Dr. Orfeo Buxton

And also on average, short sleep or lots of disruptions.

How did those influence cognitive performance on average?

Well, on average, the people who sleep more poorly have worse cognitive function.

A smaller difference was within a person.

It was significant, but smaller than the between person difference.

So you might have heard people are different.

We rediscovered that for sleep and cognition.

But what we also showed was day to day, there's an effect on processing speed the next day.

And it's related to how many disruptions or interruptions there were.

If they had more interruptions than their usual, than their average, then they had worse cognitive performance or processing speed than their average the next day.

Maybe a little fancier than writing an email, but yeah, a simple brain game.

Right.

So I've done a lot of controlled laboratory studies.

They're very challenging and very expensive.

And there's always the do I really sleep that great on a crinkly hospital bed, you know, while being watched?

It's just weird enough that people do now prefer more of the real world type of experiments where people are sleeping in their own beds.

And the technologies now enable us to do that with relatively low impact for the study participants.

Yeah, well, you hit on one of the things.

There's a lot going on for restorative processes during sleep.

So wakefulness is very costly energetically for your brain neurons and their support cells that recharge overnight and allow the brain to be restored to be able to function the next day.