Sleep Debt
Sleep debt is the effect of not getting enough sleep; a large debt causes mental, emotional and physical fatigue.
Sleep debt results in diminished abilities to perform high-level cognitive functions. Neurophysiological and functional imaging studies have demonstrated that frontal regions of the brain are particularly responsive to homeostatic sleep pressure.
Scientists do not agree on how much sleep debt it is possible to accumulate; whether it is accumulated against an individual's average sleep or some other benchmark; nor on whether the prevalence of sleep debt among adults has changed appreciably in the industrialized world in recent decades. It is likely that children are sleeping less than previously in Western societies.
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Famous quotes containing the words sleep and/or debt:
“Six, or at most seven, hours’ sleep is, for a constancy, as much as you or anybody can want: more is only laziness and dozing, and is, I am persuaded, both unwholesome and stupefying.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)