Use of Personal EEG Monitors in a Behavioral Neuroscience Course to Investigate Natural Setting Sleep Patterns and the Factors Affecting Them in College Students

Sleep is often a topic of avid interest to college students, yet it is one that does not yield itself well to hands-on, interactive learning modules. Supplementing classroom learning with interactive “real world” laboratory activities provides students with a deeper understanding of behavior and its neural control. The project described here was designed to supplement the teaching of EEGs, sleep and circadian rhythms and involved students in the empirical process from hypothesizing about the factors that affect sleep, to personal data collection, data analysis and writing in the style of a peer-reviewed manuscript. Students enrolled in Behavioral Neuroscience at Connecticut College were provided with a home-based personal EEG monitor used to collect sleep data in their natural sleep setting. Participants recorded sleep data with the use of the ZEO® Personal Sleep Coach system and completed a nightly sleep journal questionnaire for seven nights. The ZEO® system uses EEG patterns to define sleep stages including wakefulness, light, deep and REM sleep. The journal included questions about factors known to affect sleep such as stress, caffeine, academic activity, exercise and alcohol. A class data set was compiled and used by students to perform univariate correlations examining the relationships between ZEO® variables and sleep journal variables. The data set allowed students to choose specific variables to investigate, analyze and write a peer-reviewed style manuscript. Significant class-wide correlations were found between specific sleep stages and behavioral variables suggesting that the ZEO® system is sophisticated yet inexpensive enough to be used as an effective tool in the classroom setting. Overall student feedback on the exercise was positive with many students indicating that it significantly enhanced their understanding of sleep architecture and made them keenly aware of the factors that affect quality of sleep.