Outside, students mingle and compare the bags under their eyes.Inside a classroom, a student sits with his head down on his desk,his eyes closed.

In between classes, students plod along, weighed down with booksand lack of sleep. With the combined pressures of academics, workand social life, college students considering what activities tocut often chose sleep. More than 75 percent of all college studentsdo not get enough sleep, according to a recent study by HarvardMedical School.

Sleep is part of the circadian rhythm regulating all the bodyprocesses, including digestion and the conditioning of bodytemperature.

During sleep, growth hormone is released, blood cells and bodytissues rebuild, energy levels are restored, and there is anincrease of blood flow and renewed protein levels in brain.

The frontal cortex of the brain, responsible for higher thought,reasoning and planning, needs the body rested in order to functioneffectively.

Lack of sleep harms the frontal cortex’s ability to controlspeech, access memory and solve problems. Creativity isstunted.

“You cumulatively lose I.Q. points the more you go withoutsleep,” Kim Dolgin Ohio Wesleyan psychology professor said. “Youcan regain these points only if you regain the amount of sleepneeded for you to be rested.”

Perhaps the best choice the night before an exam is to spendtime in bed rather than with your books.

Sleep deprivation can also result in weight gain because glucoseand cortisol rise in the blood stream, increasing the appetite.

Lack of rest hinders the body’s ability to regulate glucose andproduce insulin.

Sleep deprivation can have some of the same hazardous effects asbeing drunk, according to a study published in 2000 by the Britishjournal Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

People who drove after being awake for 17 to 19 hours hadimpaired coordination, reaction time and judgment, and performedworse than those with a blood alcohol level of .05 percent, thestudy found.

Researchers said that up to 60 percent of road accidents involvesleep deprivation, and they have suggested laws againstsleep-deprived driving similar to the ban on drunk driving.

Sleep deprivation is so harmful that it has been used to forceprisoners into submission or prepare them for interrogation.

In a BBC magazine report, Andrew Hogg, of the Medical Foundationfor the Care of Victims of Torture, said, “[Sleep deprivation] issuch a standard form of torture that basically everybody has usedit at one time or another.”

Menachem Begin, Israeli prime minister from 1977-1983 and once aprisoner of the KGB wrote, “In the head of the interrogatedprisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death,and he has one sole desire: to sleep… Anyone who has experiencedthis desire knows that not even hunger and thirst arecomparable.”

John Schlapobersky, who was also tortured through sleepdeprivation, said, “I was kept without sleep for a week in all.After two nights without sleep, the hallucinations start, and afterthree nights, people are having dreams while fairly awake, which isa form of psychosis.

“By the week’s end, people lose their orientation in place andtime. To deprive someone of sleep is to tamper with theirequilibrium and their sanity.”

Entrepreneurs who have opened coffee shops on or nearby collegecampuses understand the needs of students like De Anza’s JessicaCarreira.

“Coffee is definitely my best friend. I completely rely on it; Ican’t function a day without it,” she said. “If I didn’t havecoffee, even if I got eight hours of sleep, I’m like, dead.

“Buying two coffees a day, I spend more than $35 on coffee aweek. It keeps me alive, it’s kept me surviving.”

Fellow student Kevin Andrea has a different view.

“Caffeine is the worst thing that you can possibly do toyourself when you’re working on reduced sleep,” He said. “With anytype of stimulant, you’re getting your body to start cranking a lotfaster. Caffeine is the harshest stimulant for you, because it putsyou into overtime immediately, but when you stop, your body isready to completely shut off.

“Soda is as far as I recommend anyone going — just a quickpick-me -up, not to hit you quite as hard.”

Stimulants or not, there are going to be a lot of sleep-deprivedstudents wandering around campus as we head into finals. Treat themkindly.