Polish scientists have shown that a week after a period of chronic lack of sleep, a person cannot recover all his abilities. The article of the researchers was published in the magazine PLOS ONE.
The danger of chronic lack of sleep for a person is quite known – for example, it is associated with subsequent inattention and memory loss, an increased risk of accidents and cardiovascular diseases. However, it is unclear how and for what time a person can recover after it.
To evaluate this, researchers from the University of Yaghellonian forced 23 volunteers within ten days to reduce the time of their sleep by 30 percent (on average for two hours, from 7.5 hours, to 5.5). After that, seven days of restoration in everyday conditions with unlimited sleep were followed. All this time, the participants of the study were on the wrists Actigraphs to monitor sleep, and their brain activity was tracked with the help of electroencephalographer. In addition, they daily passed the stamp test, measuring the reaction delay and its accuracy when reading words.
It turned out that participants could not return to the indicators to chronic lack of sleep – with the exception of the strip test indicators.