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Sleep Deprivation Disrupts Brain-Cell Communication, Study Finds (npr.org)
A new study published in the journal Nature Medicine found that sleep deprivation causes the bursts of electrical activity that brain cells use to communicate to become slower and weaker. "The finding could help explain why a lack of sleep impairs a range of mental functions, says Dr. Itzhak Fried, an author of the study and a professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Los Angeles," reports NPR. From the report: The finding comes from an unusual study of patients being evaluated for surgery to correct severe epilepsy. As part of the evaluation, doctors place wires in the brain to find out where a patient's seizures are starting. That allows Fried and a team of scientists to monitor hundreds of individual brain cells, often for days. And because patients with epilepsy are frequently kept awake in order to provoke a seizure, the scientists had an ideal way to study the effects of sleep deprivation. In the study, all the patients agreed to categorize images of faces, places and animals. Each image caused cells in areas of the brain involved in perception to produce distinctive patterns of electrical activity. Then, four of the patients stayed up all night before looking at more images. And in these patients, "the neurons are responding slower," Fried says. "The responses are diminished, and they are smeared over longer periods of time." These changes impair the cells' ability to communicate, Fried says. And that leads to mental lapses that can affect not only perception but memory.
Sleep is one of my favorite things to do. My wife thinks I'm crazy because I always insist on a very expensive mattress and sheets and stuff. Duvet covers, shit like that. But man, when I hit the rack at night, I sleep like a little baby boy. Still wake up with a boner, even at my advanced age.
Seriously, listen up you younger Slashdotters: Do not neglect your sleep. Sleep long enough to get dreams, because dreams, even nightmares, are really good for you. In fact, I've noticed that when I have one of those nightmares where you jump straight off the bed gasping, I go on to have a really good day. I don't know about the science of all that, but you want dreams. Unfortunately, the dreams you want seem to come at the end of your sleep, but you have to have had a long enough uninterrupted sleep.
Go to bed a little early tonight and enjoy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
and constant lack of sleep may make it a long lasting effect
no shit, how much did that grant cost me
In related news, water is wet.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
For fuck sake, I knew that when I was, like, six.
I'm wondering if the people who come up with this stuff are thinking that if they say something sufficiently mind-numbingly obvious, that everyone's brain will still be too numb to realize that what they are saying has actually been common knowledge for generations.
I think its because a lot of people think they can cheat their sleep. A person needs what they need. A good rule of thumb is if you need an alarm clock every day.
What I don't buy into is the idea that everyone needs 8 hours. Most do. I don't. I sleep 5. I go to bed, and 5 hours later I wake up with no alarm clock, feeling refreshed. Only way to get me to sleep 8 is to drug me - or if I have a cold.
The weird thing is not how many people don't believe me, but how their first response is to get pissed off at me.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
and constant lack of sleep may make it a long lasting effect
no shit, how much did that grant cost me
The importance of the study is that it characterizes the effect in a way that can be replicated, and then used for further study. For example, the effect drugs have on the subject, or different types of sleep.
It might also help in validating or invalidating specific hypotheses.
For example, there is a hypothesis that neurotransmitters evolved from nutrient sources. The theory goes that when simple organisms ate something there was a wash of nutrients (such as glucose) throughout the system. Evolution then gave the organisms sensors that would associate particular inputs with the wash of nutrients they receive from eating, and trigger the "swallow" action (probably invagination at that level). Then the organism evolved to separate the swallow signal from the sensor signal by using a modified nutrient as the signal, and when the organism fed successfully it would convert some of the nutrient into the signal to "feed" the sensor cells.
Fast forward and we have a complex system of cells that use various neurotransmitters as "food" to represent information. The neurotransmitters are sent cell-to-cell, but also scavenged and reused, and the scavenging process is not 100% efficient so the extra neurotransmitters act as growth factors - a cell can grow more dendrites to scavenge more of the "food" neurotransmitters in the areas where they are most often generated, leading to Hebbian theory and all that.
Back to the study...
