Download Explain how biological factors may affect one

Sleep Depravation (SD)
There are many biological factors that affect the cognitive thought process of
a human, one being Sleep Depravation. Sleep depravation is spreading more and
more as the younger generations start to get less sleep due to things like the
increase in working hours, the Internet or simply the pleasures in the entertainment
industries. This essay will focus on how Sleep deprivation affects the cognitive
processes such as attention, short-term memory, one’s motivation, and lastly
behavior.
The first study is a study on the areas, which sleep depravation affects, and
what functions it affects the human body. Dr. Kilgore WD did many researches using
brain scan technology on people while they are deprived of sleep and compare it to
the scans of the person when he/she have slept well. The data acquired from the
researched shows that the effects of sleep depravation occurs mostly in the
prefrontal cortex, as a brain region that may be particularly susceptible to the
effects of sleep loss, executive function tasks that putatively measure prefrontal
functioning have slowed down inconsistent findings within the context of sleep
deprivation. Since not all of the human functioning neurons are in the prefrontal
cortex, the scientists concluded that the affect of sleep deprivation does not affect
the bodily functions such as human organ failures, and only affect what the scientist
predicted to affect which is the functions of the brain that includes a general slowing
of response speed and increased variability in performance, alertness, attention and
vigilance. Although things such as alertness and attention are still being debated the
thing we know that sleep depravation clearly affects on many higher level cognitive
capacities are perception and memory.
The second study will focus on how exactly does sleep deprivation affect
short-term memory. First, the two most widely studied cognitive problems in Sleep
Depravation are attention and short-term memory. The short-term memory can be
divided into four parts: phonological loop, spatial sketchpad, the episodic buffer and
central executive. The phonological loop temporarily stores verbal information; the
sketchpad stores pictures, and the episodic buffer to separate and differentiate
information from several different sources, and the central executive controls them
all. These processes of short-term memory play a role in certain attention functions,
such as sustained attention. Both attention and working memory are linked to the
functioning of frontal lobes of the brain meaning that according to the assumption
made by Kilgore and the experiment of the vigilance test by Dinges and Powell 1985,
the affects of sleep depravation would cause short-term memory lost in things like
picture or music, and also confusion in memory because of the buffer.
The third study will focus on motivation, which is another form of attention.
Scientists wanted to know that do sleep deprived people have less motivation for
doing things so they might change the timeline for working in many countries.
Harrison and Horne (1998, 1999) suggested that the deterioration of cognitive
performance during Sleep Depravation could be due to boredom and lack of
motivation caused by repeated tasks, especially if the tasks are simple and
monotonous. They used short, novel, and interesting tasks to destroy this
motivational gap, yet still noticed that sleep deprived people have impaired
performance. In contrast, other researchers suggest that sleep deprived subjects
could maintain performance in short tasks by being able to temporarily increase
their attention effort, but when a task is longer, performance deteriorates as a
function of time.
In conclusion, sleep depravation can affect many people in the same way but
produce different results, because of the variety of humans. From the data in the
research shown above it can be hypothesized that people’s behavioral patterns
change to cope and adapt with the sleep depravation. The effects shown were clear
that memory and attention were affected like predicted which is a negative
influence to one’s mind. But, it also shows that people can be a lot less motivated
and effective during the period in which they are sleep deprived and also become a
lot more capable at the same time.