Does Sleep Deprivation Lead To Insanity? By Jason Rickard At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

One of the biggest misconceptions about sleep is that it if you go for a couple of days with no sleep, you will end up losing your sanity. Eye opening discoveries were made a few years ago, and this has changed this great misunderstanding about sleep.

A man named Robert McDonald holds the world record for having stayed up for almost nineteen days with no sleep. All that was reported was extreme drowsiness, and intense difficulty with concentration. Another person by the name of Randy Gardener went without sleep for eleven days and again the same was reported.

These cases cleared the biggest misconception about sleep, which was that sleep deprivation leads to insanity. It is clear that sleep deprivation does not lead to you losing your sanity but in fact here is a really surprising fact for you. In a recent study on over one million participants, it was discovered that those who slept less, actually went on to live a longer life. This excludes the extra time gained by sleeping less.

In some cases, lack of sleep was reported as a major problem. For example, many insomniacs experience hallucinations, slow speech, movement, reactions and poor concentration. This however does not confirm that lack of sleep can lead to insanity. Hallucinations and other signs of lack of sleep mentioned above are temporary and can be cured upon a good days sleep.

One astonishing discovery made recently on the aspect of sleep is that sleep interferes with memory. Memory has a very clear link with sleep. An experiment conducted on individuals who had not gone to sleep for nearly two days showed that their memory retention on identifying individual faces was weak and difficult for the subject. However the subjects were able to distinguish familiar faces from the unfamiliar ones with a positive outcome. This in some way can be the reason from where, the false theory of insufficient sleep can lead to insanity, may have been derived.

Many people today complain from the lack of sleep and blame many of their health problems due to the insufficient sleep. Experts argue that any association between sleep and health problems almost always emerge weak at best and could without difficulty be explained by other causes.

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