Sleep
deprived and forgetful at the end of a long vacation is par for the course for
our youngsters. It won’t be long now before the kids are wending their weary
way back to school. It is well established that we adults need our beauty sleep
and it is Slow Wave Sleep, SWS, that we need to help us remember things.
Potkin
and Bunney have observed that adolescents haven’t been studied very much in
terms of the effects of sleep deprivation and have set out to remedy that with
their study that was published last week in PLoS ONE (1).
They
took 40 boys and girls between 10 and 14 and tested them at home (no music, TV
or other distractions as we find when our kids are doing homework) and tested them
with paired words sequences. They had to learn these and were then tested
later. This was to test their semantic memory. This is part of the declarative
memory, which we use to stuff facts away to spit them out later in term tests
or trivia games.
There
were two groups. One learned their paired words at 9 a.m. and were tested at 9
p.m. with no sleep during that 12-hour period. The other group learned their
word pairs at 9 p.m. They were then tucked up to get a good night’s sleep
before being tested at 9 a.m. the next day.
The
results showed a clear improvement for the group that had a good night’s sleep.
Their score was 21% better.
All
of them were given a control working memory test in which they re-ordered
letters and numbers in case there was a circadian rhythm factor. There wasn’t
and sleep or no sleep made no difference to that working memory performance.
Maybe you don’t ride a bicycle as well when you’re tired, but you don’t forget
how to ride it.
We
need to make sure our kids get 8 – 10 hours of sleep with as much SWS as
possible before school days. Tricky in this electronic age. Reading a book
under the cover with a flashlight doesn’t compare with the pull of interactive
games on smartphones and tablets.
