Sleep Deprivation affects on College Students' Cognitive Performances

Introduction

Mankind is supposed to take rest after working for enough number of hours because the physical organ become weak and in order to make these organs regain the power needed to perform different tasks (Pilcher and Walters, pp 125). It is same for the mantle performance because if humans keep awaked for long time then their mental ability to understand different tasks and solve problems will also reduced. It is most common for the college students because they are exposed to more task of different nature and they try their level best to go through all these tasks (Vadhan, Hart, Van, Gunderson, Haney and Foltin, pp 359). The reason that why this happened to the college students is that these individuals used to get involved in all type of tasks such as study, sports, social activities and adventure type activities and as these individuals are young and very energetic they always attempt to perform best. It is a fact that time is limited but the needs and activities to perform are not limited. This makes college students to take less amount of sleep (Vadhan, Hart, Van, Gunderson, Haney and Foltin, pp 359). The Biologists and researchers have proved through their studies that if any individual is taking less amount of sleep then their cognitive performance will surely be reduced. The sleep deprivation results in making more frequent human error such as accidents (Vadhan, Hart, Van, Gunderson, Haney and Foltin, pp 359).

Discussion

Cognitive performance means that obtaining and storing information and applies the learning to make use of knowledge. It helps an individual's to apply their skills in real life matter and also to abstract the knowledge from the experiences (Pilcher and Walters, pp 359).

The sleep deprivation mostly affects attention of the person which is crucial factor to perform any activity (Vadhan, Hart, Van, Gunderson, Haney and Foltin, pp 359). According to biologists the part of the brain which largely involved in attention is known as parietal lobes and if there are any lesions to this part of the brain then the attention level of the person will be directly affected. Injured parietal lobe makes the attention of the person slow and difficult to divert (Pilcher and Walters, pp 125).

Divided Attention

The sleep deprivation makes the attention of the person divided at the same time. In order to perform well and as per standards, we need to be attentive. On the other hand, it will become very difficult to understand the situation and problems and when the understanding of the situation is low or weak it is not possible to solve the problem (Vadhan, Hart, Van, Gunderson, Haney and Foltin, pp 359). Cognitive performance involved in acquiring knowledge or learning from experiences which need in depth analysis of the situation. The in depth analysis can be done by giving full attention to any matter (Pilcher and Walters, pp 125). If a person is unable to give full attention to any matter than the performance ...