Is sleeping too much bad for your brain?
13 October, 2018
The largest sleep study ever concludes that sleeping too little or too much has a negative impact on our cognitive ability, but not on our short-term memory.
As years of research mount up, we are steadily improving our understanding of sleep.
However, despite making up around one third of our entire lives, sleep still holds many mysteries.
The strains of modern life often mean that we sleep less than we might like.
Increased screen time, caffeine, and stress are among the many reasons why people do not get the sleep that they require.
So, as our sleep quality deteriorates, understanding the impact on health and performance is more important than ever.
To add to our growing knowledge of sleep, researchers from Western University's Brain and Mind Institute in Canada set up the largest sleep study to date.
The largest sleep study ever
Launched in June 2017, the online sleep study collected data from more than 40,000 participants in just the first few days.
As Adrian Owen, a cognitive neuroscience researcher at Western, explains, "We really wanted to capture the sleeping habits of people around the entire globe. Obviously, there have been many smaller sleep studies of people in laboratories, but we wanted to find out what sleep is like in the real world."
The number and diversity of participants allowed them to compare the impact of sleep deprivation on people of different ages, professions, and lifestyles. Their preliminary findings, based on an analysis of 10,000 people, were published recently in the journal SLEEP.
To get an in-depth understanding of the people involved in this study, the team collected detailed data from participants.
As Owen goes on to explain, "We had a fairly extensive questionnaire, and they told us things like which medications they were on, how old they were, where they were in the world, and what kind of education they'd received because these are all factors that might have contributed to some of the results."
This gave the scientists the opportunity to test a range of theories and gain an understanding of how sleep quantity might affect people. Volunteers underwent a battery of 12 well-established cognitive tests so that the amount of sleep could be correlated with mental ability.
About half of the participants slept for 6.3 hours or under per night, which is around an hour less than the study's recommended level.
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