Sleep? What's sleep?

By Michael Kang

Many college students proper sleep. Studies have shown that the best number of hours of sleep is roughly 9 hours. Unfortunately, only a handful of college students obtain such a pleasurable amount of sleep. Such rigorous sleep schedules are very harmful to the body and also for the advancement of higher education. I speak from experience when I say that the lack of sleep can affect someone physically and mentally. With only a few hours of sleep a night, I find it difficult to wake up in the morning and to pay attention during school.
A research project conducted by Kelly Fogle, Josie Frye, and Amber Richey from Manchester College states that "[r]esearch studies concerning sleep deprivation have found that lack of sleep has strong ties to several factors that could potentially affect academic success, especially at the college level." According to Fogle, Frye, and Richey quoting an outside source, "[l]ack of sleep can adversely affect functions of the frontal cortex of the brain, and implicit learning has been associated with the prefrontal cortex of the brain (Heuer and Klein 2003). In one study, Heuer, Spijkers, Kiesswater and Schmidtke (1998) found that as the amount of sleep a person gets per night decreases, the person’s ability to learn implicitly also decreases. Implicit learning is usually related to difficult or complex tasks learned more passively than actively (Heuer and Klein 2003). In a later study, Heuer and Klein (2003), deprived subjects of sleep for one entire night and came to the same conclusion, that there is a negative relationship between sleep deprivation and implicit memory. When a person is deprived of sleep, he or she is not as able to engage the prefrontal cortex to learn implicitly (Heuer and Klein 2003)."
Ultimately, the lack of sleep proportionally affects the lack of attentiveness. I personally experiences the truth behind this idea for the second day I lacked sleep, I was unproductive in taking notes and was unable to receive anymore knowledge; therefore, if I were to be tested on anything that took place during lecture, I would not pass for my lacking sleep which would cause my grades to fall.