Missing out on sleep tonight will not only make the simplest of tasks harder to perform tomorrow, but will also deny the brain an opportunity to solve complex problems while the body rests.
This, in a nutshell, is one of the many points Harvard University psychiatrist Robert Stickgold made yesterday in his talk on "Sleep, Memory and Dreams: A Neurocognitive Approach."
The forum was "a nice bridge between science and literature," College senior Justin Hulbert said, adding that Stickgold "didn't just show numbers and graphs, but he helped the audience start to grasp the scientific underpinnings of sleep."
Stickgold described how students who are getting around four hours of sleep a night and sleeping 10 hours on the weekends may think they have made up their sleep deficit, when in reality, they have not.
"Students practice what I call sleep bulimia," Stickgold said.
Sleep, however, is just as important as hours spent studying -- those students would have been more productive and performed even better had they gotten their rest every night.
"Sleep seems to revel in working on the hard problems," Stickgold added.
In other words, the brain is almost designed to solve hard problems during sleep. Stickgold cited a study by German University of LYbeck researcher Ullrich Wagner, where a group with a good night's sleep was more than twice as likely to find a hidden number sequence than their sleep-deprived counterparts. Even more interesting, those who had slept found a way to solve the problem considerably faster.
Studies have also shown that sleep pinpoints the tasks a person is having difficulty learning and resolves them overnight.
For instance, a person asked to type the number sequence 4-1-3-2-4 repeatedly may, for whatever reason, pause before typing the number two in the sequence.
However, if the participant goes to sleep and resumes typing the sequence the next day, studies show that this choppiness will virtually disappear and he or she will type the sequence fluidly.
Stickgold said that kids who tell their parents they are going to go study for their physics test by going to sleep are not as crazy as they sound. If students have the fundamental knowledge for a test, they will be more than twice as able to apply this knowledge in more abstract problem solving. Getting sleep regularly is more important than timing it for right before a test, Stickgold said.
Yet, even though a sleep deficit cannot be countered overnight, naps can help people retain information, or even enhance previous learning if they enter the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, in which the brain is most active.
Stickgold also discussed how, during REM sleep, the brain may put two components together that may seem bizarre -- yet this is where creativity originates.
The Penn Humanities Forum hosted Stickgold, one of the nation's leading sleep researchers, before a completely full Logan Hall auditorium.
