11 ms·

> Interestingly, our study did not identify a significant relationship between sleep quality—that is, sleeplessness/insomnia and cognitive performance— contrary

> Interestingly, our study did not identify a significant relationship between sleep quality—that is, sleeplessness/insomnia and cognitive performance— contrary to some previous findings > The regression highlighted a positive association between normal sleep duration (7–9 hours) and cognitive scores... while extended sleep duration negatively impacted scores across both cohorts > intermediate and evening types, were linked to superior cognitive function propaganda by big insomnia ;)

kranner 2y ago
More like propaganda by Big Alcohol, given the following > Individuals who abstained from alcohol showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed alcohol, conflicting with previous research that has connected moderate drinking with cognitive impairment. Weekly and monthly alcohol consumption, as opposed to daily drinking, was found to somewhat correlate with lower cognitive scores.
- treetalker 2y ago
  This is a situation of correlation ≠ causation, because — as all Rick & Morty fans know — some geniuses are drinking copiously just to slow down their turbo-charged intellects. :-)
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    You have to put 2 spaces at the head of each line to get code formatting, otherwise your artistic endeavors are fed to the HN paragraph enforcement daemons.
    - treetalker 2y ago
      Thanks! For some reason it actually looked correct on my phone when I posted it. I’ve removed ASCII Rick just to be safe.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    Yes, let's go with that as the reason I drink.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    Good lord
- danielheath 2y ago
  Those who abstain entirely are disproportionately likely to be former alcoholics - which explains eg the apparent protective effect of moderate drinking
  - kranner 2y ago
    I don’t see how that’s the most likely reason to abstain. A lot of religious people have never consumed an alcoholic drink; at least that is the case for South Asians: Muslims in particular, but also many Hindus and Sikhs.
    - j_bum 2y ago
      This type of led to statistical issues that skewed our understanding of the health effects of alcohol consumption. Unless abstainers who previously abused alcohol are excluded or controlled for statistically, their health effects can skew results [0]. Here’s a blurb from a recent NYT article: > Fillmore was concerned about possible misleading variables in the studies: To start, they included ex-drinkers in the category of “abstainers,” which meant they were failing to account for the possibility that some people had stopped drinking specifically because of illness. The moderate drinkers looked healthy by comparison, creating the illusion that a moderate amount of alcohol was beneficial. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-risks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...
      - khafra 2y ago
        And it's fairly difficult to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, suitable for causal analysis, by excluding the lifelong teetotalers who would have become alcoholics if they had ever partaken.
    - criddell 2y ago
      The Presbyterian church my parents took me to used actual wine (with an option for grape juice) at communion. I think most people participating in the ceremony didn't consider that having a drink any more than if their prescription medicine contained alcohol.
- mnk47 2y ago
  So the Ballmer Peak is real! https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/
  - flobosg 2y ago
    From a few months ago: The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search – https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062892)
- luke-stanley 2y ago
  Some might just be avoiding falling asleep or being even less capable.
- bratbag 2y ago
  Hypothesis: The better you understand the world, the more likely you are to need an occasional drink.
  - ziggyzecat 2y ago
    addition to hypothesis: and that need grows exponentially with your understanding of the world until a certain point. That need can be reduced to a healthy "Mom said everything is fine in moderate amounts" once you choose to not live by conflicting standards, or rather: when you choose to not support implicitly AND explicitly conflicting causes ( many on the left, finboys & fingirls, law enforcement, ... but unemployed who don't work on themselves or their environment as well )
  - jajko 2y ago
    Not really, you need a coping mechanism with all the crap and stupidity across society, and how powerless truth and correct moral behavior can be. Alcohol is one of the worst ones, you just blunt yourself while still realizing all failures, just temporarily a bit downtuned, next morning back to misery. No solution or even improvement is happening, just basically giving up (or a bit of complaining which is just group psychological therapy). Sports, meditation, maybe even occasional psychedelics steered in right direction, active vacations, good food, good sleep. Life is much easier in such mode.
