Sleep Deprivation And False Memories

Despite the fact that deprivation of sleep has negative impacts, individuals still continue to deprive themselves of sleep. Many claim that they can just make it up tomorrow night and sleep the extra two hours they did not get. However, this is only adding more and more to a sleep debt. This debt will continue to grow and grow until it is paid off. William Dement and Christopher Vaughan strongly advocate that people should know the warnings, importance, and consequences that come with sleep deprivation, and therefore, lead to sleep

In a laboratory study of sleep deprivation, researchers employed a variety of techniques to keep volunteers awake for variable amounts of time. One group of participants was kept awake for 24 hours, and the other was kept awake for 48 hours. During periods of forced wakefulness, participants were required to engage verbal learning tasks such as memorizing the definitions of obscure English words. At the conclusion of the period of forced wakefulness, participants were allowed to sleep for as

Thesis: Sleep deprivation can lead to serious health problems, make you forget information, and have a negative impact on the outlook of life.

This paper examines five different sources of information that addresses information pertaining to wakeful resting or sleeping and the effects it has on memory garnered by experiments performed on humans and animals. Wakeful resting is defined as an individual that has not fallen asleep but has engaged in a period of rest that cuts them off from the distractions of the outside world. Sleep is the bodies natural cycle of rest that suspends the consciousness and allows both the body and the mind to take a break from any stressful activities and recover. By either taking a short wakeful rest or going to sleep after learning new material, memory consolidation in both humans and animals will be improved, and it is not limited to humans that

There are a few factors that are essential for life such as breathing or eating, but one of the most essential factor is sleep. Even though the amount of sleep people need differs from one individual to another, the fact is that eventually everyone needs to sleep. People know the importance of sleep, but due to the increased workload and the pressure of society people are getting less sleep. As a result, there has been an increase interest on the effects lack of sleep has on the mind especially the memory of a person. Many questions arose about the relationship between sleep and memory due to the fact most high school and college students have become sleep deprived. For example, does more sleep mean higher grades?

Sleep is a beneficial necessity, both from a scientific and psychological standpoint, improving both mental and physical health. It plays an essential role in our growth and development as human beings. During sleep, our brains are growing and preparing for the day ahead so that we may be productive and attentive in every daily task. Without the recommended minimum of eight hours of sleep each night, people get agitated, distracted easily, gain health problems, make bad decisions, and acquire feelings of sadness and depression. Sleep deprivation is harmful and can cause a large amount of irreversible damage to ones brain, increasing the risk of diseases, strokes, and even diabetes. Throughout history, many authors have written about characters

An article in Nature Neuroscience from February 2009 describes an experiment which was conducted regarding sleep and its correlation to memory. Memory was impaired after 35 hours of sleep deprivation weekly and constant shallow sleep. Regular sleep benefits memory as newly stored information is easily encoded. Proper sleep is crucial for processing and retaining new information. Those who suffer from sleep deprivation struggle to maintain new information and with comprehension skills. In order for students to maximize their learning capabilities, they need the proper sleep to be mentally prepared for

This article explains the importance of getting the perfect amount of sleep at night. The idea that sleeping for less than five hours or more than nine hours proves to have a negative effect on the human body. Sleep deprivation has a closely related link to memory retention and can cause a person to have trouble with daily task. The author continues to explain that not only is the brain effected by too little or too much sleep, but the rest of the body is also effected. Conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and even depression have links to not getting the perfect amount of sleep. The article concludes with listing tips to get the ideal amount of sleep at night, such as, going to sleep and waking up at the same time every day and limiting the amount of caffeine that is consumed throughout the day.

The article Sleep deprivation and false memories reported two studies, but only study one will be summarized here. The study done here is to see if amount of sleep is associated to false memories. This study is a correlational study because it is looking for the association of natural occurring variables (i.e. the amount of sleep one gets). The independent variable of this study is the amount of sleep the participants had, either they were sleep deprived or not. The dependent variable is whether or not they had false memories. The participants were made up of one hundred ninety-three undergraduates from the University of California, Irvine, 76% of which were female and 24% were male. The participants were divided into two different groups based on their self-reported sleep duration only on the night prior to the study session. The participants who reported five or fewer hours of sleep were put in the restricted sleep group, those with more than five hours were put into the reference group. Neither group differed meaningfully on age, gender, race-ethnicity etc.

