A clever little study by a college senior in Colorado found that students who were told they'd gotten a good night's sleep, even if they hadn't, performed better on attention and memory tests than students who were told they'd slept poorly -- even if they were well rested.
Christina Draganich based her results on two experiments with 164 students at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colo. A paper about the study, "Placebo Sleep Affects Cognitive Functioning," was published this year in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.
The placebo effect is potent, time-proven medicine. It has been shown that a significant (but incalculable) part of physician-prescribed therapies work because patients believe they will. Traditionally viewed as an alternative to drug treatment, the placebo effect is a beneficial outcome that cannot be attributed to a treatment or therapy but rather is caused by a patient's beliefs and perceptions. For example, a patient given sugar pills reports reduced pain.
A "nontraditional" placebo effect has been found to cause poison ivy in test subjects exposed to fake plants, physical improvements in people who'd undergone fake surgeries and a coffee high in those imbibing placebo caffeine.
A team of Harvard researchers even found that a group of motel maids' beliefs that they were logging significant exercise for the day -- absent any other factors -- led to weight loss, improved blood pressure and decreased body fat over the course of the month-long study.
"We've known about the regular placebo effect for thousands of years, but most of the time we hear about it in drug studies," said Kristi Erdal, a psychology professor at Colorado College and faculty supervisor for Draganich's study. "It's only been in the last decade or two that people have begun exploring the nontraditional placebo effect, branching out and pushing the envelope to see how far that can take you.
"I think our mindset affects a lot more of our behavior and our physiology than we ever thought."
For her senior thesis in neuroscience, Draganich decided to see if the same concepts and manipulations could be applied to sleep.
"Throughout college, I saw how students focused on their lack of sleep before taking an exam. I wondered if their scores were maybe influenced by their attitude regarding how tired they thought they were," said Draganich, who graduated in 2012.
Because the study hinged on students' believing researchers could assess the quality of a previous night's sleep, Draganich had to devise a legitimate-seeming fabrication. As setup, she first asked participants to fill out a questionnaire about how well they believed they'd slept the night before; then they came into the lab for a five-minute lesson about sleep.
"I told them sleep quality can be measured by the percent of time spent in REM sleep, and sleep quality often predicts cognitive
functioning," Draganich said. She told them about a brand new (fictional), cutting-edge technique that allows researchers to assess an individual's REM sleep from the night before by measuring lingering biological markers such as heart rate and brain wave frequency.
"I know that sounds far-fetched -- I did make it up," said Draganich, "but we had a lot of things on our side to lend authority."
There were "complicated drawings" up on the board in the lab, and students were connected to an electroencephalography (EEG) machine that responded to their movements.
Participants then were given real tests to measure cognitive functioning. Generally, those who were told they didn't get enough sleep scored lower, while people who were told they'd slept well achieved higher-than-average marks.
"What we were doing is looking at how an authority figure can affect a person's thinking and therefore their performance," Draganich said.
Draganich currently works with spinal cord and brain injury patients at Craig Hospital in Denver, and plans to put what she learned from her sleep study to work in the exam room once she becomes a doctor.
"I've always been very interested in how attitude interacts with health," she said. "As a physician, it's important to remember how you frame information for your patients, whether positive or negative, can affect a patient's motivation or willingness to comply with care and therefore potentially their outcome."
ActiveStyle on 05/26/2014