    - AbstractH24 2y ago
      So you are saying “psychedelics good coping mechanism, alcohol bad”? That is California sobriety at a level I’ve never seen before.
      - samstave 2y ago
        [flagged]
        monero-xmr 2y ago
        [flagged]
- bitexploder 2y ago
  Every study I have ever read emphasized importance of sleep. Many show grey matter reduction long term the less you sleep. Sleep studies literally use a little alcohol to disrupt sleep. All the research out there indicates alcohol also directly shrinks your grey matter. These findings are hard to believe for sure.
  - someothherguyy 2y ago
    Grey matter correlates with cognition and ethanol consumption, but that doesn't necessarily mean it makes every cohort (age, amount, duration, etc) worse at every cognitive battery. There are studies that show alcohol consumption is associated with greater novelty seeking, learning capacity, etc.
    - bitexploder 2y ago
      I generally think the direction is being smarter/curious first and alcohol comes along. Chemically, I don’t see how alcohol can make you have better cognition in the long run. In some narrow ways, I can see it. Long term is more interesting to me than a peak healthy person that also uses alcohol.
- rawgabbit 2y ago
  The study appears to say alcohol consumption has protective effect on cognition. Those who drank had less cognitive decline compared to those who abstained completely. If this is correct, this directly contradicts the other studies that says alcohol has zero benefits?
  - resoluteteeth 2y ago
    A lot of studies that don't control for confounding factors like the fact that many people who 100% abstain from alcohol are former alcoholics show benefits to small amounts of alcohol consumption compared to no alcohol consumption. However, the studies that make more of an effort to control for those confounding factors have generally found that there are no health benefits, so right now the evidence seems to favor the idea that there are no health benefits to alcohol and in the studies that show otherwise it is due to confounding factors. This study doesn't seem to have particularly attempted to control for these factors (it just controlled for specific cardiovascular diseases, etc.) so it's not surprising that the results match older studies that showed positive effects from small amounts of alcohol.
bigbacaloa 2y ago
[dead]
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
My pet theory is that extended sleep correlates with hide-away, hunger and depression modes - which signal to our body that energy must be conserved. And cognition without the ability to act is the definition of energy waste.
- jamesmotherway 2y ago
  Long sleep duration often presents with poor sleep quality, which negatively impacts cognition. "Long total sleep time may suggest prior sleep deprivation, medical conditions, or effects of medications."[1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4246141/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4246141/
The_Colonel 2y ago
I've been taking creatine for a while and it has interesting effects. On one hand, it seems making my sleep worse, i.e. sleeping less and kind of lightly? On the other hand, it helps me with cognitive performance, I get way less mentally exhausted during the day than I used to.
lynx23 2y ago
> normal sleep duration (7–9 hours) Show me one employed person with a life that manages to get 8 hours sleep on average. Most commuters would have to go to bed at 2100 to get a breakfast and enough time to get to work. I only get 8 hours when I know I am sleep deprived and go to bed at 2100. However, this is not "normal", and I bet it isn't normal for most. So why do we call it normal, then?
- louvki 2y ago
  idk it's normal for me but then again i live in Denmark and i dont have any children
- hansc 2y ago
  I do sleep 8+ hours each night (Netherlands): Up at 7.30, leave at 8.15, 30m commute. Leave work at 5.15, get to sleep around 10.45.
- hug 2y ago
  I work a full time tech job, I am out with friends or on a “date night” with my partner three or four times a week every week, and I have a few hobbies like music production and combat robotics. I get at least 8 hours every night. My “must be home and in bed” time on a weeknight is by 12:30AM, and I sleep in until 8:45AM. I am normally woken by my alarm. Weekends I simply set an alarm for 9 hours after I get in bed, which sometimes means sleeping until 2PM. I don’t eat breakfast, and I basically never commute in the morning, but if I do, my office is about 15 minutes away.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    Yeah not having to commute helps. More than lack of time, I'm usually too tired after a full day of work (8 or 9 till 6 or 6:30) to do anything else.
- XCSme 2y ago
  In the EU it's quite normal for the average person to get the 8 hours of sleep. Of course, it depends on the work sector you are in, but for most jobs you don't have to wake up at 6 AM. Also, most people live close to their work, within 30 minutes of biking/driving/public transport.

