{"id":3007,"date":"2018-02-19T08:00:30","date_gmt":"2018-02-19T13:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/braindevs.net\/blog\/blog\/?p=3007"},"modified":"2018-02-06T10:57:29","modified_gmt":"2018-02-06T15:57:29","slug":"sleeplessness-harms-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/sleeplessness-harms-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Sleeplessness Harms Women’s Thinking More Than Men’s?"},"content":{"rendered":"

You can understand why this study<\/a> lit up my twitter feed recently. It makes a remarkable claim: women — but not men<\/em> — experience working memory declines after a sleepless night.<\/p>\n

Why We Care<\/h2>\n

We have at least two powerful reasons to care about this study.<\/p>\n

First<\/strong>, it makes strong claims about gender differences<\/span>. According to lead author Rangtell (and 8 colleagues), women’s<\/em> performance on a working memory task gets worse after a sleepless night.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, men’s<\/em> working memory performance remains just as good as when they had a cozy 8-hour sleep.<\/p>\n

(I’ve written about gender differences before. You may recall that I’m often skeptical of specific claims<\/a>, but do think that there are some important differences<\/a> at the population level.)<\/p>\n

So, this study plays an important role in the ongoing debate.<\/p>\n

Second<\/strong>, Rangtell’s study focuses on\u00a0working memory<\/span>. And, working memory is\u00a0really important in school<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

What is working memory?<\/p>\n

When a student works on a word problem in math, she first has to\u00a0select<\/em> the key information from the sentences. Then she holds<\/em> that information in mind. Third, she reorganizes<\/em> all that information into the correct formula. And finally she combines<\/em> pieces of that formula appropriately: for example, she combines “7x+8x” into “15x.”<\/p>\n

Whenever students select, hold, reorganize, and combine<\/em> information, they’re using working memory.<\/p>\n

And, our students do that all the time. They use working memory to conjugate a new Spanish verb. And, when they apply new terminology (“protagonist”) to a specific book (“Sethe is the protagonist of\u00a0Beloved<\/em>.”) And, when they balance chemical equations.<\/p>\n

Basically, schools are shrines we build to honor successful working memory functioning.<\/p>\n

If there truly is a gender difference in working memory function, that’s a\u00a0really big deal<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Sleeplessness Harms Women More Than Men?<\/h2>\n

This study is, conceptually, very straigtforward.<\/p>\n

Ask some people to do a working memory task after a full night’s sleep. Then, ask them to do the same task after they’ve been up all night. Is there a difference in their working memory performance?<\/p>\n

\"sleeplessness<\/p>\n

Rangtell and her colleagues say: for men, “no”; for women, “yes.”<\/p>\n

However, this study includes a very serious problem. The task that they use to measure working memory DOESN’T MEASURE WORKING MEMORY.<\/p>\n

(You read that right.)<\/p>\n

The researchers asked these people to listen to a list of numbers, and then type those numbers into the computer in the same order.<\/p>\n

That’s simply not a test of working memory. After all, the participants didn’t have to reorganize<\/em> or combine<\/em> anything.<\/p>\n

Instead, that’s a test of short-term memory<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Now, short-term memory is related to working memory. But, “related to” isn’t good enough.<\/p>\n

Imagine, for instance, I claimed that sleeplessness makes people shorter. The way I determine your height is by measuring the length of your arm.<\/p>\n

Of course: arm length and height are related. But, they’re not the same thing. Tall people can have short-ish arms. I can’t measure one thing and then make a claim about a related but different<\/em> thing.<\/p>\n

So too, Rangtell can’t measure short-term memory and then make claims about working memory. She didn’t measure working memory<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Does sleeplessness harm women’s working memory more than men’s? We just don’t know.<\/p>\n

(By the way: I’ve reached out to the lead researcher to inquire about the working memory\/short-term memory discrepancy. I’ll update this post if I hear back.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can understand why this study lit up my twitter feed recently. It makes a remarkable claim: women — but not men — experience working memory declines after a sleepless night. Why We Care We have at least two powerful reasons to care about this study. First, it makes strong claims about gender differences. According […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":1980,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[21,19,10,30],"class_list":["post-3007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lb-blog","tag-gender","tag-skepticism","tag-sleep","tag-working-memory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3007"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3014,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3007\/revisions\/3014"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.learningandthebrain.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}