caffeine 2
CAN NAPS HELP?
In the 1980s and ’90s, David Dinges, together with his astute collaborator (and recent administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) Dr. Mark Rosekind, conducted another series of groundbreaking studies, this time examining the upsides and downsides of napping in the face of unavoidable sleep deprivation. They coined the term “power naps”—or, should I say, ceded to it. Much of their work was with the aviation industry, examining pilots on long-haul travel.
The most dangerous time of flight is landing, which arrives at the end of a journey, when the greatest amount of sleep deprivation has often accrued. Recall how tired and sleepy you are at the end of an overnight, transatlantic flight, having been on the go for more than twenty-four hours. Would you feel at peak performance, ready to land a Boeing 747 with 467 passengers on board, should you have the skill to do so? It is during this end phase of flight, known in the aviation industry as “top of descent to landing,” that 68 percent of all hull losses—a euphemism for a catastrophic plane crash—occur.
The researchers set to work answering the following question, posed by the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA): If a pilot can only obtain a short nap opportunity (40–120 minutes) within a thirty-six-hour period, when should it occur so as to minimize cognitive fatigue and attention lapses: at the start of the first evening, in the middle of the night, or late the following morning?
It first appeared to be counterintuitive, but Dinges and Rosekind made a clever, biology-based prediction. They believed that by inserting a nap at the front end of an incoming bout of sleep deprivation, you could insert a buffer, albeit temporary and partial, that would protect the brain from suffering catastrophic lapses in concentration. They were right. Pilots suffered fewer microsleeps at the end stages of the flight if the naps were taken early that prior evening, versus if those same nap periods were taken in the middle of the night or later that next morning, when the attack of sleep deprivation was already well under way.
They had discovered the sleep equivalent of the medical paradigm of prevention versus treatment. The former tries to avert an issue prior to occurrence, the latter tries to remedy the issue after it has happened. And so it was with naps. Indeed, these short sleep bouts, taken early, also reduced the number of times the pilots drifted into light sleep during the critical, final ninety minutes of flight. There were fewer of these sleep intrusions, measured with EEG electrodes on the head.
When Dinges and Rosekind reported their findings to the FAA, they recommended that “prophylactic naps”—naps taken early during long-haul flights—should be instituted as policy among pilots, as many other aviation authorities around the world now permit. The FAA, while believing the findings, was not convinced by the nomenclature. They believed the term “prophylactic” was ripe for many a snide joke among pilots. Dinges suggested the alternative of “planned napping.” The FAA didn’t like this, either, feeling it to be too “management-like.” Their suggestion was “power napping,” which they believed was more fitting with leadership- or dominance-based job positions, others being CEOs or military executives. And so the “power nap” was born.
The problem, however, is that people, especially those in such positions, came to erroneously believe that a twenty-minute power nap was all you needed to survive and function with perfect, or even acceptable, acumen. Brief power naps have become synonymous with the inaccurate assumption that they allow an individual to forgo sufficient sleep, night after night, especially when combined with the liberal use of caffeine.
No matter what you may have heard or read in the popular media, there is no scientific evidence we have suggesting that a drug, a device, or any amount of psychological willpower can replace sleep. Power naps may momentarily increase basic concentration under conditions of sleep deprivation, as can caffeine up to a certain dose. But in the subsequent studies that Dinges and many other researchers (myself included) have performed, neither naps nor caffeine can salvage more complex functions of the brain, including learning, memory, emotional stability, complex reasoning, or decision-making.
One day we may discover such a counteractive method. Currently, however, there is no drug that has the proven ability to replace those benefits that a full night of sleep infuses into the brain and body. David Dinges has extended an open invitation to anyone suggesting that they can survive on short sleep to come to his lab for a ten-day stay. He will place that individual on their proclaimed regiment of short sleep and measure their cognitive function. Dinges is rightly confident he’ll show, categorically, a degradation of brain and body function. To date, no volunteers have matched up to their claim.
We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep.
Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.”
There is but a fraction of 1 percent of the population who are truly resilient to the effects of chronic sleep restriction at all levels of brain function. It is far, far more likely that you will be struck by lightning (the lifetime odds being 1 in 12,000) than being truly capable of surviving on insufficient sleep thanks to a rare gene.
