Study: Final Sleep Hours Are Critical

July 3 -- The wannabe super-achiever who spends too much time getting ready for the big day at the expense of getting enough sleep is probably doing precisely the wrong thing.

Researchers at Harvard University have found new evidence that the brain continually reorganizes itself while the host is snoozing away. A nap in the afternoon probably boosts performance, but it's no substitute for getting a full night's sleep because those last couple of hours of slumber are when the brain tells itself to pay attention to what's going on.

It is during that critical phase that the brain sends "funny looking wave forms" that tell some brain cells to beef up their connections with other neurons, says Mathew Walker of the Harvard Medical School's department of psychiatry. Walker, lead author of a report published in the July 3 issue of the journal Neuron, says those wave forms apparently work as "powerful triggers" that tell our brain something we've been working on is important, thus improving our performance the next day by committing a learned skilled to the memory banks.

Honing Skills in Your Sleep

That electrical activity, called "sleep spindles," can be measured, and the research shows that spindles abound toward the end of the sleep period.

"It just so happens that when you track the amount of these spindles that the human brain has during the regular eight-hour period of sleep, they seem to ramp up and have very high intensities in the last two hours of the night," Walker says. "It's specifically those two hours that we have found to be most important."

So the person who hops out of bed after six hours sleep and goes forth to use newly learned skills to slay a dragon has managed to shut down that critical phase of mental activity just as it was getting started. His new skills likely won't be nearly as potent as they might have been.

Significantly, this apparently applies to a wide range of human endeavors, from playing a musical instrument to hitting a golf ball to pounding on a keyboard. All of those depend on something scientists call the "procedural memory system," and it involves learning all types of skills.