But of course there is research that challenges the circadian theory as well. REM (rapid eye movement) sleep deprivation has been reported to lead to various personality and motivation problems (Pinel 1999 [Dement 1960]) and also memory deficits for certain learning processes (Pinel 1999 [Karni et al. 1994]), which would be against the circadian belief. .
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Sleep deprivation.
Now that we have talked about sleeping, we can discuss what happens when we do not get enough of it. .
"Self-sleep deprived- teenagers and dosing drivers are issues that we focus on decade after decade. We should be fairly educated in sleep deprivation and it's effects. But after looking at the research done so far, it seems that our common sense' in sleep deprivation was not very scientific after all. .
Some of the findings are controversial, but so far there are a few conclusions we can make about sleep deprivation. .
As mentioned before, sleep deprivation can lead to a variety of personal and motivation problems, and memory deficits of certain material. Other effects of sleep deprivation are impairment of innovative thinking and flexible decision making (Binks, Waters & Hurry 1999), poor performance on vigilance tasks (Pinel 1999 [Gillberg et al. 1996]) and increase of sleepiness and microsleeps. Even though sleep-deprived people often report feeling tired and emotionally disturbed, and they do perform poorly on passive cognitive tasks, but many of the negative effects of sleep deprivation are confounded by other factors such as stress and circadian disruptions (Pinel 1999). Since these other factors could well contribute to negative effects, and in fact they were the cause the people loss sleep in the first place, we cannot consider these personal experiences as effects of sleep deprivation alone. .
Another reason why negative effects of sleep deprivation are exaggerated is due to the effect of microsleeps.
