Less Than 5 Hours of Sleep Leads to False Memories

Posted on October 2, 2014

Skimping on sleep wears down your body in so many ways: it worsens cognitive function, slows reaction time, and makes learning more difficult.

That's quite enough consequences without piling on the results of a recent study in Psychological Science, which found that sleep deprivation is linked to false memories. Among the 193 people tested, those who got 5 or fewer hours of sleep for just one night were significantly more likely to say they'd seen a news video when they actually hadn't.

The study also discovered that students were more prone to researchers' false suggestions when they hadn't slept more than five hours. They wove those suggestions into their responses 38% of the time, while the group that got plenty of sleep did so 28% of the time. That's probably because sleep deprivation leads to problems encoding new information, the authors write.

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Category(s):Sleep Disorders

Source material from Time