Tuesday, November 6, 2001

All-nighters benefit students, study says
By Hilaire Fong
Daily Bruin

LOS ANGELES (U-WIRE) — Instead of catching a few more hours of sleep the night before an exam, pulling an all-nighter may prove to be beneficial, according to a new sleep study.

Rapid Eye Movement sleep, the dreaming period, does not have an important role in memory formation, according to University of California-Los Angeles psychiatry and biobehavioral science professor Jerome Siegel’s study.

“It is an attractive idea that learning actually occurs in sleep,” Siegel said. “However, I have read hundreds of studies, and that idea is not well supported by data. There is no correlation between intelligence and REM sleep.”

The more sleep you get, the more often you reach REM. During sleep, people go through several non-REM stages before reaching REM sleep, and as the cycle continues, REM sleep becomes more prevalent than deep sleep.

Studies show that depriving humans and animals of REM sleep by awakening them or by drug treatments does not damage their abilities to retain information.

In many cases, humans taking a class of drugs called Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors that eliminate REM sleep for periods of months or even years have unimpaired or, in some cases, improved memory. Also, humans with brain damage that prevents REM sleep have normal memory.

Siegel said this research does not mean it is wise to pull an all-nighter before any big test, and he does not promote that idea.

“If you are sleepy, you will not be able to concentrate and organize the material,” Siegel said. “It just depends on the test itself, and whether you can make it safely to the exam.”

For exams that test broad knowledge, like the SAT, Siegel recommends that students sleep instead of study. But if students need to learn specific material for a test, staying up to learn the material would not hinder their abilities to retain information.

Research conducted on animals draws similar conclusions to human studies: There is no correlation between intelligence and REM sleep.

Dolphins, considered by scientists to be very intelligent animals, spend less than 12 minutes of their 10-hour sleep period in REM sleep.

Animals that have long periods of REM sleep are not necessarily smarter than animals with short periods of REM sleep, Siegel said.

Siegel is especially interested in research on the platypus, one of the most primitive animals and the only duck-billed mammal.

Platypi spend eight hours of their 14-hour sleep period in REM.

Even though platypi spend more than half their sleeping time in REM, they are not a highly advanced species compared to other animals.

For humans, the choice to sleep or stay up is an important one, especially for students whose grades may be on the line. Students try to find a balance between knowing the material for a test and feeling clear-minded enough to take the test.

In order to function during a test, many students say they try to get about seven hours of sleep the night before.

Fourth-year biology student Anthony Camara prefers to get sleep the night before a test. He is, however, willing to stay up early into the morning to make sure he covers all of the material.

“If I do not get sleep before an English test, I will still be able to stay up and function. If I have to calculate a lot of numbers for a science or math test, I make more mistakes when I do not get sleep,” Camara said.