders vs. Paperback

 In the article about eReaders the experimenters wanted to study the effects of light exposure on sleep, doing so they studied twelve healthy subject 6 men and 6 women who while in private rooms and were given either a paper book or an eReader to read for 4 hours before bedtime with dim lighting for five straight evenings with a break in between with the two conditions traded off at random. During they study the experimenters took hourly blood tests using through an indwelling forearm IV catheter and then frozen; the samples taken were used to measure the melatonin levels to check how sleepy the participant was. The experimenters also tested for sleep latency, total sleep time, sleep efficiency, and duration of sleep stages (via EEG). The subjects also gave a subjective measure of their sleepiness using the 9 point Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS). In the results they found that suppressed melatonin levels during the eReader portion and participants would comment on not feeling sleepy in the evening but were said to be sleepier in the morning, there was also less rapid eye movement recorded. But not differences were noticed in the other factors that were assessed.

I didn’t really understand why they let the participants hold the book but not the eReader, I just wonder what was significant about not letting them move it. I thought it was interesting how the eReader affected latency and REM sleep but not any other factors I would assume efficiency of sleep would be somehow related to latency and how you feel when you wake up.

This applies to pretty much any and everyone these days. Reading on your phone and on tablets is the trend right now, even for younger children. The effects of light exposure that close to bedtime can hinder performance, and be detrimental to our health. Personally I have a bad problem of leaving my TV on or watching Netflix on my computer before I go to bed and normally I would say it helps me fall asleep but lately I have definitely noticed that it makes it so much harder to fall asleep.

Football

The purpose of the study titled Football was to test if West Coast (WC) professional football teams had an advantage over East Coast (EC) teams in performance in games played after 8pm due to circadian factors given the time zone. To do this they to data spanning over 40 years that included over 100 teams and examining games played in all days of the week including home and away games for a total of 106 games and a control group of 293 daytime games. Using two data sets game times and scores were verified and crossed referenced using multiple sources for confirmation to see if the WC teams had beat the point spread or not. They figured this out by using the formula:

                               

                                Score of WC team – Score of EC team + Point spread = x

If x was positive, it meant that the WC team beat the point spread and if it was negative they did not. The results concluded that there was a strong advantage for WC teams over EC teams even accounting for the point spread. But the data also showed that even though WC teams had an advantage over evening games the same was not said for daytime games, for games played during the day the EC teams had the advantage.

I found it interesting that they used data spanning over 40 years and ten referenced and crossed checked it all, it proved to be a very thorough and well thought out study for the information that they had. With that being said there was also a lot of things that they couldn’t test for and had to make assumptions about which could have potentially skewed their data away from their results.

I think this study applies to the general public in that no matter if you are a collegiate athlete or just going to and from class and studying for class or working a 9-5 or a day/night shift type job your body’s sleep and our circadian physiology plays a bit part in how we perform on a day to day basis.

REM Sleep and Dreams

In Dement’s article The relation of eye movements During Sleep to Dream Activity the participants in the study or “Ss” included seven adult males and two adult females with five of them studied thoroughly and the other four used as confirmation of the former. The “Ss” had electrodes placed on various parts of their head and face and were then sent off to bed with the electrodes plugged in using a single cord allowing them full range of motion while they slept. The experimenters or “E” would wake the “Ss” up during certain duration of the periods where the participant was either in REM sleep or NREM sleep, they were first asked if they had been dreaming and then asked to describe in detail what their dream was about if possible. The experimenters did this over the course of 43 nights I believe. They found that “Ss” could more accurately recall their dreams when awakened during REM periods than NREM periods. It was then concluded that it is possible to objectively measure dreams by recording REM’s during sleep.

What I found interesting about this study was that in addition to finding the accuracy of dream recall after waking the “Ss” up the experimenters would then also ask the participants if they could predict how long they had been dreaming given a duration of either 5 or 15 minutes. And the cool thing about that was that the majority of the time the participants guessed correctly.

Something that I didn’t really care for in this study methods and results aside, was that they mentioned that they placed a bell next to the bed of the participants and that was how they would wake up the patients… it was “sufficiently loud to ensure immediate awakening in all levels of sleep”. For me that would be a big N O, I don’t think I could have been a part of this study I would not like to have to be woken up from my sleep and then asked questions???? No thank you!

I don’t think I fully understand what the intent for the general public would be but from what I can gather I think the purpose is mainly just bringing awareness to the benefits of good quality deep REM sleep, it may also correlate to memory consolidation as well and how REM sleep helps with that.

Emotion

The article Emotion covers an experiment that sets out not only to test if sleep helps decrease amygdala and behavioral reactivity of prior emotional experiences but also prove that there is a correlating action that decreases adrenergic levels during REM sleep. They tested their hypothesis using 34 healthy adults ranging from 18-30 years old and separated them into 2 groups a sleep group and a wake day group. The two groups each took two repeat fMRI where they viewed 150 pictures then rated their emotional intensity (1-5). After the experiment was complete they found that there was a decrease in amygdala reactivity in the sleep group but an increase in reactivity in the wake group throughout the day. These findings were also observed with the subjective reactivity associated with REM sleep with a decrease in adrenergic levels in the sleep group and an increase in the wake group.

What I liked about this study was that the experimenters seemed to be more focused on the details and the validity of the entire experiment. Adding the circadian control test and using multiple test sessions in order to make sure that the experiment will have the best chance of ending without any of the data having to be thrown out because of “technical difficulties”. I also thought it was interesting that they also found that sleep helps with memory consolidation as well. I always hear that if you study then sleep on it that you will retain more of what you studied, I never really considered that to be a good option but after reading this article I might give it a try.

This experiment is important to the general public because it proves that if you are feeling down or mad about anything all you need is a goodnight’s sleep and it can cause you to become more relaxed and not feel as strongly about the situation and reduce your blood glucose levels during your sleep helping to increase your quality of sleep throughout the night.