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Sleep Deprivation & Cognitive Abilities: Attention
Introduction
Sleep is a state of mind and body in which the sensory organs respond less to external stimuli, the body becomes inactive and a loss of consciousness is experienced, either partial or complete. Sleep is a mechanism that re-energies our body and brain. It is essential to maintain a good physical and mental health. Sleep deprivation is lack of sufficient sleep. In absence of enough sleep, the process of rejuvenation is significantly impacted. It may cause tiredness and lethargy, and render the mind less active. The decrease in activity of mind affects the cognitive system, increases irritability and reduces a person’s tolerance level. The effect on cognitive systems is the most critical and reduces a person’s productivity multi-fold. Not only this, it also increases the frequency of errors and accidents.
Given the criticality of impact of sleep deprivation on cognition, the paper attempts to evaluate the effects of sleep deprivation on the cognitive abilities of a person. Attention is a vital part of a person’s cognitive abilities and is chiefly impacted by sleep loss. Lack of attention renders a person more vulnerable to situations. It has the potential of causing fatal damage to a person. Not only this, impact on other cognitive abilities can also be attributed to lack of attention. Thus, the paper mainly focuses on the attention bit of cognition that is impacted by sleep loss. The paper is divided into four parts. The first part identifies the chief causes of sleep deprivation. The second part describes the various impacts of sleep deprivation on cognitive abilities of a person, including attention. The third part discusses the specific impacts of sleep deprivation on attention and its related symptoms. The fourth part concludes the paper. At the end of the paper, the reader will be able to comprehend and evaluate the impact of sleep loss on attentiveness.
Causes and Consequences of Sleep Deprivation
Causes of Sleep Deprivation
Sleep deprivation has become engrained in one’s daily routine. The number of people experiencing sleeplessness is increasing alarmingly. It leads to significant losses for the person impacted, and for the society as whole. The main causes of sleep deprivation are stress, lifestyle and medical disorders.
Stress has become a frequent phenomenon today and causes sleep loss. Stress may happen due to work pressure, bitter life experiences, strained relationships and financial difficulties. Change in lifestyle has been experienced in youth recently, with cultural shift to night parties and celebrations. Addiction to entertainment mediums like television, computer, phone and social networking sites are also a distraction from sleep. Insufficient sleep patterns are also observed in people who work in night shifts, causing an altered biological clock that is difficult to handle. Medical disorders like insomnia, sleep walking and other illness that affect the mental makeup of a person is one of the significant contributors to sleeplessness.
Consequences of Sleep Deprivation
Sleep is essential for maintaining a healthy living. The requirement of sleep may vary across people, but the absence of adequate sleep is evident for a person’s day time performance. Visible behavioural changes, growth impairment, increased disease susceptibility, metabolism disorder and impact on brain are the main consequences of sleep deprivation. The common visible symptoms of sleep loss are attacks of intermittent sleeps, drowsiness, tiredness, lethargy and the inability to hold body composure. Sleep loss may increase susceptibility to diseases like hypertension, diabetes and high blood pressure. It may impact the metabolism by altering the food consumption and energy utilisation cycles. Not only this, sleeplessness also affects one’s mental wellbeing. It impacts the nervous system of the body and affects cognitive abilities, which is discussed in the next section.
Impact of Sleep Deprivation on Cognition
The impact on the normal functioning of the brain is the most adverse effect of sleep deprivation. The increasing propensity to sleep in the day and state instability may affect the neural system (Durmer and Dinges 2005). He also emphasised on the issue of increased individual vulnerability due to inadequate sleep. The effect on the neural system and cognition are manifested in multiple ways. According to Killgore et al. (2007), inadequate sleep adversely affects a number of cognitive abilities, ranging from alertness to higher order executive functions. Key executive functions impacted are constructive thinking skills and behavioural characteristics.
Constructive Thinking Skills
Constructive thinking is the ability to organise thoughts constructively. Killgore et al. (2007) divided constructive thinking into six factor scales that are emotional coping, behavioural coping, categorical thinking, personal superstitious thinking, esoteric thinking and naïve optimism. He concludes that sleep deprivation causes decline in emotional intelligence, reduces intrapersonal and interpersonal effectiveness and declines the ability to manage stress.
Behavioural Traits
A study conducted by Angus and Heslegrave (1985) measured the outcome of sleep deprivation in a cognitively demanding environment and less demanding environment. The study showed reduced performance, mood fluctuations and irritability in the former as compared to the latter. Killgore et al. (2007) also concluded that behavioural aspects like positivity and action orientation reduces because of sleep deprivation.
Both, constructive thinking and behavioural characteristics show a decline due to insufficiency of sleep. They reduce the ability of solving problems and accomplish complex tasks. Thus, in all, they affect the performance in an executive role. A more basic and underlying cognitive ability, that also affects the performance of other abilities, is attention. The following section discusses the impact on attention in detail.
Specific Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Attention
Attention is a cognitive ability in a person that helps in focussing and concentrating on a particular thing. It helps in effective completion of tasks. Attentiveness and agility also play an important role in reducing errors and chances of accidents. This section discusses the impact of sleep deprivation on brain concerning attention and the various factors of attention that is impaired.
