How you end up sleep-deprived matters

Enlarge (credit: Aaron Jacobs)

Anyone who has tried to pull a late-night study session and wound up rereading the same pages of their textbook because they couldn't focus has experienced it. And countless studies confirm it: if you're sleep deprived, your brain starts functioning poorly. Your reaction times slip, you are more prone to careless actions, and you generally just get bad at things. But how is it your body registers "too little sleep"? It could be after you spend too much time awake. Or it could be the amount of sleep you get in a 24-hour period. Or it could be tracked in relationship to your body's internal 24-hour circadian clock.

A new study out this week suggests it's not just one of these things, and different aspects of our mental capacities are either more sensitive or less sensitive depending on how we end up short on sleep.

The challenge with separating out different aspects of sleep deprivation in the real world is that anything you do will involve multiple aspects of sleep. Get too little sleep during a 24-hour cycle, which means more awake time-and awake at times your circadian clock says you shouldn't be. So, the researchers behind the new work messed with people's clocks. They got a small group of people (because it would be hard to recruit a large one) to live at a sleep center for 32 days, cut off from any indication of outside time.

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