Returning to Dinges’s study results, you may have predicted that optimal performance would return to all of the participants after a good long night of recovery sleep, similar to many people’s notion of “sleeping it off” on the weekends to pay off their weeknight sleep debt. However, even after three nights of ad lib recovery sleep, performance did not return to that observed at the original baseline assessment when those same individuals had been getting a full eight hours of sleep regularly. Nor did any group recover all the sleep hours they had lost in the days prior. As we have already
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