In other words, what if my dietary problems were, in fact, cognitive problems? Makes sense, right? Who could have guessed it was problems of 1) deciding when to eat and 2) getting consistent high quality sleep. My first instinct - most people’s first instinct - is that overeating has to do with diet. Food companies making it oh-so-easy to splurge and get addicted to the worst kinds of food. Hundreds of millions of Americans face similar struggles daily, with sleep deprivation and overeating temptations driving their health into a worsening spiral. Surely all of the poor decisions were ravaging inside my body, too? Misery and shame dominated my mind, identity and emotional states. No matter what I tried or how hard, I was powerless to stop myself in this vulnerable day-end moment of exhaustion and stress. Soon, almost certainly because of this, there were 50lbs more of me in the world. The results of this study invited me to imagine a future where quantification of cognition and sleep becomes the norm, where these kinds of contemplations can empower all of us.Įverything that plagued me during those darker years seemed to culminate in a single moment every day: overeating at night, right before a late bedtime. These years were marked by struggles with my own behaviors and impulse control. My mind traveled back to years ago, when the combination of severe sleep deprivation from three young children, the demands of building a startup, and an existential crisis of faith dropped me into a deep depressive state. Ī similar connection between sleep and inhibitory task performance has been shown in the literature ( Demos 2016) but to the best of our knowledge this is the first time this effect has been shown to have a neural origin on a single-participant level. These are the areas of my brain that showed larger (yellow hues) or smaller (blue hues) activations during the impulse control task as I got more sleep. What’s especially interesting to me is that Kernel brain data revealed a relationship of cognitive functioning with my Whoop data that behavior alone could not. Said differently, when I was well rested, my brain was more engaged in willpower control. My brain activation was correlated to the previous night’s sleep independently thus my brain yielded information about my ability to withhold keypresses (or, in the grander scheme of things, resist the cookie) above and beyond what my behavior could reveal. Importantly, the correlation between brain activity and sleep was not driven by my performance on the task. When they looked at my brain’s activation to that task across days, some areas of my brain reflected the amount of sleep that I had gotten the previous night. When I was well rested, with a lot of deep sleep compared to my baseline, Kernel scientists found that I performed better on an impulse control cognitive task based on a classic psychophysics study design. Participating in a Kernel study exploring how sleep affects aspects of cognition using Kernel’s benchtop, fiber coupled Beta TD-fNIRS system
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