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Experimental results show little effect of sleep deprivation on fruit fly lifespan. Even with a severe reduction in sleep – one that proves deadly to rats and humans – flies do not seem to be perturbed.įigure 2. Even though the sleep-deprived flies showed a 95% reduction in the amount of sleep they got, there was only a slight decrease of a couple of days in the average lifespan of the male and female flies ( Figure 2). This persisted for the entire lifespan of the fly, which can be almost two months in a laboratory environment. They monitored the flies using their computer-assisted tracking and as soon as a fly was still for 20 seconds, the tube would spin to interrupt their sleep. Having seen that there are naturally occurring sleepless flies, the authors of this study investigated whether depriving flies of sleep would decrease their survival. Their surprising finding showed that some flies are naturally sleepless, since their sleep habits remained the same when tested again in a new tube. They found that when looking at normal healthy flies of the same genetic strain, sleep amounts were very different between individuals – some flies were only reported to sleep a few minutes a day while others slept for 10 hours. These two approaches allowed them to record every single position of the fly in the vial, but also to differentiate between sleep (immobility lasting longer than five minutes) and what they term ‘micro-movements’ or movements that happen while the fly is standing in one place: grooming, egg-laying, and feeding.
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The researchers housed flies in individual vials with food and recorded the flies’ behavior using computer-assisted tracking and machine learning. Fruit flies are a common organism used in laboratory studies – they are easy to maintain, and many tools have been developed over the years to study their genetics, neurobiology, and behavior. Given the potential that sleep deprivation may not be deadly, scientists from the Imperial College London decided to rigorously investigate the sleep habits of the fruit fly in order to see if there is a link between sleep deprivation and survival. Therefore, the bar is extended in a lighter shade to represent that pigeons may be able to go longer without sleep before suffering ill effects. For pigeons, the experiment was terminated after 29 days, but the pigeons did not show ill effects. Results of sleep deprivation studies for different organisms. In the case of fatal familial insomnia, it is difficult to say whether death occurs due to lack of sleep or due to the destruction of neurons caused by the disease – infecting mice with the same misfolded protein that is responsible for Fatal Familial Insomnia causes premature death without interrupting sleep. In pigeons, chronic sleep deprivation did not cause the same lethal effects as in rats.
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While these sleep deprivation experiments seem to point to the fact that going without sleep is deadly, there still exists room for speculation about the necessity of sleep. In humans, those affected by Fatal Familial Insomnia, a rare genetic disorder caused by misfolded proteins in the brain, suffer from an inability to sleep and die within months of showing symptoms.
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In rats, for example, sleep deprivation over the course of two to three weeks is lethal. In order to study whether sleep is absolutely vital to survival, researchers have used model organisms to track the effects of sleep deprivation on health and survival ( Figure 1). Sleep has direct benefits for memory and learning, metabolism and hormone balance, waste product removal from the brain, and emotional health. The average person spends approximately one-third of their time sleeping and, fortunately, that time is not wasted. Yet contrary to our current understanding, a recent study of the humble fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, shows that sleepless flies continue to lead normal lives. Decades of studies concur with what is already commonly known – sleep is vital for the health of the body and the brain, and lack of sleep can be deadly. Anyone who has had the misfortune of missing a night of sleep would not need convincing that sleep is important for well-being.