Oversleeping and lack of sleep impair thinking and memory

Chi­nese sci­en­tists from the Peking Uni­ver­si­ty Clin­i­cal Research Insti­tute argue that with a lack and excess of sleep, cog­ni­tive impair­ment devel­ops.

Dur­ing the study, sci­en­tists col­lect­ed data on more than 20,000 men and women. All of them talked about how they usu­al­ly sleep, and also took tests for cog­ni­tive func­tions. Sci­en­tists believed that a per­son sleeps lit­tle if he had no more than 4 hours of sleep per day. If a per­son slept 10 or more hours a day, then it was an excess of sleep. The ide­al option was rec­og­nized as 7 hours of sleep per day.

It turned out that cog­ni­tive func­tions wors­ened both when peo­ple slept 4 hours a day or less, and when the dura­tion of sleep was 10 hours or more.

The mech­a­nisms of action of exces­sive and insuf­fi­cient amounts of sleep on the state of the brain are not yet clear. There is evi­dence that lack of sleep increas­es the con­cen­tra­tion of amy­loid and tau pro­tein in the cere­brospinal flu­id, the depo­si­tion of which in brain tis­sues leads to the devel­op­ment of Alzheimer’s dis­ease. Sci­en­tists also believe that each per­son has their own opti­mal bal­ance between the amount of sleep and the con­cen­tra­tion of amy­loid pro­tein.

And too much sleep can, the­o­ret­i­cal­ly, pro­voke inflam­ma­to­ry process­es, which also impair con­cen­tra­tion, affect think­ing and mem­o­ry pro­cess­ing.