Thanks for the suggestion, Doc.

Frasier's faux pas could have been avoided if he and his radio boss had remembered that people generally don't perform well when they are sleep-deprived, because contrary to popular opinion, sleep doesn't mean that the brain rests. In sleep, the brain stores up knowledge, such as the dates of the Civil War (1861-1865, for the record) for that upcoming history exam (falling asleep while studying may not be such a terrible thing), or our appointment to pick up Aunt Marge from the airport, or the speech we have planned for that big presentation tomorrow. In vivid dreaming or rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, our minds are working out issues and anxieties in our waking life, as well as creating a space for imagination, free-association and playfulness, all of which foster creativity and analytical thinking.

When we are sleep-deprived, we start to fall asleep in our waking life, which has a detrimental effect on our ability to learn, think, and to do basic tasks. Dr. Timothy Roehrs of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at Wayne State University explains:

Sleepiness in the wake state impairs memory formation and retrieval. Sleep loss studies, sedative drug studies, and studies of patients with disorders of excessive sleepiness have all found memory impairment. Many of these studies show that the degree of memory impairment is consistent with the degree of waking sleepiness…

Memory function at the transitions from wake to sleep and from sleep to wake is intriguing both for what might be learned about memory, as well as, state transitions. The transition to sleep is associated with memory loss… Subjects presented stimulus words at 1-min intervals while falling asleep, when awakened 10 min later they could not recall those words presented within the immediate 5-min wake interval before EEG signs of sleep. That finding has since been replicated and extended to include both explicit and implicit memory tasks…

Memory interruptions that result from sleep deprivation, according to What You Can Do About Sleep Deprivation: Lessons from Around-the-World Solo Sailors, an article by Dr. Claudio Stampi, Founder and Director of the Chronobiology Research Institute in Newton (Boston), Massachusetts, USA. Stampi points out that in catastrophic accidents such as the Exxon Valdez crash and the meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Bophal and Chernobyl occurred when the workers had been awake for long periods without sleep, and were performing highly demanding tasks while exhausted.

The workers most likely did not understand what lack of sleep would do to their ability to remember crucial tasks such as how to steer an oil freighter. According to a 1995 survey of 1,000 adults conducted by Bruskin/Goldring Research for the Better Sleep Council (BSC), 47 percent believed that the brain rests during sleep, yet 53 percent said that their concentration and their ability to function suffered when they didn't get enough sleep. Roughly one-third of respondents admitted that they didn't get enough sleep, a disturbing statistics considering that one-half of them required maximum alertness during the week.

In contrast, a study on young adults in Israel tracked day-to-day improvements in learning and found that they were connected to the amount of REM sleep the teenagers got. When Dr. Avi Karni and Dr. Dov Sagi of the Weizmann Institute deprived their young subjects of REM sleep, the subjects' learning ability was impaired, so that they could not remember how to do repetitive tasks, such as riding a bicycle. And as for cramming for that exam, Canadian studies have shown that students who get a good night's sleep before an exam outperform their classmates who stay up all night.

So "sleep on it" may be good advice for everyone, except for Frasier's insomnia-stricken caller.