Can We Thrive On 7 Hours Of Sleep?

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How little sleep can we actually get by on before our performance suffers? That's the question the David Dinges, head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, set out to answer.

The Test

According to a New York Times Magazine article, Dinges and lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned subjects to one of three groups who either received four, six, or eight hours (the control group) of sleep.

Over the course of the study, the researchers tested the subjects' attention span every two hours during the day. Their task involved sitting in front of a computer screen for 10-minutes and hitting the space bar every time they saw a number flash on the screen.

While the test is arguably a snooze, it is routinely used to test truck drivers, pilots, and astronauts. Even a half-second delay in response is indicative of a lapse into sleepiness.

The Results

Those with eight hours of sleep did not show any declines in cognitive function and minimal attention lapses over the study's 14 days. The four-and six-hour groups' scores, however, declined steadily with the four-hour subjects performing far worse. And by the sixth day of the study, a quarter of the six-hour group was actually falling asleep at the computer. In fact, in the end, they were lapsing in attention five times as much as they had early on in the study.

Would 7 Hours Work?

Gregory Belenky, a colleague at the Walter Reed Hospital, ran a parallel study to Dinges'. Belenky purposely placed his subjects into three, five, seven, and nine hour sleep groups to see if the research could pinpoint an actual sleep threshold. While there was little difference between Belenky's nine-hour and Dinges' eight-hour groups, the seven-hour group showed declining performance for three days before stabilizing.

Overall, Belensky concluded that cognitive function noticeably suffers within five to seven days of less-than-ideal sleep. With the National Sleep Association reporting that Americans get 6.9 hours of sleep on weeknights, it seems we could definitely benefit from more sleep.

Cognitive Slide

If you think you can get used to sub-par sleep, consider this last finding. After only a few days, the four- and six-hour groups in the studies reported 'adjusting' to their new sleep states. In reality, their cognitive performance had tanked.


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