Sleep Control
With the pressures of modern life, many of us have to perform demanding
and stressful work in a state of chronic sleep loss.
In these circumstances, you have a considerable advantage over
others if you can maintain high levels of alertness while sleep
deprived, but can also achieve good quality sleep when the opportunity
presents itself.
Being able to switch rapidly between high alertness and deep sleep
can single you out as having Superhuman qualities
The Test
Our test aims to find out how well our contestants performed when
sleep deprived and how quickly they could get to sleep when allowed
to.
Our contestants were taken to a special sleep lab and were wired
up with electrodes so that we could monitor their brain's electrical
activity so that we would know exactly when they were awake and
asleep. They were then kept in a brightly lit room for 48 hours
to sleep deprive them in preparation for the test. During this time,
it was essential that they all stayed awake otherwise they lost
points.
After 48 hours, each contestant was placed in their own bedrooms
where they had to complete a simple performance test lasting 30
minutes: pressing the space bar on their laptop computers when they
think they see three consecutive odd numbers. After that, the lights
went out and our contestants were allowed to sleep (known as a recovery
sleep). The electrodes were monitored to see exactly how much sleep
each contestant had. After 30 minutes sleep, they were all woken
up by a combination of extremely loud white noise and bright lights.
Then, the laptop test started again.
This pattern of test, sleep, test, sleep was repeated over six
hours and, at the end, the scores were added up.
The Experts
Prof. Barbara Stone,
Sleep Psychologist - Qinetiq Centre for Human Science
Why Is It Superhuman To Cope with Sleep Deprivation?
Going without sufficient sleep has both physical and mental effects:
- Surprisingly our physical performance is relatively unaffected
- Our Immune system is replenished by sleep so being deprived of
sleep reduced our immunity
- Our mood can be adversely affected by lack of sleep - we
can become irritable, depressed, anxious or even overconfident
- We can experience a reduction in verbal fluency
- Our ability to make decisions and work as a team can also
be impaired
- As the pressure to sleep builds you can have 'microsleeps'
- Our ability to perform well in tasks that are long, monotonous
and need our sustained attention is impaired
- Overall, our brain activity slows down which can affect
our capacity for creative thinking and our memory
In normal life most people will make some mistakes in the simplest
of tests. But under sleep deprivation conditions most of us will
make a large number of errors. It is very rare for someone to perform
perfectly and not make a mistake under these conditions. Sleep deprived
people find it difficult to perform simple vigilance tests like
our contestants which, at the best of times, can be dull and boring.
They find it hard to keep their motivation levels up and to keep
performing at a high level.
If you are repeatedly woken up after a small amount of sleep, you
will suffer from sleep inertia - the drowsiness associated with
the disrupted sleeping pattern. The quicker you recover from it,
the better you are able to perform. The harder you find it to fully
wake up yourself up, the harder it is to perform well and the more
mistakes you will make.
Scoring
The contestants were ranked according to their performance on the
computer tasks and on their ability to get to sleep and rest well
when allowed to do so.
Our Superhuman was the contestant who was able to function best
when sleep deprived but also had the ability get good quality sleep
when the opportunity arose.
Click here to see the
final results >
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