“I’m going to try to change your life forever,” Dr. James Maas announced to his Loomis Chaffee audience January 22. The renowned sleep and performance expert regaled LC students with the physiological benefits of sleep. “Most teenagers are walking zombies,” says Dr. James Maas. “Most of you are operating on half a brain” due to lack of sleep.
His examples of the effects of lack of sleep ranged from the humorous video of a middle school student constantly yawning during a rally hosting former President Bush to the sobering video of a man partially thrown from his car during an accident caused by fatigue at the wheel.
He cited a study where young people were restricted to 6 hours of sleep for 6 nights. 
According to the study, these subjects developed medical profiles identical to that of a 72-year senior citizen with elevated levels of cortisol and blood sugar, and reduced leptin molecules in the brain. Sleep deprivation, according to this research, may lead to higher risk of hypertension, depression, Type II diabetes, obesity and may cause various types of cancer. “This is nothing to be scoffed at,” Dr. Maas stated.
Dr. Maas pressed to his audience that, “The sleeping brain does something that your awake brain does not do … it puts information that you gain in the classroom, on the athletic field and socially into neural networks for long-term storage, essential for memory and learning, for performance, problem solving, and creativity.” This information is stored in the hippocampus for no more than 24 hours. According to new research, sleep transfers the new information to permanent storage in association areas of the brain’s cerebral cortex and Dr. Maas argues, “You need at least eight hours of sleep every night for maximum retention and transfer into these association areas… We know definitively now that lack of sleep inhibits your learning and memory.”
Dr. Maas invited Sharon Driscoll to speak with him. A pre-med undergraduate at Cornell who works with Dr. Maas, Sharon reported on a study of students at Stanford and Cornell universities, who slept 9 hours per night. Those students had significantly better grades than those who slept 6 hours or less per night.
“You have no idea what an excellent athlete you can really be if you pay attention to your sleep,” Dr. Maas said. He presented evidence supporting his research in the form of several well-known athletic figures. All of whom followed Dr. Maas’s sleep regime including the Orlando Magic, the New York Jets, and Olympic gold medalist Sarah Hughes. With each case, the teams or individual dropped early-morning practice to sleep and went on to perform great feats in their sport.
In the end, even simply establishing a regular sleep schedule, synced to your biological clock, can help. “If you are up late, don’t sleep in,” says Dr. Maas.
According to Dr. Maas, most people are carrying a “sleep debt bank account.”
“Sleep loss doesn’t dissipate over time.” He recommends a “power nap” as a stop-gap measure, but regular, uninterrupted sleep is the key.
Dr. James B. Maas is a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Professor and past chairman of the Department of Psychology at Cornell University. He received his B.A. from Williams College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell. He teaches introductory psychology to 1,700 students each year in the nation's largest single lecture class, and conducts research on the relationship between sleep and performance.
Dr. Maas’s presentation comes at a time when a number of LC committees are looking into the possibility of a later school start in the next year.
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