Most studies are about discovering the contributors of false memories. However, this study focuses on how sleep deprivation contributes to false memories even though many studies argue that sleep deprivation damages cognitive function. Their study went in detail by researching the effect encoding have during this process. They found that if a participant was sleep deprived during event encoding; he or she would increase the likelihood of falsifying memories. However, when the participant was sleep deprived after encoding had already occurred then there was no big impact on falsifying memories. These experiments are conducted on the effect of sleep deprivation contributing to false memories since false memories can have dreadful consequences.

A greater understanding of these complex and dynamic brain states has helped clarify the ways in which sleep enhances memory processing. An increasing number of sleep studies have behaviourally assessed the facilitative role of REM and NREM sleep on declarative and procedural memory performance in humans. The preliminary results provided initial evidence to the idea that hippocampal-dependent declarative memories, such as memories of personal events and fact-based information, are facilitated by NREM sleep (specifically SWS) and hippocampal-independent procedural memories are facilitated by REM sleep (Plihal & Born, 1997).

Sleep is essential for optimal human function. In fact, a lack of sleep can actually affect important cognitive functions, like memory. A 2007 study added to the already substantial evidence that even acute total sleep deprivation impairs attentiveness, working memory, and reaction time in various tasks (Alhola, Polo-Kantola). One such way to further this investigation of the effects of sleep deprivation on memory is through the Memory Interference Test, or MIT. MIT is a program designed by Gaston Pfluegl, Ph.D., and Enrique Lopez, Psy. D., at UCLA to test the memory of students. Along with a memory test, the MIT also anonymously collected the physical states, mental states, and demographics of each student test subject, providing a substantial database through which students can test hypotheses, such as the connection between sleep deprivation and memory. Since the MIT requires short-term memory recall, the hours of sleep a student had before taking the test could have a noticeable effect on his or her performance. An unprecedented study this year found that sleep deprivation may actually even induce false memories, which would certainly impact a student taking the MIT because the test requires the subject to recognize images that have been previously presented to them (Frenda, et al). The hypothesis is that students who slept 8 hours before the test will perform better on the MIT than students who only slept 4 hours. The null hypothesis is that students who had adequate

The third category of misattribution is false recall and false recognition, which is “when individuals falsely recall or recognize items or events that never happened” (Schacter, 1999, p.189). Considering recognition and recall as they pertain to psychology, recognition is described as memories that do not require a great deal of mental effort to attain information, where as recollections are memories that are placed in long-term storage and require a greater depth of processing. When analyzing false recognition and false recall, false memories appear to stem from both an encoding and retrieval

With the concerning matter of sleep peralisys some have turned to the belief that hypnosis is to be a trustworthy factor. On the contuary hynossis is not a trustworthy mean of displaying accurate memories because hypnosis can often create false memories. Consciousness also plays a large rule in our subjective experience of ourselves and the every cahgning world. On average we spend nearly thirty percent of our waking hours, mind wandering, and fantasizing. INitally we spend as much as one third or more of our lives in one specific state of consciousness in the sense of sleep. Thus sleep plays a critical role in storing memories and remembering emortional information. Over the years we have learned that sleep is critical for the function of our immune system, planning, reasoning, and functioning to the best of our

It is important to try to get as much sleep as possible for a healthier life. Good rest causes a boost in energy, mental clarity, and improved health (Helvig). Along with all of these benefits, sleep affects the brain in many positive ways too. Rest plays a major role in strengthening memories, also. Memories that are forged during the day are fortified during sleep (Nere 12). An experiment was conducted in the University of Notre Dame that showed that test subjects could recognize different parts of a picture of a dead cat after experiencing different sections of sleep. “After a night of sleep the subjects could accurately recognize the image of a dead cat, but they had forgotten the background street scene” (Stickgold). The subjects did not, however, accurately remember pictures that were not so gruesome. For example, they could recognize the dead cat but not a cat walking across the road. Another experiment was conducted that had subjects tap out a rhythm with their fingers. Only over a period of non-REM sleep was this ability to remember the rhythm enhanced. “The inescapable conclusion: the brain strengthens different types of memories during different stages of sleep” (Stickgold). While sleep can have many constructive effects,