And they had the tendency to perseverate on verbal memory tests: In this case, to come up with the same answer again and again, cross it out, and try again, which is a sign that the creative mind isn’t doing so well. People who were sleep-deprived for the 32 hours performed significantly worse on most types of divergent thinking, including fluency, flexibility and originality. One study deprived participants of sleep for 32 hours and tested them on various aspects of thinking. When people are sleep-deprived, certain types of thought seem to be affected more than others: For instance, divergent thinking-thinking outside the box, in new and imaginative ways-seems to be the first thing that goes when one is sleep-deprived, whereas convergent thinking-being able to figure out the correct answer, as on standardized tests-stays intact. We know this from anecdotes and from evidence. Sleep seems to beget creativity-and sleep deprivation strips it away. One study found that just a little sleep deprivation-the loss of 2 hours of sleep per night for 14 nights-left participants with poorer performance on certain neurobehavioral tasks that involved attention and short-term memory. Sleep deprivation has also been shown to have a negative impact on cognitive functions like attention and working memory. Sleep deprivation drains your executive function.” That’s why we have so many accidents with cars, and of course trains. When you’re sleep-deprived, it strongly affects your ability to multitask. Driving is the most intensive multitasking activity we do-it uses hands, feet, vision, awareness of what’s going on. "Sleep deprivation will definitely affect one’s ability to multitask. “We know that sleep is necessary for higher cortical function, the most important of which is multi-tasking” says Thorpy. Sleep deprivation can affect everything from cognition to attention to decision-making. It doesn’t take a study to tell us that a lack of sleep affects our cognitive capacities, but luckily, there are a lot of them. Another incredibly strong reason to make sure we get enough. These proteins and other toxins seem to accumulate during the day, and are cleared during sleep. And perhaps most astonishing is that much of this gunk is the β-amyloid protein, which is a precursor to the plaques in Alzheimer’s disease. The space between brain cells expands significantly during sleep, which facilitates the clearing of the "gunk” through cerebrospinal fluid. The lymphatic system of the brain opens up at night, and removes toxins while we’re asleep.” “There’s a lot of new research in this area in the last few years. “I think some of the most exciting work is on the glymphatic system,” says Michael Thorpy, director of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Health System and professor of clinical neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. One of the most illuminating discoveries in the last few years is that the brain clears out toxins much more rapidly while we’re asleep than when we’re awake. Toxins, including those associated with Alzheimer’s disease, are cleared during sleep ![]() And this means that bad memories in addition to the good ones more likely to stick around, and less likely to be forgotten. A very recent study showed that once negative emotional memories are consolidated during sleep, they’re less likely to be suppressed. ![]() One thing to be aware of is that sleep also seems to nail down negative memories, which probably plays a role in PTSD and depression. And research has shown that the brain tends to weaken the connections that form the memories that the brain deems unimportant. The theory is that the brain consolidates the memories it needs, but prunes back the ones it doesn’t. When learning the task and recalling the task were separated by a night of sleep, rather than the same amount of time during waking hours, the participants did much better. In one study, participants had to learn a motor routine (tapping buttons in a certain order). Most people have probably observed the phenomenon whereby sleep helps us remember things we’ve learned during the day. The brain makes a lot of connections during the day, but not all of them are worth saving so sleep is a time in which the brain streamlines the connections it “needs.” One of the central functions of sleep is that it helps consolidate long-term memory-it seems to do this, not only through strengthening certain neural connections, but also through pruning back unwanted ones.
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