Dr. Orfeo Buxton

well everyone wants to feel restored after they slept not tired and exhausted still but sharp ready to go and so one way that you know your sleep was disrupted or way too short is that you don't have that sense of that the sleep was restorative how people experience that can vary and it can vary night to night tossing and turning is a good way to put it this can be for long stretches or frequent interruptions during the night either internally generated by

thinking and waking up to something or disruptions from the environment.

You know, pets, especially cats, are not advised for sleep.

They're not on the same schedule.

They kind of don't care if you're getting good sleep or not.

Might have to work on that.

So the actual advice is to get seven or more hours a night.

on a regular basis and it seems like the regular basis is maybe doing even more work it's a sleep is a habit just like exercise and diet you don't have three salads and wake up lean you don't go to the gym for six hours and wake up the rock sleep is a habit and so you need enough of it it needs to be on a regular basis but what we're showing here in this study in older adults

is that it needs to also be relatively unbroken.

So if you have very long interruptions or frequent interruptions, your cognitive performance is a little less than preferred.

Yeah, so this is very different from the controlled laboratory studies where we know that cognitive performance is influenced by how much you slept last night, the last week or two, how disrupted it was.

This was looking at the role of day-to-day sleep in cognitive function in older adults in a real-world setting.

So they were sleeping in their own bed, going about their usual daily activities.

They had a sleep watch on their wrist for a couple of weeks.

And during the day, they did six...

brief brain games every day.

And those brain games are on a study phone app, and they can evaluate various characteristics of cognitive processing, memory, processing speed, and so forth.

So we did this in several hundred older adults in their 70s and 80s in Bronx, New York, as part of the Einstein Aging Study.

And we examine multiple aspects of sleep.

So duration, timing, quality, disruption, those kinds of things overnight and how day to day sleep influences cognitive performance the next day.