Dissociable effects of self-reported daily sleep duration on high-level cognitive abilities

Abstract

Most people will at some point experience not getting enough sleep over a period of days, weeks, or months. However, the effects of this kind of everyday sleep restriction on high-level cognitive abilities—such as the ability to store and recall information in memory, solve problems, and communicate—remain poorly understood. In a global sample of over 10000 people, we demonstrated that cognitive performance, measured using a set of 12 well-established tests, is impaired in people who reported typically sleeping less, or more, than 7–8 hours per night—which was roughly half the sample. Crucially, performance was not impaired evenly across all cognitive domains. Typical sleep duration had no bearing on short-term memory performance, unlike reasoning and verbal skills, which were impaired by too little, or too much, sleep. In terms of overall cognition, a self-reported typical sleep duration of 4 hours per night was equivalent to aging 8 years. Also, sleeping more than usual the night before testing (closer to the optimal amount) was associated with better performance, suggesting that a single night’s sleep can benefit cognition. The relationship between sleep and cognition was invariant with respect to age, suggesting that the optimal amount of sleep is similar for all adult age groups, and that sleep-related impairments in cognition affect all ages equally. These findings have significant real-world implications, because many people, including those in positions of responsibility, operate on very little sleep and may suffer from impaired reasoning, problem-solving, and communications skills on a daily basis.

Pre-sleep Cognitive Arousal Decreases Following a 4-Week Introductory Mindfulness Course

“…Poor sleep quality is a common complaint in the general population, even among those who do not meet diagnostic criteria for specific sleep disorders (Yong et al 2017). Sleeping poorly or insufficiently can lead to acute adverse consequences such as negative mood (Dinges et al 1997;Haack and Mullington 2005), cognitive impairment (Lim and Dinges 2010;Lowe et al 2017;Wild et al 2018), and low quality of life (Strine and Chapman 2005). More importantly, chronic poor sleepers are at higher risk of developing more serious health problems such as diabetes (Cappuccio et al 2010a) and cardiovascular disorders (Cappuccio et al 2011), and have a higher overall mortality risk (Cappuccio et al 2010b).…”

Cognition across the lifespan: age, gender, and sociodemographic influences

“…While these results are presumed to be reflective of the cognitive performance of the population, they are complicated by the differences in socio-demographic factors. Several of the factors showing the largest differences, such as sleep and anxiety, have known effects on cognitive function [38], making it difficult to determine what is driving the observed gender differences. Further complicating the matter is that because these socio-demographic factors are gender-dependent, it is not possible to include them in the model due to issues with multicollinearity.…”

“…All data for this study were collected with the CBS (www.cambridgebrainsciences.com) online platform, which has previously been used for other large-scale studies of cognition [38, 39]. A total of 65,994 participants registered and completed all portions of the study, with a final number of 45,779 being included after removing outliers and rows with missing data (described in the data preprocessing section below).…”

Hubungan Durasi Tidur Dengan Fungsi Kognitif Geriatri

“…Selain itu long sleep duration juga memungkinkan terjadinya inersia tidur yang lebih lama. 17,18 Spira dkk (2015) menemukan bahwa orang dengan short sleep duration berasosiasi langsung dengan terjadinya deposisi plaq Aβ di seluruh otak dan meningkatkan fosforilasi tau yang dideteksi sebagai biomarker terjadinya demensia. 19 Semua hal tersebut sejalan dengan hasil yang didapatkan oleh peneliti, bahwa kelompok geriatri dengan short sleep duration maupun long sleep duration memiliki skor MMSE versi Indonesia dan dan skor MoCA-Ina jauh lebih rendah dbandingkan kelompok normal sleep duration.…”