Do you ever wonder what happens to your brain when you don’t sleep enough?
According to authors Zachary Zamore and Sigrid C. Veasey of the Chronobiology and Sleep Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, there are at least three crucial things to know when you are trying to improve memory and brain function:
- First, when we accumulate a sleep debt, we lose some of the subjective ability to judge how that lack of sleep affects us.
- Second, even though we don’t realize it, objective tests show that we continue to have “deficits … in vigilance and episodic memory” even after “2-3 nights of recovery sleep.” Key: The deficits persist even if we feel “less tired” after recovery sleep.
- Finally, and perhaps most alarmingly, studies suggest that this persistent sleep loss — even when we try to catch up on it — can lead to “heightened susceptibility to neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease … and Parkinson’s disease (PD).”
Among other things, it brings home just how difficult and crucial it is to study what happens when people become sleep deprived.
The full article can be found here and it is a very short and informative read.
If you really want to improve your sleep and memory, there have been significant breakthroughs by studying the sleep of specific animals.
It turns out we all fall into a specific circadian rhythm closely tied to some of the most majestic animals in the wild kingdom.
If you are interested in discovering which Sleep Animal you are, just Click Here to take the 2 minute Sleep Animal quiz and at the end, you will discover the best way to improve your sleep and your memory.