Researchers from Brazil and the United States have shown that the lack of sleep affects the human gait. Dedicated to another negative impact of the study of scientists was published in Scientific Reports magazine.
Until recently, walking was considered as a fully automatic process, requiring a minor conscious control – which, in particular, confirmed the experiments on animals. However, over the past decade, the researchers found out that it turns out that healthy subjects can adjust their gait depending on visual stimuli, which involves some impact of consciousness.
In his experiment, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Sao Paulo distributed to 30 Brazilian students actimens, with the help of which their activity was tracked for 14 days. The subjects did not give any instructions so that they could adhere to the usual mode of sleep and wake. On average, each student slept for six hours a day at eight. Some of the students compensated for a lack of sleep, dumbling on the weekend. On the eve of the 14th day, one group of students spent the night without sleep in the laboratory – without access to caffeine and other stimulants. After that, all participants performed a test.
Each of the subjects got up onto a treadmill, while the speed for all was the same. The subjects asked to keep up with the rhythm of the metronome. Experimentors gradually increased and lowered the speed of the metronome, not to mention this to students. The gait of the participants in the experiment – and, in particular, the moment when their heels concerned the treadmill – were tracked using cameras and compared with the course of metronome.
“We found that mistakes (in the currentization with the metronome -” Lenta.ru “) were more significant in people with a sharp lack of sleep,” Arturo Forener-Courtero said one of the researchers. They knocked out of the rhythm and reacted worse to acoustic tips. The best results showed those students who slightly slept at the weekend – even if they passed the experiment in almost a week.