by John Medina
SLEEP

Meet Dr.
John Medina.
He wrote
the book
Brain Rules.

There are 12 Brain Rules.
Exercise Survival Wiring Attention
Short-term Long-term Sleep Stress
memory memory
Sensory Vision Gender Exploration
Integration

We're going to
look at sleep.

Rule #7
Sleep well,
think well.

Why does sleep matter?
We sleep for 1/3 of our lives, so it
must be important. Yet scientists
are only starting to understand it.

Sleep makes us vulnerable to
predators, so it must be important
and necessary.

We'll look at sleep in these ways:
1. What's going on in the sleeping
brain?
2. How does sleep work?
3. Larks, owls, and hummingbirds
4. The nap zone
5. Sleep = good
6. No sleep = bad
7. Sleep-friendly world

1 What's going
on in the
sleeping
brain?

The brain isn't inactive when
you're sleeping.

The brain isn't inactive when
you're sleeping. It's busy with
legions of neurons crackling
electrical commands.

A laboratory study showed that
while a rat was sleeping, its brain
was learning about the maze it
was running earlier.

2 How does
sleep work?

Sleep involves a battle between two
opposing drives. It's called the
circadian rhythm.

The circadian arousal system keeps
you awake. This is called “Process
C.”

The homeostatic sleep drive
makes you sleep. This is called
“Process S.”

The longer one army controls, the
more likely it is to lose.
That's why you can't stay awake
or asleep forever.
And that's why we're constantly
bouncing between sleep and
wakefulness.

3 Larks, owls, &
hummingbirds

Sleep patterns vary from
person to person.

Meet the morning larks.
They wake up early and
go to bed early.
About 10% of
us are larks.

Night owls wake up
late and go to bed
early.
About 20% of us
are night owls.

The other 70% of us us are
hummingbirds. Some are more
larkish, some more owlish, some in
between.
Which kind
of bird are
you?

4 The nap zone

Sleep rhythms fight their battle
around the clock not just at night.
__

Most of us want to sleep a little
during the day. There's a reason
for that. Some cultures have even
made it an institution. In Spain it's
called “siesta”.

Scientists now know there's a “nap
zone” that happens when the
Process C and Process S curves
converge. Perfect time for a nap!
Nap Zone

Here's how to calculate your
nap zone:
Add 12 hours after the mid-
point of your sleep. So if you
go to bed at 11 p.m. and
wake up at 7 a.m., your nap
zone would start at 3 p.m.
This is an oversimplification
but a general rule of thumb.

A NASA study showed a 26-
minute nap improved a pilot's
performance by more than
35%.

If that's what a nap can do,
imagine the benefits of a full
night's sleep!

5 Sleep = good

Have you ever gone to sleep with
something on your mind, and
woken to find that you have the
answer?

Mountains of
data show
that a healthy
sleep can
boost learning
significantly,
for certain
types of tasks.

Sleep has been shown to
enhance tasks that
involve visual texture
discrimination, motor
adaptations, and motor
sequencing.

But learning a procedure
appears most sensitive to
sleep improvement.

You know
the phrase
“Let's sleep
on it”?
It helps!

6 No sleep = bad

Sleep loss cripples thinking in just
about every way you can measure
thinking:
Attention
Executive function
Immediate memory
Working memory mood
Quantitative skills
Logical reasoning
Math knowledge

Eventually, sleep loss
affects manual dexterity,
including fine motor
control and even gross
motor movements, such
as the ability to walk.

7 Sleep-friendly
world

The effects of
sleep
deprivation
are thought to
cost
businesses in
the US more
than $100
billion a year.

What if businesses and schools
took the sleep needs of their
employees and students
seriously? Here are some ideas...

Variable Schedules
What if we matched chronotypes
to work schedules?
Remember larks and owls?
We might gain more productivity
and quality of life

Promote Napping
What if businesses and schools
were serious about the nap zone?
We wouldn't schedule meetings or
exams during the nap zone.
We could create a space for people
to take a half-hour nap every day.

Sleeping On It
Organizations might tackle their
hardest problems by sending the
team on a mini-retreat. They'd be
presented with the problem and
asked to think about it. But they
wouldn't start talking or sharing
until they had slept about eight
hours.

Learn more
about the
brain at the
Brain Rules
website:
brainrules.net

Thanks to Garr Reynolds for inspiring
this slideshow. Check out his \"Brain
Rules for Presenters\" presentation
on SlideShare.