When we consider a student in college, we often associate the surrounding stereotype: an individual who is loosing sleep to study, staying up all night to get good grades. It could be said that there is a slight idolization of this behavior between students, a glorification of the sleepless nights to get perfect grades, henceforth getting into a good medical school, graduate program, or job. We know sleep is incredibly important for brain function and development, yet we see students in college functioning with little to no sleep everyday. How does this affect their performance in school and their circadian rhythms in sleep?
Dr. Cavanaugh and his research team establish the importance of the emergence of a circadian rhythm to certain developments in an article called “Developmental emergence of sleep rhythms enables long term memory capabilities in Drosophila.” In this study, using mutant Drosophila that had missing clock genes for circadian sleep, meant they could not achieve deep sleep states. They found that mutant Drosophila had a more difficult time with establishing and consolidating memories than those who had the clock genes still intact, pointing to the fact that sleep deprivation changes the ability to be able to consolidate LTM. They establish that healthy sleep patterns allow for more advanced cognitive series of actions to take place, such as lasting memories. This research has several applications to the lives of humans, where we see college students with major sleep deprivation in universities all the time, studying and memorizing for exams. What happens when students who aren’t getting proper sleep attempt to perform well in school? Subjects continue to build on each other and memory consolidation is necessary for good performance.
Phillips et. al tackle this in their research article called “Irregular sleep/wake patterns are associated with poorer academic performance and delayed circadian and sleep/wake timing.” Studying 61 undergraduate college students for 30 days with sleep diaries and quantifying the regularity of their sleep using a sleep regularity index, they found that there was a significant circadian phase delay in not only the endogenous melatonin rhythm, but also the sleep propensity rhythm which is used to consolidate the wakefulness moments and sleeping moments in the body. Students in the “Irregular” sleep category showed signs of jet-lag when they did not sleep regularly- amounting almost up to three time zones going West even though they never travelled. They found that regularity and duration of sleep did not affect each other, showing that regularity of sleep is an added piece of the puzzle, however sleep regularity was positively correlated with academic performance. Students who achieved more regular circadian sleep cycles performed better in school than those who reported irregular sleeping patterns.
When unifying these articles, we can shine a light on the cruciality of sleep cycles and how they affect the brain when not taken care of properly. It can be damaging to students to not be more mindful of how much sleep they’re getting and how cyclic it should be. Learning from these studies should begin to open the doors to seriously talking to students about the impact of sleep deprivation on their brain and academic performance, as it is something that is neglected in school.
Phillips, Andrew J., et al. “Irregular sleep/wake patterns are associated with poorer academic performance and delayed circadian and sleep/wake timing.” Scientific Reports, vol. 7, no. 1, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-03171-4.
Poe, Amy R., et al. Developmental Emergence of Sleep Rhythms Enables Long-Term Memory Capabilities in Drosophila, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.02.03.479025.
