Neurocognitive Consequences of Sleep Deprivation

By Namni Goel, Hengyi Rao, J. Durmer, David F. Dinges. Seminars in neurology, 2005

2,319 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Sleep deprivation is associated with considerable social, financial, and health-related costs, in large measure because it produces impaired cognitive performance due to increasing sleep propensity and instability of waking neurobehavioral functions. Cognitive functions particularly affected by sleep loss include psychomotor and cognitive speed, vigilant and executive attention, working memory, and higher cognitive abilities. Chronic sleep-restriction experiments—which model the kind of sleep loss experienced by many individuals with sleep fragmentation and premature sleep curtailment due to disorders and lifestyle—demonstrate that cognitive deficits accumulate to severe levels over time without full awareness by the affected individual. Functional neuroimaging has revealed that frequent and progressively longer cognitive lapses, which are a hallmark of sleep deprivation, involve distributed changes in brain regions including frontal and parietal control areas, secondary sensory processing areas, and thalamic areas. There are robust differences among individuals in the degree of their cognitive vulnerability to sleep loss that may involve differences in prefrontal and parietal cortices, and that may have a basis in genes regulating sleep homeostasis and circadian rhythms. Thus, cognitive deficits believed to be a function of the severity of clinical sleep disturbance may be a product of genetic alleles associated with differential cognitive vulnerability to sleep loss.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dd398cca60b7ed396eca8d7eccf48e3f431499d2

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

Citations in the corpus

A deficit in the ability to form new human memories without sleep (2007, methodology): “Both groups then performed a recognition test (without fMRI) on day 4, after two recovery nights of sleep, allowing determination of encoding success in the absence of concerns about fatigu”
Insufficient Sleep and the Socioeconomic Status Achievement Gap (2011, background): “We have long known that in adults, attention, cognition, and memory are significantly impaired after total or partial sleep deprivation (Durmer & Dinges, 2005; Pilcher & Huffcut, 1996).”
Sleep deprivation reduces default mode network connectivity and anti-correlation during rest and task performance (2012, background): “A single night of total sleep deprivation (SD) can result in behavioral deficits with accompanying alterations in neural activation patterns (Chee and Chuah, 2008; Goel et al., 2009).”
Negative Impacts of Shiftwork and Long Work Hours (2014, background): “Sleep deprivation impairs many types of performance: reduces the ability to concentrate; slows reaction time; and reduces the ability to remember and learn new facts and motor skills (Goel et al., 2009).”
Sleep for cognitive enhancement (2014, background): “Not obtaining enough sleep diminishes a wide variety of cognitive functions such as attention, language, reasoning, decision making, learning and memory (for reviews see Durmer and Dinges, 2005; Killgore, 2010; Jackson et al., 2013).”
Serving You Depletes Me? A Leader-Centric Examination of Servant Leadership Behaviors (2020, background): “Future research could focus more on uncovering the effects of servant leadership behaviors on other markers of self-regulatory resources, such as prefrontal cortical functioning (e.g., Durmer & Dinges, 2005) and decrements in brain function (e.g., Jennings, Monk, & van der Molen, 2003).”