Abstract
The timing and dynamics of many diverse behaviors of mammals, e.g., patterns of animal foraging or human communication in social networks exhibit complex self-similar properties reproducible over multiple time scales. In this paper, we analyze spontaneous locomotor activity of healthy individuals recorded in two different conditions: during a week of regular sleep and a week of chronic partial sleep deprivation. After separating activity from rest with a pre-defined activity threshold, we have detected distinct statistical features of duration times of these two states. The cumulative distributions of activity periods follow a stretched exponential shape, and remain similar for both control and sleep deprived individuals. In contrast, rest periods, which follow power-law statistics over two orders of magnitude, have significantly distinct distributions for these two groups and the difference emerges already after the first night of shortened sleep. We have found steeper distributions for sleep deprived individuals, which indicates fewer long rest periods and more turbulent behavior. This separation of power-law exponents is the main result of our investigations, and might constitute an objective measure demonstrating the severity of sleep deprivation and the effects of sleep disorders.
Highlights
IntroductionSleep deprivation good sleep (like nutrition and physical exercise) is considered a basic contributor to human health and well-being, its chronic deprivation seems symptomatic of modern societies
Sleep deprivation good sleep is considered a basic contributor to human health and well-being, its chronic deprivation seems symptomatic of modern societies
The pattern of the activity events in rested wakefulness (RW) mode exhibits a highly-visible circadian rhythmicity, whereas episodes of activity measured in the standard deviation (SD) mode present a substantial portion of a shortinterval chattering
Summary
Sleep deprivation good sleep (like nutrition and physical exercise) is considered a basic contributor to human health and well-being, its chronic deprivation seems symptomatic of modern societies. Some recent research shows that both total sleep deprivation and chronic sleep reduction may lead to similar effects in terms of physiological, affective and cognitive consequences (e.g., [4,5]). The most obvious effect of sleep loss is the daytime drowsiness, an underestimated problem concerning operators of transportation and in other ‘‘critical-safety’’ work settings. A list of cognitive sleep loss consequences set in a review by Durmer and Dinges [6] includes a variety of symptoms: from slowed reactions, omission and commission errors, and a decline in working memory performance, to deterioration in divergent thinking and increased likelihood of unproductive problem-solving. Cognitive domains are affected diversely by sleep loss, so that sustained attention deteriorates much more than the performance of challenging working memory tasks [4]. Impairments in performance are accompanied by changes in performance selfratings [5]
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