After a sleepless night, you likely feel sluggish the next morning, and a small new study suggests why: Your brain cells feel sluggish, too. And when those brain cells are tired, you may be more likely to be forgetful and get distracted more easily, the research found.
In the study, the researchers found that sleep deprivation makes it difficult for brain cells to communicate effectively, which, in turn, can lead to temporary mental lapses that affect memory and visual perception.
In other words, the findings offer clues as to why a sleepless night makes it so hard to think and concentrate the next day. [The Spooky Effects of Sleep Deprivation]
“We discovered that starving the body of sleep also robs neurons of the ability to function properly,” senior study author Dr. Itzhak Fried, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California,
Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement. “This paves the way for cognitive lapses in how we perceive and react to the world around us.”To study the effects of sleep deprivation,
the researchers recruited 12 patients with epilepsy who, as part of a preparation for surgery unrelated to the study, had electrodes implanted into their brains.These electrodes allowed the researchers to monitor hundreds of individual brain cells.
