Does your workweek schedule dig you into an ever-deepening hole of sleep deprivation? Do you sleep in on the weekends to try to boost yourself back out? You're in good company. But even if you feel recovered by the following week, your brainpower might be suffering.
In a survey by the National Sleep Foundation, 40 percent of respondents said they try to "catch up" on sleep during the weekend. Pennsylvania State University professor and physician Alexandros Vgontzas, along with a group of colleagues, recruited 30 subjects to study how well this catching up really works. The subjects were healthy men and women between 18 and 34 (who didn't mind the prospect of sleeping with a catheter in their arm).
For two weeks before the study, researchers made sure subjects got 7.5 to 8 hours of sleep every night. Then the subjects came into the sleep lab. The experiment began with ...
