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Sleep Deprivation Increases Brain Activity
SL33Z3 writes "Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have found increased brain activity in areas of the brain that otherwise stay inactive. The longer the students went without sleep, the more activity was found. Research found students to have better recollection after long periods of sleep deprivation. Check out the release here. " Heck, combine this with the news about caffeine and I'm all set!
In extreme cases, brain cells can even be killed by overexcitation, although personally I'm only aware of drug models for this phenomenon.
Oxygen deprivation effects are partially due to excitotoxic effects. The malfunctioning (due to oxygen deprivation) neurons dump NMDA which causes neighboring neurons to self destrict. That's why there was interest in NMDA antagonists. That is anso a partial explaination for barbituate coma reducing brain damage due to hypoxia (if the barbituates don't kill you, of course).
It's also well known that sleep deprivation decreases life expectancy. Remember the DJ in 1959 who spent 200 hours on the air without any sleep. Then they found he was permanently brain damaged. He had increased brain activity all right but he was a vegetable. Ever since then when a radio station wanted to pull a stunt like that they had the DJ taking intermittant naps.
I have many episode of sleep deprivations before, and I took acid many times in my younger days too.
What I can is that those two things are NOT the same.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Ha, it only goes to show that brains and muscles have a lot in comon.
:)
Muscles fire (contract) individual fibers to provide the needed amount of force. A fiber either fires, or it does not. After a fiber fires, it needs to rest and heal.
Sore muscles result from many fibers needing rest and healing. Muscle fatigue comes from many fibers having fired, and few being left available to keep the work going.
The speed with which muscle fibers recover is proportional to their level of conditioning. So an athletic person is ready to go again sooner that a sofa-spud.
What does this have to do with brains?
A conditioned brain is able to recover from effort more quickly, while a stagnant one needs a long weekend.
A brain that has used up it's 'normal' operating capacity (analog to 'conditioned' fibers) will start to recruit typically unused areas to keep the work going. Sleep deprivation is a way of keeping the normally used areas from getting adequare recoup time, thereby forcing the 'lazy' areas to take up some slack.
Sleep deprivation cycles, along with an inter-disciplinary training regiment (variance in modes of thought, analytical, creative, perceptive, linguistic, mathematical...) is for the brain exactly like cross-training is for the body.
And it sounds suspiciously like going to college.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I've always wondered exactly what purpose it is that sleep serves. It is obviously not just for resting our organs and muscles - I see no reason for the impossibility of creatures whose bodies need no sleep.
It is obviously a necessity for the brain. Perhaps for consciousness to occur, there have to be periods of unconsciousness for some kind of routine "maintenance" that the brain's neural network performs on itself, somehow tied in with dreams.
I have absolutely no background on this - the above is just my random musings as I started learning about neural nets and AI. I was hoping to start a discussion or catch the eye of someone who has studied this extensively. What is the current state of human knowledge about sleep? Is it still mostly a mystery?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
A few years ago someone wondered: "Why are there no higher animals which do not sleep?" It clearly would be of great evolutionary advantage to not have to sleep. So there must be some very basic reason.
Answer: Brains use more energy than blood can deliver. The purpose of sleep is to recharge energy.
Mixed with neurons are glial cells, which store glucose during sleep. They then supply glucose to neighboring neurons while the brain is awake, supplementing glucose from the bloodstream.
When the energy is exhausted, neurons stop working properly. That's why there are hallucinations (particularly in pattern-matching neurons such as peripheral vision). It's probably also why the brain secretes chemicals which increase blood flow -- it's trying to get more glucose to keep functioning during whatever crisis is keeping it awake.
So, why might areas which are normally quiet showing more active in this study? Maybe because the blood flow has been increased in the exhausted areas, and also the neighboring cells which were least-used are now trying to activate because their exhausted neighbors can't work?
This paper does not seem to be on the net, so see Google search of related comments.
it only takes about three days to start hallucinating. Things get real strange, it definitely warps things immensely. Great for brainwashing.
+&x
Of course you're right... I mean come on, anybody who has been sleep-deprived for a substantial period of time can testify that there is no worse feeling.
