Rubik's Cube Improves Spatial IQ

Although majority of the people cling to the notion that sleep is a time when your body and brain shuts down for rest and relaxation, it is unequivocally a myth! Although it is a time when your body rests and restores its energy levels, sleep is an active state that influences both your physical and mental states. Insufficient restful sleep can result in sundry health problems.

Increase your child's IQ

A study shows there is a great way to enhance a child's intelligence, by encouraging healthy sleep patterns while he is a baby. In the children who were found to have excellent intelligence there was one thing in common. They all had healthy sleep patterns at night. Dr. Lewis Terman's research conducted in 1925, which continues to be widely quoted and used even today, examined over 3,000 children on the Stanford-Binet IQ Test. A common thing found in all children who had a high IQ was healthy sleep patterns at night.

Lack of sleep has detrimental effects on health and IQ

Many people doze off unintentionally during the day despite getting their usual share of sleep during the night. This could be a sign of a sleep disorder. Approximately 40 million Americans suffer from sleep disorders, including obstructive sleep apnea, insomnia, narcolepsy, and restless legs syndrome. An untreated sleep disorder can spell multiple troubles, viz.

• Decrease your daytime productivity.
• Increase your risk of facing an accident.
• Make you susceptible to illnesses and even early death.
• Increase your body mass index.
• Increase risk of impending diabetes and heart problems.
• Make you more prone to psychiatric conditions including depression and substance abuse.
• Decrease your ability to concentrate, stay alert, respond to stimuli or remember new information.

According to experts, every hour of sleep you lose translates to a temporary IQ loss of one point. A National Sleep Foundation study found that half of all U.S. workers rue that sleepiness interferes with their work yield quotient, and nearly 20 percent concede it makes them more prone to committing errors.

The link between sleep and healthy brain function

The brain processes new memories and stores them into long-term memory during sleep. Experiments on students have demonstrated that mental fatigue can lead to a lower IQ.

People in the United Kingdom are getting too little sleep, and are even running the risk of mental retardation, according to a report released in Sunday. Loughborough University's Sleep Research Centre reports that a growing number of offices are staffed around the clock, pushing Britain towards a 24 hour society.

According to the report, each hour short of eight hours of sleep a night could knock one point off a person's IQ. In this fashion, it would be easy to lose fifteen points in a week, resulting in a person with an IQ of 100 receding to one belonging to the "borderline retarded" category. The Sleep Centre also says a lack of sleep could lead to a decrease in reasoning skills and linguistic coherence, since sleep is the time when the brain processes information received during waking hours.

How much sleep do I need?

According to National Sleep Foundation sleep needs vary according to age.

Advance Research speaks

A popular theory by lead researcher Jan Born, from the Department of Neuro-endocrinology at the University of Luebeck, in Germany, suggests that sleep helps "fix" memories in the brain, and new research finds that passing a gentle electric current through the sleeping brain improves memory even more.

In this new study, researchers show that using an electric current at a particular frequency during non-rapid-eye-movement (non-REM) sleep can improve memory by about 8 percent.

Conclusion

Thus adequate sleep is a pre-requisite for healthy functioning of the brain and fighting against dip in IQ levels. Some people inquire whether it is possible to gain back the lost IQ by making up for the lost sleeping hours. The response to this is self deducible. Just as gaining weight is very easy, but cutting down on your diet cannot return you to your slim self again by the wave of a wand, so is the case with sleep and IQ.