Sleep!!!!!

From NYMag 15 October '07, Snooze or Lose by Po Bronson who also wrote the excellent article on the Inverse Power of Praise.

On the effects of lost sleep on developing brains:

• “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development...”


• “Sleep disorders can impair children’s I.Q.’s as much as lead exposure.”


• Sleep loss debilitates our body’s ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest: the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for what’s called “executive function.” Among these executive functions are the orchestration of thoughts to fulfill a goal, the prediction of outcomes, and perceiving consequences of actions. So tired people have difficulty with impulse control, and their abstract goals like studying take a back seat to more entertaining diversions. A tired brain perseverates—it gets stuck on a wrong answer and can’t come up with a more creative solution, repeatedly returning to the same answer it already knows is erroneous


• SAT scores up and teenage car accidents down SIGNIFICANTLY in school districts where high school start-times were changed from 7:30 to 8:30

There's much more info about how learned information and memories are encoded, how our bodies, when sleep-deprived, metabolize differently, linking sleep-loss with the worldwide childhood obesity epidemic. Good, interesting stuff.

The NYTimes published this on 23 Oct '07 which echos much of the NYMag article.

The real agony emerges in adolescence. As children go through puberty, two
things happen to make getting enough sleep problematic: they need more sleep
than prepubescent children, not less — 9 to 10 hours a night — and their body
clocks shift to a later time to fall asleep and, consequently, a later
awakening...their bodies do not begin to produce the sleep hormone melatonin until 1 a.m., as opposed to 10 p.m. in most adults.

I hope that all this research on sleep deprivation vis poorer grades, moodiness, depression, disciplinary problems and traffic accidents will be embraced by school districts by the time Ivo and Burl go to school...