Infographic of the Day: So What If You Don't Sleep Enough? How many times have you told yourself (especially when you're up at 2 a.m. on a Sunday night): "Eh, it's just sleep.
" Is it just sleep, though? What happens to your health when you're not sleeping enough? This infographic designed by FFunction for Zeo, a company that makes an electronic "sleep coach," is less of a real data visualization than a set of illustrated facts. Sleep is Awesome. How Little Sleep Can You Get Away With? Antonio Bolfo for The New York Times Catching Up Temporary relief for the sleep-deprived on trains and in airports in the New York area.
Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at , who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world. In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab. Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects’ ability to sustain attention with what’s known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P.V.T., considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures.