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Lack Of Sleep Can Affect
Your Brain Power
Feb. 9, 2000 (Atlanta) -- A sleepy person's brain
works harder -- and accomplishes less. A study using
real-time, state-of-the-art imaging shows that sleep
deprivation has dramatic effects on the brain and how
well it performs.
Researchers expected to find only sluggish activity in
the brains of healthy young people who took a simple
word test after staying awake for 35 hours. They found
instead that while parts of the sleep-deprived brains
churned with activity during the test, another part of
the brain -- the language center -- shut down.
"Sleep deprivation is bad for your brain when you
are trying to do high-level [thinking] tasks,"
study co-author J. Christian Gillin, MD, tells WebMD.
"It may have serious consequences both on
performance and on the way your brain functions."
Gillin's team at the University of California, San
Diego, and the San Diego VA Medical Center found that
the brains of some sleep-deprived study participants
tried to overcome the language-center shut-down by
shifting activity to another part of the brain. These
individuals performed better on the memory test than
their sleep-deprived peers, but not as well as they
did when rested.
"What this shows is that the brain is very
flexible," Monte S. Buchsbaum, MD, professor of
psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, tells
WebMD. "This shows that the brain can move a task
from one area to the other when you are sleep
deprived, or when you get old."
Jim Horne, PhD, director of the sleep research
laboratory at Loughborough University in England,
notes in a commentary accompanying the study that the
part of the brain that overworks in the sleep-deprived
people normally is one of the most active areas of the
brain. It is involved in complex functions such as
updating working memory, planning, attention, sense of
time, dealing with novel situations, and verbal
fluency. "Some years ago, we suspected that if
sleep offers some sort of recovery process, then the
parts of the cortex that work hardest during
wakefulness may be those that suffer the deprivation
initially," he tells WebMD. "But what seems
to be happening is that the functional part of the
brain appears to be working even harder during
compensation -- to no avail, because performance shows
deterioration."
However, Horne says that this part of the brain gets
its rest during the earliest stages of sleep.
"Not all of sleep is for recovery. A particular
part of sleep occurring in the early part of sleep is
most important for [brain] recovery, and the latter
part is not so important in that regard," he
says. "As we can eat more food than we require
and drink more fluids than we require, we may sleep
more than we require. Rather than trying to extend
one's sleep ? perhaps we should take short naps
instead."
So how much sleep does one need, and how should one
get it? Horne has an easy answer. "The amount of
sleep we require is what we need not to be sleepy in
the daytime," he says.
Gillin and colleague Gregory G. Brown, MD, are
planning to use the new imaging techniques to find out
exactly how one might get the right amount of sleep.
"The current study is the beginning -- the
opening wedge," he says. "A lot of work
remains in determining whether short-term sleep
deprivation is different than chronic deprivation,
whether women respond differently than men, whether
stimulating drugs have any effect, whether short naps
provide respite, and, if so, how long a nap [is
needed]."
Vital Information:
In a person who is sleep-deprived, one part of the
brain shuts down while other parts will kick in to
help compensate.
Regardless of the brain's attempt to overcome sleep
deprivation, a sleep-deprived person cannot perform
mental tasks as well as someone who is well-rested.
For brain recovery, the early part of sleep
each night is the most important.
By Daniel DeNoon
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