I've definitely noticed that staying up late (or similarly being awake after not getting enough sleep) harms memory recall, motor tasks, and concentration/logic.
But, lack-of-sleep also sometimes offers a slight euphoria or creativity/disinhibition in thinking. The mechanism might even be the same: certain parts of the brain that normally moderate mood or inhibit certain lines of thought fall asleep on their own. So, the remaining parts of the brain party.
"When you get very very tired—and I had been up four nights all night long; Steve and I got mononucleosis—your head gets in this real creative state and it thinks of ideas that you'd normally just throw out. I came up with this idea of taking one little cheap (less than $1) part with 4 bits in it. If I spun it around at the right rate, the data that comes out of that chip looks like color TV. And I could put 16 different patterns and they all look like different colors, sort of. Would a digital signal that goes up and down actually work on a color TV the way there are sine waves and complicated calculus to develop how color TV was established in the television world? Would it work?
"
- Steve Wozniak, from the Founders at Work interview
This makes sense. I've been noticing lately that if I stay up late designing, my creative flow seems to improve drastically.. Up until this point I thought I had just been fooling myself into thinking I was better when I stayed up late, but perhaps there is actually something to it.
I've found this to be true as well. My writing ability and creativity seem to improve when I stay up late. I'd like to see a real study into this. But anecdotal evidence seems to support this idea.
"Lack-of-sleep also sometimes offers a slight euphoria or creativity/disinhibition in thinking"
I agree. I've found out that if I stay awake all night I tend to have a rush of completely new ideas about the problem I'm working on.
Lack of sleep can put me in a state where I care less about my ego and thus doing certain things I may typically hesitate to do. Extreme anger also has a similar effect on me.
I've heard being drunk being described in a similar fashion but can't compare having never touched alcohol.
I find that my procrastination disappears from lack-of-sleep as well. My most productive days at work are the ones where I get less than 4 hours of sleep.
Thanks for pointing that out; your comment led me to read the Ars article. I was then compelled to go Nature and read the article and its accompanying News and Views. Interestingly, the News and Views opens with the same profound point (that the unit of sleep appears to be single neurons) that you referred to in your post. My point is only to note that the Nature folks address in the first line what it took the Ars reporter an entire article to get at.
Quoted for reference:
"An accompanying perspective makes a separate suggestion: the fundamental unit of sleep may be a single cell. When an animal is sleep deprived, individual cells are more likely to take themselves offline. By chance, that will eventually start producing the clusters that produce local sleep events. Over time, the frequency of local events goes up, and the neurons begin to coordinate their activity, ultimately producing the large-scale rhythms seen in sleep."
Possibly crackpot, but still interesting "Left In the Dark" theory says left side of the brain needs more sleep than right side, and that sleep deprivation can actually improve those areas in which the left side suppresses the right side. A very interesting read: http://leftinthedark.org.uk/
That site definitively seems crackpot, but they might be right about some parts of the brain suppressing activity in other parts. Like a Subsumption architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsumption_architecture
I've read the book, and it is well referenced and researched, at least on par with modern scientific standards: Which means, the author _probably_ picks the sources that support his ideas, and ignores those that don't (that's how modern published science works in nutrition, health and medicine).
But, lack-of-sleep also sometimes offers a slight euphoria or creativity/disinhibition in thinking. The mechanism might even be the same: certain parts of the brain that normally moderate mood or inhibit certain lines of thought fall asleep on their own. So, the remaining parts of the brain party.