Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Beulig, Alfred

Keywords

Sleep Deprivation, Memory, Cognition, Biology

Area of Concentration

Biology

Abstract

Sleep has always been known to be important to activities of daily function. It is also vital to maintain health and preserve cognition. Sleep serves to conserve energy, remove waste from the brain, aid in restoration processes, and benefit memory and cognition. Therefore, sleep deprivation is harmful to an individual, as well as society, since a sleep-deprived person would not function at an optimal level and pose a danger to others while driving, working, or performing other activities. Sleep benefits all aspects of memory, especially long-term memory. Slow-wave sleep has been shown to benefit implicit memory, and REM sleep affects explicit memory, although both are likely necessary for optimal functioning. REM sleep is thought to benefit emotional memories, although negative stimuli will be remembered with or without sleep. In a sleep-deprived person, a negative stimulus will travel through an additional pathway that involves the amygdala in order to consolidate the memory with the same accuracy as a rested organism. Chronic partial sleep deprivation is less studied than acute total sleep deprivation, although it has greater societal implications since most people will experience chronic partial sleep deprivation more frequently than acute total sleep deprivation. Chronic partial sleep deprivation can be just as detrimental to cognition, and the recovery process takes more time than for total sleep deprivation. Stored information can be forgotten if it is not accessed frequently, and in the case of explicit memory it can be replaced by new information. Sleep demands vary on an individual basis, according to sex, age, and individual differences. More studies should be done using a diverse population to be more applicable to real people. Furthermore, more research should be done on chronic partial sleep deprivation, due to the individual and societal hazards, as well as the prevalence, of this type of sleep deprivation.

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