People who sleep on an average between 7 to 8 hours each night showed better cognitive function than those who slept more, or less than this amount, reports a new study. The findings of the study are published in the journal Sleep. The world's largest sleep study was launched in June 2017, and within days more than 40,000 people from around the world participated in the online scientific investigation, which includes an in-depth questionnaire and a series of cognitive performance activities.
‘Too much sleep can equally impair brain-power and cognition as too little sleep.’
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"We really wanted to capture the sleeping habits of people around the entire globe. Obviously, there have been many smaller sleep studies of people in laboratories, but we wanted to find out what sleep is like in the real world," says Adrian Owen, Western's superstar researcher in Cognitive Neuroscience and Imaging. Read More..
"People who logged in gave us a lot of information about themselves. We had a fairly extensive questionnaire, and they told us things like which medications they were on, how old they were, where they were in the world and what kind of education they'd received because these are all factors that might have contributed to some of the results."
Approximately half of all participants reported typically sleeping less than 6.3 hours per night, about an hour less than the study's recommended amount. One startling revelation was that most participants who slept four hours or less performed as if they were almost nine years older.
Another surprising discovery was that sleep affected all adults equally. The amount of sleep associated with highly functional cognitive behavior was the same for everyone (7 to 8 hours), regardless of age. Also, the impairment associated with too little, or too much, sleep did not depend on the age of the participants.
"We found that the optimum amount of sleep to keep your brain performing its best is 7 to 8 hours every night, and that corresponds to what the doctors will tell you to need to keep your body in tip-top shape, as well. We also found that people that slept more than that amount were equally impaired as those who slept too little," says Conor Wild, Owen Lab Research Associate and the study's lead author.
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On the positive side, there was some evidence that even a single night's sleep can affect a person's ability to think. Participants who slept more than usual the night before participating in the study performed better than those who slept their usual amount or less.
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