Are you suffering from sleep deprivation?
Groggy? Not alert? Forgetting shiz?
Slowly losing grip of reality?
Nope. You can’t be trusted.
Such is Science Christ’s new commandment, at least. A U.C. Irvine recently got a bunch of kids – half who’d surfed a healthy delta-wave sea the night before and half a little more worse for wear – and had them watch a video of a man stealing a wallet. Those without sleep, they reported, recalled the incident wrong – getting details like where he put the wallet incorrect, while the bright eyed and bushy tailed group recalled the events with far more clarity. I tend to feel like this test had less to do with memory and more to do with restful alertness (or lack thereof) and all that information you’re able to consume with your brain better when you’re not using every bit of energy you have just to keep the skin shades over your eyeballs drawn open so you can pretend to look alive.
Also, let’s not forget these were students. So other distracting variables extend to the the barrage of college-kid problems keeping them from making the test parameters a priority – like the internal monologue that includes, “I’m hungover” and “I’m hungover” and “I might be too hungover to make my abortion appointment.”
Even though this experiment was a poor example of how, memory does get worse without sleep. The potential for developing an alter ego after nights of sleeplessness might be limited to the Hollywood Norton narrators and Bale machinists and me (…and me too!), but the rest of the normal folk out there still hanging onto reality by a thread are still subject to suffering a slightly skewed version of the past. And in a way – we actually all are – whether running on fumes with espresso shots or a full tank of Z’s. Why? Our brains remember shiz wrong anyway.
Ever had a so-so holiday or date or trip and then tried to convince everyone it was so awesome after? Or mayhaps you’re one of those social cancers who unconsciously mountains inconvenient molehill happenstances into a world-keeps-shitting-on-me filter to gain pity or avert hurting your hubris via excuses for why you suck at life?
All of us do some version of this.
It’s our way of making sense of our past and defining ourselves.
But we’re still wrong.
We’ve got our brains working against us already – but subtract five hours or more of snoozing to that scientific fact, and you can pretty much guarantee that at least half of what you’ll relay later is gonna be a confabulation. In fact, in a more relevant part of this sleep deprivation study – some subjects claimed they saw videos that never even existed of people doing things that never happened. Like their brains just borrowed from the imagination file, xeroxed it, and faxed it on over to the black hole that happens when a good night’s rest collapses into a singularity of info-retention space-time.
Well, this sounds good and hopeless.
Especially since I either wake up to muscle spaz-athons every three hours or my dog serves as a 2 A.M. alarm clock to perform a wheezing fit that culminates in a “guess which hole I’m going to puke out of?” game. I suppose the only thing left to do is change my name to Marla and keep pretending to kill myself until Brad Pitt shows up and I can steal him from Angie like she did to Jen.
Dude. I mean you too, Norton, duh.
Don’t you remember the movie? You’re both the same dude? Forgetful much?
Clearly it’s past Jack’s cranky missed naptime.