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Ok, ok, I don’t want to bang on about sleep too much. I’m not a sleep expert (rather the brain and behaviour), it’s just that there’s been a bunch of research coming out about sleep. But sleep just is very, very important for physical and mental health, and optimal performance.
I reported yesterday on how dreaming increases the flow red blood cells in capillaries in the brain. Previously I also reported on how naps can’t compensate for sleep loss and how sleep affects everything (including fat metabolism).
So what does this latest research show?
Well, what these researchers, around Jeremi Ochab of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, were interested in, is how quickly people recover from chronic sleep loss.
For this they deprived a group of volunteers (19 in total who completed the study according to protocol) of sleep for 10 days . This was defined by 30% less sleep compared to four normal days — their baseline. This was then followed by 7 days of rest (normal) functioning. All participants went about their life as normal — in naturalist settings — observing human beings in the wild, so to speak!
During this all participants went through a series of tests daily: motor control, EEG measurements of…