In the 1980s and ’90s, David Dinges, together with his astute collaborator (and recent administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) Dr. Mark Rosekind, conducted another series of groundbreaking studies, this time examining the upsides and downsides of napping in the face of unavoidable sleep deprivation. They coined the term “power naps”—or, should I say, ceded to it. Much of their work was with the aviation industry, examining pilots on long-haul travel.
The most dangerous time of flight is landing, which arrives at the end of a journey, when the greatest amount of sleep deprivation has often accrued. Recall how tired and sleepy you are at the end of an overnight, transatlantic flight, having been on the go for more than twenty-four hours. Would you feel at peak performance, ready to land a Boeing 747 with 467 passengers on board, should you have the skill to do so? It is during this end phase of flight, known in the aviation industry as “top of descent to landing,” that 68 percent of all hull losses—a euphemism for a catastrophic plane crash—occur.
The researchers set to work answering the following question, posed by the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA): If a pilot can only obtain a short nap opportunity (40–120 minutes) within a thirty-six-hour period, when should it occur so as to minimize cognitive fatigue and attention lapses: at the start of the first evening, in the middle of the night, or late the following morning?
It first appeared to be counterintuitive, but Dinges and Rosekind made a clever, biology-based prediction. They believed that by inserting a nap at the front end of an incoming bout of sleep deprivation, you could insert a buffer, albeit temporary and partial, that would protect the brain from suffering catastrophic lapses in concentration. They were right. Pilots suffered fewer microsleeps at the end stages of the flight if the naps were taken early that prior evening, versus if those same nap periods were taken in the middle of the night or later that next morning, when the attack of sleep deprivation was already well under way.
They had discovered the sleep equivalent of the medical paradigm of prevention versus treatment. The former tries to avert an issue prior to occurrence, the latter tries to remedy the issue after it has happened. And so it was with naps. Indeed, these short sleep bouts, taken early, also reduced the number of times the pilots drifted into light sleep during the critical, final ninety minutes of flight. There were fewer of these sleep intrusions, measured with EEG electrodes on the head.
When Dinges and Rosekind reported their findings to the FAA, they recommended that “prophylactic naps”—naps taken early during long-haul flights—should be instituted as policy among pilots, as many other aviation authorities around the world now permit. The FAA, while believing the findings, was not convinced by the nomenclature. They believed the term “prophylactic” was ripe for many a snide joke among pilots. Dinges suggested the alternative of “planned napping.” The FAA didn’t like this, either, feeling it to be too “management-like.” Their suggestion was “power napping,” which they believed was more fitting with leadership- or dominance-based job positions, others being CEOs or military executives. And so the “power nap” was born.
The problem, however, is that people, especially those in such positions, came to erroneously believe that a twenty-minute power nap was all you needed to survive and function with perfect, or even acceptable, acumen. Brief power naps have become synonymous with the inaccurate assumption that they allow an individual to forgo sufficient sleep, night after night, especially when combined with the liberal use of caffeine.
No matter what you may have heard or read in the popular media, there is no scientific evidence we have suggesting that a drug, a device, or any amount of psychological willpower can replace sleep. Power naps may momentarily increase basic concentration under conditions of sleep deprivation, as can caffeine up to a certain dose. But in the subsequent studies that Dinges and many other researchers (myself included) have performed, neither naps nor caffeine can salvage more complex functions of the brain, including learning, memory, emotional stability, complex reasoning, or decision-making.
One day we may discover such a counteractive method. Currently, however, there is no drug that has the proven ability to replace those benefits that a full night of sleep infuses into the brain and body. David Dinges has extended an open invitation to anyone suggesting that they can survive on short sleep to come to his lab for a ten-day stay. He will place that individual on their proclaimed regiment of short sleep and measure their cognitive function. Dinges is rightly confident he’ll show, categorically, a degradation of brain and body function. To date, no volunteers have matched up to their claim.
We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep.
Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.”
There is but a fraction of 1 percent of the population who are truly resilient to the effects of chronic sleep restriction at all levels of brain function. It is far, far more likely that you will be struck by lightning (the lifetime odds being 1 in 12,000) than being truly capable of surviving on insufficient sleep thanks to a rare gene.
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