If it turns out that a large amount of sleep deprivation causes brain damage in humans a lot of people are going to freak out (and probably do even more damage from worrying.) Hopefully our brains are more resilient than mouse and puppy brains (yikes...)
If this were as dangerous as intoned, I would expect there would already be observable trends in the acuity of aged parents and those who did not raise children.
I'm sitting here reading this at 3am after having fed my 2 month old son and this was the same thought which crossed my mind. Given how affected my sleep has been (and my experience isn't anything out of the ordinary really), I would absolutely expect to see some pretty clear trends showing up.
That's going to be confounded because people who have kids are probably self selected to be doing well financially, which is correlated with mental accuity.
