... Dinges says people who are chronically sleep deprived, like people who've had too much to drink, often have no sense of their limitations. They believe they've trained themselves. "I think it's a convenient belief. For the millions of people who don't get enough sleep because their commute to work is too long, or they spend too many hours at work, or they just want this lifestyle of go, go, go, it's convenient to say, 'I've learned to live without sleep.' But you bring ‘em into the laboratory - and we have an open challenge to any CEO or anyone in the world, come into the laboratory - we don't see this adaptation," he says.
One thing sleep researchers do see is that their sleep-deprived volunteers often have mood swings: they get short-tempered, then become almost giddy, sometimes within seconds.
"We took a group of young college undergraduates and we deprived them of sleep for about 35 hours straight. And then we placed them inside a MRI scanner and we showed them increasingly negative and disturbing images," says Matthew Walker, who devised a study to look at what was going on inside their brains. "And what we found was that in those people who had a good night of sleep, the control group, they showed a nice, modest, controlled response in their emotional centers of the brain."
"But, when we looked in the sleep deprived subjects, instead, what we found is a hyperactive brain response," he says.
And what's more, in the sleep-deprived subjects, Walker discovered a disconnect between that over-reacting amygdala (a region of the brain) and the brain's frontal lobe, the region that controls rational thought and decision-making, meaning that the subjects' emotional responses were not being kept in check by the more logical seat of reasoning. It's a problem also found in people with psychiatric disorders.
...
Eve Van Cauter, an endocrinologist at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, studies the effect of sleep on the body. At her lab, healthy, young volunteers like Jonathan Mrock are paid to come one at a time and have virtually every system in their bodies monitored while their sleep is interfered with.
"We did a study where we restricted sleep to four hours per night for six nights," Van Cauter explains. "And we noticed that they were already in a pre-diabetic state. And so, that was a big finding."
The study's subjects were on the road to diabetes in just six days, and that’s not all - they were also hungry. Van Cauter has made a radical discovery: that lack of sleep may be contributing to the epidemic of obesity in this country through the work of a hormone called leptin that tells your brain when you’re full.
"We observed that the volunteers, they actually had a drop in leptin levels," Van Cauter explains. "Leptin was telling the brain, 'Time to eat. We need more food.'"
"Even though they’d eaten," Stahl remarks.
"But in fact they had plenty of food," Van Cauter agrees.
...
Van Cauter and Tasali are investigating a novel theory that some of the health problems we typically associate with old age may in fact be caused by the loss of deep sleep.
"We lose deep sleep at a very early age. So a young, healthy person may have 100 minutes of deep sleep, and at 50 years old it may be as little as 20 minutes. So it really… goes down very quickly," Van Cauter explains.
Tasali's goal is to turn 19-year-old Jonathan, sleep-wise, into a 70-year-old.
The next morning - 346 sounds later - it's time for testing. Now Jonathan's going to have fat extracted from his body for analysis, go through a PET scan to see how his brain is metabolizing sugar, and between procedures, he’s answering questions about how he feels. His doctors assure 60 Minutes that Jonathan will be fine once he goes back to his normal sleep routine, but after four nights without deep sleep they have found that, like prior study subjects, he is hungrier, less alert, and most importantly, his body is no longer able to metabolize sugar effectively, putting him temporarily at increased risk for Type 2 diabetes.
"We usually think of diabetes as something that's a disease of old age. But really it may be a disease of sleep deprivation," Stahl remarks.
"I would say that sleep deprivation may be a new risk factor for diabetes," Van Cauter says. "Not just aging, not just being overweight or obese, not just having a family history of diabetes, which are the three major risk factors. But this is an added one. And we have really an epidemic of diabetes now. And Type 2 diabetes is now occurring in children, in adolescents. And, you know, adolescents and children too are also being sleep deprived. Maybe high schoolers are amongst the most sleep deprived individuals in our society, because they have an enormous sleep need - nine to ten hours. Yet they sleep less than seven hours per night."
She says this research proves we all need to rethink what we consider essential for good health - that the diet and exercise formula also has to include sleep.
...