I know, you stopped listening to your parents around age 12, but every now and again, they do have useful advice for you:
Only 5% of high school seniors get eight hours of sleep a night. Children get an hour less than they did 30 years ago, which subtracts IQ points and adds body weight.
Until age 21, the circuitry of a child’s brain is being completed. Bronson and Merryman report research on grade schoolers showing that “the performance gap caused by an hour’s difference in sleep was bigger than the gap between a normal fourth-grader and a normal sixth-grader.” In high school there is a steep decline in sleep hours, and a striking correlation of sleep and grades.
Tired children have trouble retaining learning “because neurons lose their plasticity, becoming incapable of forming the new synaptic connections necessary to encode a memory. … The more you learned during the day, the more you need to sleep that night.”
The school day starts too early because that is convenient for parents and teachers. Awakened at dawn, teenage brains are still releasing melatonin, which makes them sleepy. This is one reason why young adults are responsible for half the 100,000 annual “fall asleep” automobile crashes. When Edina, Minn., changed its high school start from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., math/verbal SAT scores rose substantially.
Furthermore, sleep loss increases the hormone that stimulates hunger and decreases the one that suppresses appetite. Hence the correlation between less sleep and more obesity.
So, even though the temptation is to stay up as late as you possibly can . . . don’t. You’ll actually notice the difference the next day.
It would be interesting to see if Chinese and Indian children are allowed to sleep in to better their grades. Considering how they are outperforming us pathetic westerners, they must be allowed to sleep all day.
I suspect, though, that studies of Chinese and Indian teens would generate different headlines:
Fear of organ harvesting improves academic performance
Being surrounded by bone-crushing poverty enhances reading comprehension
Comment by Lickmuffin — March 4, 2010 @ 13:00
You’ve got to allow for selection bias (in the case of India) and incomplete or misleading stats (in the case of China). Indian children are getting better access to education than ever before, but there’s almost certainly a somewhat-meritocratic selection process, so that (aside from the wealthy and well-connected) only brighter students are able to move on to higher education.
China is really two different countries: the urban China is probably following the same path as India, while rural Chinese kids may not be able to get beyond basic schooling without herculean efforts on the part of their parents. Rural China has 3-4 times the population of urban China, BTW.
Comment by Nicholas — March 4, 2010 @ 13:13
Point taken. But they are still burying us.
Comment by Lickmuffin — March 5, 2010 @ 10:46