2/14 "The Lost Hour"

Take out your reading from Friday: “The Lost Hour." What specific impacts does a lack of sleep have on the teenage mind and body? What surprised and/or shocked you in this chapter? How do you think this overall lack of sleep has impacted you and your peers? Be sure to quote several specific examples from the reading, along with your comments.

"Only about 5% of high school seniors actually get eight hours of sleep per night and 60% of high schoolers report extreme daytime sleepiness". It has been discovered that during sleep the brain shifts what it learned that day to more efficient storage regions of the brain. A lack of sleep does not allow this to occur. Memories are also processed during REM sleep. In addition, sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus the hardest and this is where positive or neutral memories are processed. Therefore, with a lack of sleep the brain can only recall negative memories. Overall sleep deprivation makes a teenager much less alert and positively functional in school. Our brains need this time to recuperate and prepare for the next day. I found it surprising that lack of sleep is also connected to obesity. It is also very interesting that our tiredness during first period is not our fault, melatonin is actually still being produced making us sleepy. I think the lack of sleep definitely impacts my understanding of material learned in school because I really feel the difference in alertness. I find that on days that I went to bed late the night before I am unable to concentrate on hard subjects such as calculus and statistics and cannot understand what is being taught to me. I think this is a huge problem for most people my age especially because with our full schedules and technology accessibility allows us to stay up later and later at night.