Conor J. Wild(1), Emily S. Nichols(1), Michael E. Battista(1), Bobby Stojanoski(1), & Adrian M. Owen(1)
Most people will at some point experience not getting enough sleep over a period of days, weeks, or months. However, the effects of this kind of everyday sleep restriction on high-level cognitive abilities – such as the ability to store and recall information in memory, solve problems, and communicate – remain poorly understood. In a global sample of over 10,000 people, we demonstrated that cognitive performance, measured using a set of 12 well-established tests, is impaired in people who reported typically sleeping less, or more, than 7-8 hours per night – which was roughly half the sample. Crucially, performance was not impaired evenly across all cognitive domains. Typical sleep duration had no bearing on short-term memory performance, unlike reasoning and verbal skills, which were impaired by too little, or too much, sleep. In terms of overall cognition, a self-reported typical sleep duration of 4 hours per night was equivalent to aging 8 years. Also, sleeping more than usual the night before testing (closer to the optimal amount) was associated with better performance, suggesting that a single night’s sleep can benefit cognition. The relationship between sleep and cognition was invariant with respect to age, suggesting that the optimal amount sleep is similar for all adult age groups, and that sleep-related impairments in cognition affect all ages equally. These findings have significant real-world implications, because many people, including those in positions of responsibility, operate on very little sleep and may suffer from impaired reasoning, problem-solving, and communications skills on a daily basis.
This repository contains all the python code and data analyses used in the creation of this manuscript. All statistics, figures, and numbers included in the paper should be fully visible in the analysis pipleline. There are five folders in this repo:
- notebooks/ - Contains viewable notebooks that step through the entire analysis. The analysis is split into separate sections to avoid extrememly long notebooks.
- lib/ - Contains custom code (e.g., constants and functions) used by the analysis notebooks.
- CSVs/ - Generated spreadsheets used to create tables in the manuscript.
- images/ - Generated figures for the manuscript (in .pdf format).
Documentation will be continually updated.
Unfortunately, the original and/or processed data are not available to share at this time.