True story: I've been through officer training for a certain Army (er... figure it out). As trainees we were sleep-deprived for 4 weeks: an average 5 hrs of sleep a day, with an occasional Sunday 6 or 7 --this while exercising 4-5 hours a day, doing chores, being on duty, etc. etc, for the remainder of the day... During Week 3 I was sitting in a nice, cozy, warm room taking notes for some class. At that point, I was halucinating at night or early in the morning pretty regulary (in fact this was a common experience among my class-mates). But that day, while I was taking notes, I fell asleep. Writing. Notes. I was woken up --by my trainer no less-- and found out that I had written down my dream/halucination/what have you. Not much, a dozen words or so and then a squiggly line trailing off...
I should have kept that notebook. But I have never been more scared for my own well being before or since.
Yeah, you go and try out the poster's theory...
engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.
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Also, how did the study compensate for time of day? Many teens do not function well until late evening, and some researchers would be mislead to believe that it was sleep-deprivation causing the increased performance, not simple circadian rhythms.
In addition, I would expect people at all ages to have a small performance boost around morning -- when they would normally be getting up. This would be the body "thinking", "Crud, I guess I'm not getting any sleep tonight, might as well try to last until tomorrow evening".
--
The shareholder is always right.
I've noticed that I can churn out code efficiently while tired, but I have more trouble searching for bugs and trying to solve complex algorithmic problems. Is the same true for you?
I think our brains are designed to do repetitive tasks efficiently while tired, but are better at complex problem-solving while awake and relaxed.
--
The shareholder is always right.
Contrary to popular belief, your brain is constantly regenerating brain cells. Brain cells do not live forever, they die and are reborn like every other cell in the body.
There is a catch, however, and its the reason scientists once thot no brain cells could ever be regenerated... they need acetylcholene. Acetylcholene isn't usually found anywhere in your body except one place - the protective "lining" of brain cells. So when it goes to regenerate one, it rips an old one apart and builds the new cell inside, so it seems like no progress is being made. There is one food that contains acetylcholine, though. Fish! It really IS brain food! (I'm not joking, BTW) You can buy choline tablets too at health food stores. Lots of people call it a "smart drug" but it doesn't increase intelligence, it simply stops the brain from autocannibalizing cells when regenerating. Nootropics (smart drugs) is an interesting field. Most are just like caffeine spinoffs (keep you more alert) and a lot are just lies in a bottle, but there seems to be a lot of study done on acetylcholene.
Esperandi
A team of researchers from the UCSD School of Medicine and the Zelot Affairs Healthcare System, San Diego used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to monitor activity in the brains of Slashdot-deprived subjects performing simple verbal learning tasks.
They were somewhat surprised to learn that regions of the brain's prefrontal cortex (PFC) displayed more activity in direct correlation with the subject's sense of Slashdotness; the Slashdotier the subject, the more active the PFC.
Furthermore, the temporal lobe, a brain region involved in language processing, was activated during flaming previous posts in troll subjects but not in Slashdot deprived subjects. Additionally, a region of the brain called the parietal lobes, not activated in troll subjects during the posting exercise, was more active when the subjects were deprived of Slashdot. The parietal region normally performs somewhat different functions in the learning process than the temporal region. Although subjects' memory performance was less efficient with Slashdot deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory.
"Only in recent years have we begun to realize the prevalence and severity of Slashdot deprivation in our population, with a significant number of people doing first posts work, suffering from karma lag and so forth," said J. Natalie Portman, M.D., professor of psychiatry at the UCSD and the San Diego VAMC, and an author of the Flamebait paper. "Yet, we don't know very much about how Slashdot deprivation impairs sexual performance, and how precisely the brain reacts to lack of Slashdot. These findings are just a beginning, and as we learn more, perhaps will be able to devise interventions to alleviate the behavioral impairments associated with lack of Slashdot."
