Sleep in Academia: The Brain We’ve Got

(See also Part One: Waking Up to the Problem.)

It’s sometimes said in “recovery” circles that “You can’t fix the brain you’ve got with the brain you’ve got.” But let’s see if we can’t try to think clearly—our crippling sleep deficit notwithstanding—about the brain.

Anybody who can manage a Google or YouTube search can discover the bad news about sleep and cognitive performance. (I say “bad news” because, let’s face it, either you are suffering a chronic sleep deficit, or you are a lone representative of sanity in a sea of irritable, clumsy, mentally-impaired zombies.) Here, I rely on the chapter titled “Sleep” in John Medina’s excellent and popular book, Brain Rules.

Medina’s Brain Rules: The Sleep chapter:

Read the whole chapter, or spend time reading the Sleep section at the Brain Rules Web site, but here are the highlights as Medina summarizes them:

The brain is in a constant state of tension between cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells and chemicals that try to keep you awake.

The metaphor Medina uses is “two armies.” Not everybody’s pair of armies are on the exact same schedule: a few are “owls” (night people), a few are “larks” (early risers), and most are “hummingbirds” in the middle somewhere. But for most of us, the “sleep army” wins us over for about half as long as the “wake army” holds sway: around 8 hours and 16 hours, respectively.

People vary in how much sleep they need and when they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.

Those “two armies” described above reach a period of stalemate for a few hours at midday. This is the “nap zone,” that ideal period for 30–60 minutes of sleep. You’re tired enough that the nap will be restorative, and it’s not so late in the day that a nap will interfere with getting to sleep later. This is the time of day when most car accidents happen: instead of seeing to our health, we’re out crashing cars into one another.

The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical activity when you’re asleep—perhaps replaying what you learned that day.

Most of the night while you’re sleeping, your brain is not resting: in fact, it’s working faster and harder than during the day. If you observe a rat’s brain activity while it learns a task, then let the rat fall asleep, you will see the same pattern of activity…except much, much, faster, and repeated hundreds or thousands of times. The brain appears to replay activity related to new learning. The picture is murkier with humans, in part perhaps because our learning is often more abstract and symbol-laden. But the brain does appear to process, quickly and often, what we experience in the waking hours before sleep.

Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.

That rat we talked about above? If we leave him alone to sleep, he will perform well at the task he’s been mentally rehearsing in his sleep. Interrupt his sleep even slightly, however, and his performance drops sharply: the learning benefits of sleep are lost. Tests on humans suggest the same drop in performance: “sleeping on” a problem boosts performance significantly, but interrupting sleep reduces those gains substantively. A single night of inadequate sleep reduces cognitive performance by 30%; add a second night, and the loss doubles to a 60% reduction in ability.

What about chronic sleep deprivation (say, 4–6 hours per night over four or more nights)? After five nights of inadequate sleep, a person’s performance is the same as that of someone wholly deprived of sleep for 48 hours.

That merits repetition: For the average person, sleeping less than six hours per night for five nights is just the same as skipping two consecutive nights of sleep altogether.

After six nights of inadequate sleep (in this study, about four hours per night), the body chemistry of a 30-year-old matches that of a 60-year-old…and it takes a full week of proper sleep to recover.

Go ahead a take a minute to wonder how you’ve gotten to this state. Hit a pillow, eat some ice cream. I’ll wait. Okay, let’s look at some possibilities on the “flip side”: what might it mean to take a reality-based approach to working and learning?

Sleep and Learning

Medina offers specific suggestions for workplace and classroom strategies better honoring the biological facts of sleep.

• “Match chronotypes:” Let the night “owls” team together and work on their preferred schedule, and so with the morning “larks.” The 80% of us who are “hummingbirds” are well served by the 9–5 work day, but if 20% of the work force is not, then it hurts all of us.
• “Promote naps:” Stop scheduling meetings and classes during the midday hours of the “nap zone.” A 30-minute nap during this time can result in a 34% boost in performance during the remaining afternoon work hours.
• “Try sleeping on it:” Plan a mini-retreat. In the afternoon and evening, present participants with problems and let them troubleshoot together (and, I would say, find out where they hit walls). Then retire to “sleep on” those problems, and address them again on rising the next morning.

On the Faculty Side: Am I the only one who finds himself watching the clock from 3:30–5:30 pm, looking for ever-more-piddling button-sorting tasks suited to my diminished capacities, steeling myself to resist the late-afternoon coffee that I know is going to keep me up later? I have now taken the step of putting a sleep mask and ear plugs in my office desk drawer, and am browsing folding cots on Amazon. I am also revisiting my evening routine: I habitually stop serious work at dinner, because I don’t like to get all riled up on problems in the evening, preferring to spend time with the family (even if it’s just TV or reading together). But I have begun taking a few minutes before getting ready for bed, sketching a few sentences relating to work in progress or difficult decisions. If I wake with thoughts on the matter, I jot these down to review later in the day.

On the Student Side: Imagine this in a syllabus: “This seminar meets 2:30–5:30 pm. Come prepared to nap from 2:40–3:15. Students skipping this period will be marked tardy.” Fortunately, I have not had to teach the dread late-afternoon seminar in a few years, but if I do again…I swear I’m going for it.

But what about the larger student problem? Online courses, run wholly or mostly asynchronously, are a godsend for the “owls” and the “larks”: they can accomplish their contributions during their best hours. For synchronous activities, if the instructor is wise enough to arrange small groups by Time Zones, the “owls” and “larks” should be allowed to self-identify with the Time Zones of their own choice, regardless of geographic location.

Reality Check:

Of course, these ideas don’t address the systemic problem: Most of us, especially in the U.S., are going to have a hard time just taking ownership of the hours of sleep we need, or even taking the time to determine how much sleep we each need, and on what schedule. In my next installment, I plan to look at the circumstances in academia that make good sleep hard. What are some of these circumstances, in your view?

Photo credit: “Wooden Neurons” by Petras Gagilas, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Add to favorites