This Fall, I was in Hanover, but I wasn't taking classes. Ah, the Hanover FSP: too burnt out to take classes, too sick of family to go home. And, let's face it, all your friends are here.
All I did was play Smash Bros., hang out and eat too many cookies at Phi Tau. Not. I was practically taking a four-course load. Okay, so maybe my fourth course was Rageology 101. But I was also TA-ing a 130-student class and applying to graduate schools, which meant studying for the GRE.
The GRE. For months I woke up during the night in a cold sweat agonizing about it. The verbal didn't scare me I scored in the 99th percentile on my first practice test. (The trick is to major in linguistics.) But the math. Oh, the math. I got a 5 on my AP Calculus exam, but this wasn't calculus; this was "quantitative." It was all the piddling shit on the SATs that you never wanted to see again, only this time it was jacked up on amphetamines and back with a vengeance. "Hey, remember me? I look like a badass geometry problem. I'm actually really easy, but good luck figuring out my trick. I brought my friends. Bet you thought you'd seen the last of our kind, didn't you? There are 45 of us, and you have 28 minutes to solve us all. Good luck, bitch."
This was going to kick my ass.
The night before my 9 a.m. test, I spent the whole evening hyperventilating and suppressing nervous nausea. I didn't sleep a wink all night. By dawn I was a frazzled mess.
Despite having been awake for 36 hours, I went to face the beast. The blessing and curse of the GRE is that you get your results immediately after you hit "submit." My verbal was fine 740 out of a possible 800. But the quantitative? 570. Ouch. My inner perfectionist was committing seppuku.
Still licking my intellectual wounds, I scheduled a retake for the next month. This time I got eight and a half hours of sleep the night before the test. (The trick is to take a shot of whiskey at bedtime.) This time, when I hit submit, my quantitative had soared to a triumphant 730.
Seriously, brain? What the hell. I feed you practice tests and you screw up. But I feed you sleep, and you are suddenly a genius?
At least now I have empirical evidence that I'm not really a (comparative) underachiever, I'm only one when I don't sleep.
Because I am a good researcher, I found sources to back up what I'd discovered anecdotally. (Fine, maybe I just wanted proof to shove under the noses of friends who said I was weak for my inability to stay awake all night.) I found a paper in Nature magazine about an experiment done by some really sick, twisted people who forced their subjects to stay awake for over 35 hours, and then gave them math problems.
Seriously. Cruel and unusual, man.
According to their fMRI scans, the parts of the brain that do math when you're happily well-rested didn't even light up. Nothing else lit up. Literally, like zero brain activity. The subjects did as well as you would do on a midterm at 8 a.m. when you're still drunk from Wednesday night. Other people at St. Lawrence University compared students' grades and how often they pulled all-nighters. Even factoring out procrastination, there was a clear trend that pulling all-nighters pulls down your GPA. Significantly.
Dartmouth's grade inflation cannot compensate for that.
If that can't convince you to skip the epic nights in Baker and go to bed instead, maybe getting arrested could. That is, if the fuzz happen to see you reeling down the street or driving while you're loopy with sleep-dep. People who drive after being awake for 17 to 19 hours are actually worse at it than people with a BAC of .05. Do you really think H-Po is going to buy the "I'm not drunk, I'm just in need of a nap" excuse when you're swerving all over the road?
The only all-nighters I have ever pulled were to camp out for a Wii at Best Buy and to read Harry Potter 7 after I bought it at midnight on the release date. (Don't judge me. Plus, I made a hot Narcissa Malfoy.) When I went to get the Wii I managed to stay awake until about 5 p.m. on day two of wakefulness, and then there is a 16-hour gap in my memory, until I woke up the next morning in a strange bed with no memories of the night before.
I blacked out. From being awake too long. What. The. Hell. Brain.
You and I are going to have a serious talk. Right after I take a nap.