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
I more or less said that the brain works harder, not nessasarily better, or at least better for any sustained period of time. I would have to think it would be really bad long term, not just for your brain but your health would have to suffer. What good would a +2(Insightful) brainbonus due you if you were laid up sick all the time.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Me I take the safe route, I view non-sleep time as that annoying period between naps, and limit all non-sleep time as much as possible.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
And if that's not really revelant, the folks from NYC would gain insight into how to finally kick the rat problem.
More race stuff in one place,
than any one place on the net.
Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is a very real disorder.
PH34R!
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Please allow me to make a few comments about the slashdot moderation system:
I think it works pretty well for what it's supposed to do. The problem is a) the nature of the site being general tech news; and b) the quantity of users. We can either a) give all users random moderation points; or b) give a limited group of users moderation points based on criterion such as being moderated up themselves; or c) a mix of both. I think this is best theoretically if tweaked properly.
However, some problems exist such as a) the default linear setup combined with the fact that this is just a news site means lots of good comments at the end of the forum get lost; b) not enough people meta-moderate; c) people mark down comments that they do not necessarily agree with but may be valid points of view, or comments that are slightly off topic but are good extensions of the current conversation; d) people given moderation points often just want to get rid of them. This is a news site after all, and responsibility to the integrity of moderation isn't exactly a priority. Many people just scroll down a bit and moderate comments that vaguely look good. Why? Again, probably because this is just a news discussion site and expending the effort to read all the comments in a story would take many, many hours.
So, I agree with you that it might be good to increase the moderation points available. However, this must be done in a manner that will give points to those who deserve them and not to those who will moderate posts down just because they do not agree with a point or those who will just moderate because at first glance the post looks good.
In short, not enough people meta-moderate so at a macro level, increasing the amount of moderation points to everyone would be bad. It would be a bit better only increasing the amount to those who are consistently moderated up but that does not guarantee that those who moderated them up properly looked at their posts. So we either give a select group a lot of points and allow them to moderate - or we give the group at large a lot of points and hope that they use them wisely. Not enough people meta moderate so this is why such a system can seem broken. The bottom line? It's a discussion news site. Expending the effort is just too much in this situation.
Even then, meta moderation does not give you the thread. This creates a problem because the moderation might be relevant to the post and thread that it replies to. The solution? Tell everyone to quote every time what they are responding to. This is done most of the time, so this is not too much of a major problem.
There is also another improvement that I want. Randomly displayed threads. There are some very good comments that get lost in the noise because we only have an option for newest and oldest in threads or by themselves. This isn't a problem for the 100 comment stories but becomes a large problem for 250+ comment stories. The first problem with randomly displayed nested and threaded comments that comes to mind is that the flow of the discussion often comes linearly, even if not the same thread. However, I think it would be welcome to most slashdot readers. Anyway, to tie this into the moderation problems, it would probably have to be the default setting for proper moderation to occur. Either that or a the owners of the site generating a lot of noise about it.
Wading through so much information and finding signal in noise isn't much fun. I usually just ignore moderation and scroll a lot.
Boy, I'd hate to be one of *their* test subjects. When these guys actually did get to sleep, the VA probably accidentally amputated their legs and then lost the medical records.
The things I've seen at the VA Medical Center East Orange NJ, it wouldn't suprise me!
Although subjects' memory performance was less efficient with sleep deprivation, greater activity in the parietal region was associated with better memory.
My interpretation of that line is that, overall, students had WORSE memory performance when sleep-deprived, but those students who had greater activity in the parietal region performed better than those with lower activity -- but still worse than they would have had with a good night's sleep. Am I correct in my reading?
Sleep deprivation can also kill you. I did a 12 page report on sleep and its effects on the human body, and have about 5 pages of stuff on sleep deprivation. A guy in the 1950's, I believe, did a radio show for 200 hours straight, and suffered SEVERE mental damage from it. Also, rats who have been deprived of any rest at all have died after 17 days. People with fatal familial insomnia, which causes the victim to be deprived of sleep for months upon months, will eventually kill after 9 to 12 months. If you want more information on sleep, deprivation, and disorders, e-mail me at mcnamarc@kirtland.cc.mi.us and I'll send you the report. I'll feel special, too. : )