What is Sleep?
Sleep can be defined a state of reduced mental & physical activity in which consciousness is altered & certain sensory activity is inhibited. During sleep, there is a marked reduction in muscle activity & interactions with the environment.
What is Cognitive Function?
Cognitive skills, which is also called cognitive abilities or cognitive capacities, are skills of the mind, as opposed to other types of skills such as motor skills. Some examples are literacy, self-reflection, logical reasoning, abstract thinking, critical thinking & mental arithmetic.
Sleep is essential to make sure that normal human cognitive performance. Not having enough sleep diminishes a vast variety of cognitive functions such as attention, language, reasoning, decision making, learning & memory
Sleep plays a vital role in memory consolidation. Memory consolidation is when short-term memories (or learnings) are transformed & stabilized into long-term memories. This process is essential for retaining learned information so we can access it later on.
A lack of sufficient sleep is associated with cognitive decline in a new study. The study reports that people who wake early in the morning require five to six hours of sleep to remain cognitively healthy. The findings also show that people who wake up later require seven to eight hours of sleep.
Both more and less sleep negatively impacted a variety of cognitive functions, such as identifying complex patterns and manipulating information to solve problems. It was verbal ability that was most significantly impacted.
Quality sleep – & getting enough of it at the right times is as important to survival as food & water. Without sleep you can’t maintain the pathways in your brain that let you learn & create new memories, & it’s harder to concentrate & respond quickly.