Sleep disorders affect millions of people across the globe in their social and cognitive function as well as potential self-physical endangerment. Many sleep disorders affect the amount of time one sleeps, leaving one in a sleep debt or simply completely sleep deprived. This affects can affect reaction times, memory, emotional state, and safety. Stress, work, time management, genetics, diet, illness, and medications all play a role in the loss of sleep. This can affect anyone around the world and actually does affects half of adults over the age of 65. Sleep disorders are widely underreported in younger age groups. Thus, It is not clear whether this is a normal part of aging. However, through the advancement of sleep research and …show more content…
(Roddick and Cherney ) These “sleep attacks” can be triggered at any time without warning leaving one unable to move due to the natural paralyzing agent that the human body produces while in a sleep state. Normally, the body becomes paralyzed during sleep to protect itself from being damaged, but sometimes people are not able to produce this paralyzing agent. Sleep apnea is characterized by pauses in breathing during sleep. This is a serious medical condition that causes the body to take in less oxygen. It can also cause you to wake up during the night. (Roddick and Cherney ) Insomnia is a very commonly reported sleep problem and often goes untreated despite the adverse effects on the one’s quality of life and health. Insomnia is defined by having difficulty falling asleep, maintaining sleep, or by short sleep duration, despite adequate opportunity for a full night’s sleep. (Colten and Altevogt) Restless legs syndrome is an overwhelming need to move the legs which are most prevalent at night along with a tingling sensation in the legs at times. (Roddick and Cherney ) Restless Legs Syndrome is most commonly identified with conditions such as attention deficit disorder and Parkinson’s disease. Actor Michael J Fox is notably known for having and being an advocate of Parkinson’s disease. An estimated fifty to seventy million US adults have some sort of …show more content…
Walker in their paper “Memory consolidation and reconsolidation: what is the role of sleep?” memory as we know it is not a single entity and is instead normally divided into declarative and non-declaritive memory systems as shown in figure 1. (Stickgold and Walker) Where declarative memory systems consist of episodic and semantic cognitive operations and non-declarative memory systems consist of procedural skill, conditioning, priming, and Non-associative cognitive operations. Sleep is divided into different stages of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep which alternate among the night in ninety minute cycles. Memory is refined and consolidated during sleep to strengthen memories and allow it to endure the rigor of time and memory loss. Evidence of sleep-dependent plasticity at both local and systems levels suggests that sleep has a crucial role in consolidation processes leading to memory enhancement. At the systems level, functional neuroimaging studies have demonstrated reactivation of patterns of brain activity seen during task training across subsequent sleep, matching similar patterns of post-training reactivation in rat hippocampal neurons. (Stickgold and