kranner 2y ago

More like propaganda by Big Alcohol, given the following > Individuals who abstained from alcohol showed lower cognitive scores than those who consumed alcohol, conflicting with previous research that has connected moderate drinking with cognitive impairment. Weekly and monthly alcohol consumption, as opposed to daily drinking, was found to somewhat correlate with lower cognitive scores.

treetalker 2y ago
This is a situation of correlation ≠ causation, because — as all Rick & Morty fans know — some geniuses are drinking copiously just to slow down their turbo-charged intellects. :-)
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  You have to put 2 spaces at the head of each line to get code formatting, otherwise your artistic endeavors are fed to the HN paragraph enforcement daemons.
  - treetalker 2y ago
    Thanks! For some reason it actually looked correct on my phone when I posted it. I’ve removed ASCII Rick just to be safe.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Yes, let's go with that as the reason I drink.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Good lord
danielheath 2y ago
Those who abstain entirely are disproportionately likely to be former alcoholics - which explains eg the apparent protective effect of moderate drinking
- kranner 2y ago
  I don’t see how that’s the most likely reason to abstain. A lot of religious people have never consumed an alcoholic drink; at least that is the case for South Asians: Muslims in particular, but also many Hindus and Sikhs.
  - j_bum 2y ago
    This type of led to statistical issues that skewed our understanding of the health effects of alcohol consumption. Unless abstainers who previously abused alcohol are excluded or controlled for statistically, their health effects can skew results [0]. Here’s a blurb from a recent NYT article: > Fillmore was concerned about possible misleading variables in the studies: To start, they included ex-drinkers in the category of “abstainers,” which meant they were failing to account for the possibility that some people had stopped drinking specifically because of illness. The moderate drinkers looked healthy by comparison, creating the illusion that a moderate amount of alcohol was beneficial. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-risks.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/15/magazine/alcohol-health-r...
    - khafra 2y ago
      And it's fairly difficult to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, suitable for causal analysis, by excluding the lifelong teetotalers who would have become alcoholics if they had ever partaken.
  - criddell 2y ago
    The Presbyterian church my parents took me to used actual wine (with an option for grape juice) at communion. I think most people participating in the ceremony didn't consider that having a drink any more than if their prescription medicine contained alcohol.
mnk47 2y ago
So the Ballmer Peak is real! https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/
- flobosg 2y ago
  From a few months ago: The Ballmer Peak: An Empirical Search – https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002 https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10002 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062892 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062892)
luke-stanley 2y ago
Some might just be avoiding falling asleep or being even less capable.
bratbag 2y ago
Hypothesis: The better you understand the world, the more likely you are to need an occasional drink.
- ziggyzecat 2y ago
  addition to hypothesis: and that need grows exponentially with your understanding of the world until a certain point. That need can be reduced to a healthy "Mom said everything is fine in moderate amounts" once you choose to not live by conflicting standards, or rather: when you choose to not support implicitly AND explicitly conflicting causes ( many on the left, finboys & fingirls, law enforcement, ... but unemployed who don't work on themselves or their environment as well )
- jajko 2y ago
  Not really, you need a coping mechanism with all the crap and stupidity across society, and how powerless truth and correct moral behavior can be. Alcohol is one of the worst ones, you just blunt yourself while still realizing all failures, just temporarily a bit downtuned, next morning back to misery. No solution or even improvement is happening, just basically giving up (or a bit of complaining which is just group psychological therapy). Sports, meditation, maybe even occasional psychedelics steered in right direction, active vacations, good food, good sleep. Life is much easier in such mode.
  - AbstractH24 2y ago
    So you are saying “psychedelics good coping mechanism, alcohol bad”? That is California sobriety at a level I’ve never seen before.
    - samstave 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - monero-xmr 2y ago
        [flagged]
bitexploder 2y ago
Every study I have ever read emphasized importance of sleep. Many show grey matter reduction long term the less you sleep. Sleep studies literally use a little alcohol to disrupt sleep. All the research out there indicates alcohol also directly shrinks your grey matter. These findings are hard to believe for sure.
- someothherguyy 2y ago
  Grey matter correlates with cognition and ethanol consumption, but that doesn't necessarily mean it makes every cohort (age, amount, duration, etc) worse at every cognitive battery. There are studies that show alcohol consumption is associated with greater novelty seeking, learning capacity, etc.
  - bitexploder 2y ago
    I generally think the direction is being smarter/curious first and alcohol comes along. Chemically, I don’t see how alcohol can make you have better cognition in the long run. In some narrow ways, I can see it. Long term is more interesting to me than a peak healthy person that also uses alcohol.
rawgabbit 2y ago
The study appears to say alcohol consumption has protective effect on cognition. Those who drank had less cognitive decline compared to those who abstained completely. If this is correct, this directly contradicts the other studies that says alcohol has zero benefits?
- resoluteteeth 2y ago
  A lot of studies that don't control for confounding factors like the fact that many people who 100% abstain from alcohol are former alcoholics show benefits to small amounts of alcohol consumption compared to no alcohol consumption. However, the studies that make more of an effort to control for those confounding factors have generally found that there are no health benefits, so right now the evidence seems to favor the idea that there are no health benefits to alcohol and in the studies that show otherwise it is due to confounding factors. This study doesn't seem to have particularly attempted to control for these factors (it just controlled for specific cardiovascular diseases, etc.) so it's not surprising that the results match older studies that showed positive effects from small amounts of alcohol.

