Sleep Deprivation and Memory

We have always been told you need to make sure you are getting to proper amount of sleep. Its seems impossible to get a full eight hours every night in this day and age. As a college student you are expected to go to about five hours of class, eat three meals, study for every class which can add up to about ten hours a day, workout, maintain a social life, attend club meeting and other extracurriculars in the span of 24 hours. That right there adds up to about 22 hours, that only leaves two hours everyday for sleep. 

In the article, “This is How Sleep Deprivation Hurts Mental Health” it talks about how when you sleep deprive yourself for one night you are hurting yourself the next day because you are going to be less productive, irritable, and less focused. If this trend of not getting enough sleep continues then long-term effects can start taking place like depression, anxiety, and cognition. If your cognition is being affected than you will not be able to process and remember the things you were just studying. Making you have to study more and more leading you into a vicious cycle of sleep deprivation. In a study ran by Medical University of South Carolina they tested 33 men to see how sleep deprivation how affect their brain cognition. The test subjects were sleep deprived for 30 hours and showed a significant amount of memory loss. The brain was also physically changed, the left dorsolateral PFC was activated less after being sleep deprived. 

In discussion Dr. Eitan Schechtman-Drayman talked about targeted memory reactivation and how it can help you memorize things better. By preforming a simple technique before going to sleep you can help program you brain to memorize things you have been studying better. From the article, “State of the art on targeted memory reactivation: Sleep your way to enhanced cognition” Dr. Schouten talks about how TMR can be used to improve one’s declarative memory during testing. If you are able to memorize things you are learning faster you could study for less time and be able to get more sleep, which would also help you from being sleep deprived. 

References:

Mu, Qiwen. (PDF) Decreased Cortical Response to Verbal Working Memory ...21 Jan. 2005, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8031494_Decreased_Cortical_Response_to_Verbal_Working_Memory_Following_Sleep_Deprivation.

Schouten, Daphne I., et al. “State of the Art on Targeted Memory Reactivation: Sleep Your Way to Enhanced Cognition.” Sleep Medicine Reviews, W.B. Saunders, 21 Apr. 2016, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1087079216300089.

“This Is How Sleep Deprivation Hurts Mental Health.” EHE Health | This Is How Sleep Deprivation Hurts Mental Health, https://www.ehe.health/blog/sleep-deprivation.