Impact on Brain Causing Lack of Attention
Sleep insufficiency impacts the smooth functioning of the brain and its physiology, which causes lack of attention in human beings. According to Thomas et al. (2000), decrease in the function and physiology of brain is primarily found in the thalamus region of brain, which is involved in maintaining alertness and attention (Martin, Davis and Oh, n.d.). They find that the impact is also felt in the prefrontal cortex part of the brain, which promotes alertness and attention.
Attention is indirectly impacted by the increased fatigue due to sleep loss. Gunzelmann et al. (2008) mention a study conducted by Duran et al. that reveals that vigilant attention becomes frequently interrupted with increasing levels of fatigue. The study explains that fatigue increases the urge to sleep and causes certain involuntary functions in the brain to sleep. This leads to inactivity in certain parts of the brain. Gunzelmann et al. (2008) refer to a work of Dinges and Kribbs that explains that fatigue causes lapses that lead to delayed responses and increased frequency of errors.
Impacts of Sleep Deprivation on Attention
Impact of sleep insufficiency is manifested on one’s attentiveness in varied ways. It affects attention by adversely impacted situation awareness, visibility, responsiveness and concentration.
Impact on Situation Awareness
Lack of attention is manifested as a reduced awareness of the external environment and situation, as a result of sleep inadequacy. This is because, without proper sleep, the brain may not be able to analyse multiple information with respect to a given situation and process it to given a complete picture of the situation. Thus, selective attention may result in incomplete situation awareness. Wickens acknowledges that thorough understanding of the situation is important for is essential for performance, though it may not be concluding (Grugle 2005).
Impact on Visibility
Sleep deprivation impairs activities that entail performance of visible tasks. According to a research conducted by Chee, Tan, Parimal and Zagorodnov (2010), sleep insufficiency results in slower and less accurate picture classification as well as poorer recognition memory. Thus, there is a reduction in functional connectivity and effective integration of the sub parts of a task. This adversely affects the ability of performing a task successfully. Tomasi et al. (2009) conclude that deactivation in cingulate cortices impair the attention networks of the body thereby reducing the accuracy of visual-spatial attention performance. This can make human beings more vulnerable to accidents and more risks in routine life.
Impact of Responsiveness
Delayed and erroneous responses are common consequences of sleeplessness. Lim and Dinges (2008) concluded that insufficient sleep leads to slowness of response in human beings. Not only this, it also increases the chances of making mistakes and the amount of time spent on a particular task. Thus, sleep deprivation reduces vigilant attention in human beings and reduces overall work efficiency of executives. A parallel study was conducted by Cordova et al. (2006) on rats that concluded that a seven to ten hours of sleep deprivation results in latency and delays in responses, and increased omission errors. Vulnerability and lack of attention to night time activities is also one of the effects of sleep deprivation (Taillard et. al. 2005).
Impact on Concentration
According to Science Daily, researchers say that sleep deprivation affects focus and concentration in a similar way as alcohol does. Concentration is an integral part of attentiveness. In absence of ability to concentrate and focus, accidents are bound to happen. Not only that, it may also lead to situations of absentmindedness, forgetfulness, lack of vibrancy and impaired retention. According to Fay (2010), that the drive to sleep is so overwhelming in sleep deprived children that it impairs with attention, memorising and comprehension. However, it is difficult to overcome sleeplessness because of the increasing burden of homework on children.
Lack of concentration impairs with the learning abilities of human beings. In absence of good learning conditions, the intellectual growth of a person gets adversely affected. Not only this, lack of concentration also affects one’s ability to build a formal or informal relationship. It reduces the involvement in conversations, thereby reducing the warmth in a relationship. Thus, sleep deprivation can affect the learning environment of a person and may hinder with a person’s drive to excel in his field of interest. It can also affect one’s relationship management skills, leading to social growth impairment.
Conclusion
The paper had set out to evaluate the impact of sleep deprivation on cognitive abilities, especially attention. Sleep deprivation actually impacts the neural system of the body. Impact on cognitive ability is characterised by decline in constructive thinking skills and effective behavioural traits. Decline in constructive thinking skills was observed with reduced emotional intelligence, interpersonal and intrapersonal effectiveness, and ability to manage stress. Behavioural changes observed were increased irritability and frequent mood swings. Overall impact on constructive thinking skills and behavioural traits results in reduced efficiency, ability to accomplish complicated tasks and problem solving abilities. All these qualities are important of effective executive functions.
Attention forms the basis of performance of all cognitive activities. Sleep deprivation affects the thalamus and prefrontal cortex of the brain that maintains the alertness and attentiveness of brain. Fatigue caused by sleep insufficiency also causes lack of attention. Lack of attention is manifested in the form of reduced situation awareness, visibility issues with respect to task completion, impact on responsiveness and concentration. Inability to be attentive hinders with the activity of processing of multiple information to get a complete understanding of the situation. It also reduces a person’s analytical skills. Inattentiveness is also characterised by less accurate picture classification as well as poorer recognition memory. Lack of concentration adversely affects the intellectual growth of a person and may hinder with a person’s drive to excel in his field of interest. Lack of attention is also manifested in the form of delayed and inaccurate responses to a stimulus. Thus, sleep deprivation leads to inaccurate situation analysis, increased frequency of mistakes and accidents, and adversely affects task performance and decision making abilities. It may also hinder with the overall intellectual, emotional and social growth of a person.
References
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