bigbacaloa 2y ago

[dead]

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

My pet theory is that extended sleep correlates with hide-away, hunger and depression modes - which signal to our body that energy must be conserved. And cognition without the ability to act is the definition of energy waste.

jamesmotherway 2y ago
Long sleep duration often presents with poor sleep quality, which negatively impacts cognition. "Long total sleep time may suggest prior sleep deprivation, medical conditions, or effects of medications."[1] [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4246141/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4246141/

The_Colonel 2y ago

I've been taking creatine for a while and it has interesting effects. On one hand, it seems making my sleep worse, i.e. sleeping less and kind of lightly? On the other hand, it helps me with cognitive performance, I get way less mentally exhausted during the day than I used to.

lynx23 2y ago

> normal sleep duration (7–9 hours) Show me one employed person with a life that manages to get 8 hours sleep on average. Most commuters would have to go to bed at 2100 to get a breakfast and enough time to get to work. I only get 8 hours when I know I am sleep deprived and go to bed at 2100. However, this is not "normal", and I bet it isn't normal for most. So why do we call it normal, then?

louvki 2y ago
idk it's normal for me but then again i live in Denmark and i dont have any children
hansc 2y ago
I do sleep 8+ hours each night (Netherlands): Up at 7.30, leave at 8.15, 30m commute. Leave work at 5.15, get to sleep around 10.45.
hug 2y ago
I work a full time tech job, I am out with friends or on a “date night” with my partner three or four times a week every week, and I have a few hobbies like music production and combat robotics. I get at least 8 hours every night. My “must be home and in bed” time on a weeknight is by 12:30AM, and I sleep in until 8:45AM. I am normally woken by my alarm. Weekends I simply set an alarm for 9 hours after I get in bed, which sometimes means sleeping until 2PM. I don’t eat breakfast, and I basically never commute in the morning, but if I do, my office is about 15 minutes away.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Yeah not having to commute helps. More than lack of time, I'm usually too tired after a full day of work (8 or 9 till 6 or 6:30) to do anything else.
XCSme 2y ago
In the EU it's quite normal for the average person to get the 8 hours of sleep. Of course, it depends on the work sector you are in, but for most jobs you don't have to wake up at 6 AM. Also, most people live close to their work, within 30 minutes of biking/driving/public transport.