The Effect of Less Sleep on Cognitive Function

As a student, I would spend the majority of my time reading especially when the exam was 1 month away but the reading would become intense when it was close to exam period. I would stay up all nights once it got to a week to my exams and I would be like that until the exams ended even if it took 1 month for the exams to end.

According to the CDC, 70% of students in high school aren't sleeping enough, and 60% of students in middle school aren't sleeping well. I were to judge the percentage of students who had good sleep in my school studying nursing, I could say that 80% of students weren't having enough sleep and this was worse during exam periods.

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The total amount of sleep needed by individuals vary depending on the person but on an average, a young person need about 8 to 10 hours of sleep per night. Adequate sleep in individual is necessary for brain development and cognitive function and research has shown that sleep deprivation of any kind will impact the brain negatively basically the frontal lobe.

I know you are wondering what the frontal lobe's function is, well you see when you read and want to remember things, the frontal lobe plays a big role with memory and attention. Working memory includes phonological loop which is responsible for acoustic and verbal information, the Visuospatial sketchpad which is responsible for spacial and visual information, the episodic buffer which does the job of a buffer by integrating information from the two, and the central executive which serves as the control room controlling the three.

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Enough with the jargon, in one word, when we do not have enough sleep, our ability to receive and organize information immediately they come, becomes impaired. Not sleeping also affects the ability of a person to concentrate on a task and this is known as Attention lapses. It can be as a result of microsleeps which is a series of small sleep lasting for a few seconds. When you are feeling sleepy, it is best to just go to bed because trying to stay awake when you are feeling sleepy will usually impact cognitive function and concentration.

So when you are reading for test with the hope of performing well in the test but you are depriving yourself of sleep, then you should expect to perform well because your cognitive function would be impaired as such seeing writings spelt wrongly or not been able to remember properly.

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Researchers at UCLA studied students in high school with 3 high schools in Los Angeles. The research was to monitor the students sleeping habit. They were to write their wake up and sleep time through out their secondary education. They were asked to write their study and sleep time, as well as how well they performed in school. Researchers saw that as they promoted in their class, their sleeping time reduced with students in their 12th grade sleeping 40 minutes lesser than in their 9th grade. The researchers noticed that the more time they spent studying was related to increased academic problems and this was because they had less sleep time. The researchers emphasized on putting sleep into the equation when talking about effective learning.

Stress also impact ones brain activity, preventing proper assimilation and mental health with affects results in examinations or tests. Depriving yourself of sleep will not make you a guru, neither will it give you a guaranteed pass mark or increased cognition. When it comes to studying, eating properly, employing good technique like chunking, and getting proper rest over a period of time will help. Reading for just one day will not give you the 6 months result you are looking for.

Keeping the mind and body healthy through sleeping means increased cognition, memory, and attention span, which would help with effective studying in the long run.

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^{https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2656292/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5673147/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2805706/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10083484/
https://schoolstarttime.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/gillen-oneel-to-study-or-to-sleep.pdf
https://www.apta.org/news/2018/01/29/cdc}