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Parental perception of global sleep problems was surprisingly common in school-aged children receiving routine pediatric care. Parental reports of their children's sleep problems may be a red flag for specific sleep problems and psychiatric, social, or medical problems. Sleep problems should be queried about during pediatric visits for school-aged children.

Twice a year, normally diurnal songbirds engage in long-distance nocturnal migrations between their wintering and breeding grounds. If and how songbirds sleep during these periods of increased activity has remained a mystery. We used a combination of electrophysiological recording and neurobehavioral testing to characterize seasonal changes in sleep and cognition in captive white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys gambelii) across nonmigratory and migratory seasons. Compared to sparrows in a nonmigratory state, migratory sparrows spent approximately two-thirds less time sleeping. Despite reducing sleep during migration, accuracy and responding on a repeated-acquisition task remained at a high level in sparrows in a migratory state. This resistance to sleep loss during the prolonged migratory season is in direct contrast to the decline in accuracy and responding observed following as little as one night of experimenter-induced sleep restriction in the same birds during the nonmigratory season. Our results suggest that despite being adversely affected by sleep loss during the nonmigratory season, songbirds exhibit an unprecedented capacity to reduce sleep during migration for long periods of time without associated deficits in cognitive function. Understanding the mechanisms that mediate migratory sleeplessness may provide insights into the etiology of changes in sleep and behavior in seasonal mood disorders, as well as into the functions of sleep itself.

Methods common to several studies in this series are described. A key feature is a sleep deprivation apparatus in which an experimental and a yoked control rat are housed on opposite sides of a divided disk suspended over shallow water. When the experimental rat enters a "forbidden" sleep stage, the disk is automatically rotated, forcing the experimental rat to walk to avoid being carried into the water. The control rat receives the same physical stimulation but can sleep ad lib when the disk is stationary.

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