It seems reasonable that wakefulness uses one or more neurotransmitters so often that the scavenging process can't keep up, and the sleep phase is needed for the scavenging to catch up. This is by design, because the unscavenged neurotransmitters also act as growth factors to encourage dendrite growth among correlated neurons.
If the study is right, it might be possible to measure the neurotransmitter levels as the patient gets sleepy, correlate it with the distinctive neural patterns, and thus identify the neurotransmitters that get depleted during wakefulness. (The study has identified the distinctive patterns we need to look for.)
And that would have all sorts of applications.
(Also, I don't know how much that grant cost you, but it was probably worth it.)
I worked as a water plant operator with rotating shifts and started sleeping four hours at a time. I was always wasted from fatigue and could barely function at work or with friends. One beer or cocktail would knock me out. I would be awake all night when I wasn't at work.
Depends on the country. People in Denmark are very financially secure - no fears of being trapped in poverty if they get enough sleep.
The USA is a democracy. If Americans wanted enough sleep they could vote to be more like Denmark.
But instead Americans vote to be the opposite of Denmark - for Trump and his fellow Republicans. And then they complain that they're not getting enough sleep.
Denmark has the least attractive immigration policy for refugees.
So you're saying that voting for Trump was because we wanted to be less like Denmark?
Or are you saying we *should* be more like Denmark, and have highly restricted immigration?
I don't understand your point - can you be more specific about how voting for Trump made you feel bad?
This.
I frequently send my guys home during stressful times with instructions to go to bed early. Those that do get sent home again, those that don't get ground down until they say they need sleep.
It's an interesting empirical test within the teams, because the ones that go home early, get sleep, and come back, finish more work than the ones that grind themselves to a nub.
"I need to watch TV/You Tube/Play video games to relax" really doesn't seem to work. At least not according to my metrics.
YMMV
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Oh look a six year old neuro surgeon. Have you cured cancer yet? I mean if you knew this when you were six you should have countless peer reviewed papers to your name by now along with a very detailed knowledge of the inner workings of the brain.
But even after only 2 days Jesus in the corner starts to appear and talk nonsense.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Now, why would a guy like you know what a duvet is? Does it have an advantage in a hunter gatherer sence?
Not only does sleep disruption play a role in the declining mental abilities that typify Alzheimerâ(TM)s disease, but getting enough sleep is one of the most important factors determining whether you will develop the condition in the future.
https://www.newscientist.com/a...
What I found is what you really need is darkness; keep your visual-cortex off. You don't have to really sleep - I have stayed in darkness for say 2 hours and sleep only say 6 hours and feel refreshed next day. With the invention of light bulb, humans lost this darkness. ..say 3 bits on/off VAT (visual/audio/thoughts) .. having 0xx for like 8 hours a night is good enough for you to feel refreshed. [ie stay in darkness.. ok to think ..ok to sing..ok to listen.. but retina is not exposed to any light stimulus)
It's like powering down the most power hungry chip -- the visual processing unit. You can think or even use the auditory cortex (listen to music say). That is
That's *great* that you knew it when you were 6 years old! How is the rate of mental performance correlated to the length of deprivation? At what stage of deprivation does decreased function become apparent? How long does it take to reverse the effects? Ohh, you don't know, because you didn't actually do a study?
Those number are important; as a child genius, you should know that.
Seriously, sleep deprivation can cause all kinds of health problems. Sleep is the time when your body heals and repairs damage during the day. Depriving yourself of this is a bad thing. I have started to feel better since getting a sleep apnea machine and I am sure I will feel even better once I get this extra weight off.
This is why I feel sleepy when I don't sleep!
Coffee reverses this, though, right?
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
I didn't read the pay-walled study, but the article and /. post didn't mention a control group.
Maybe the repeated same activity was slowed down over those channels because the exercise had already been done, new paths were created and the brain didn't need to follow the old route anymore. I would want to know the difference from repeating an activity the next day, vs doing it the next day with sleep.
My point was not to appear to be boastful about how allegedly brilliant I was when I was a child... my point was that I it is evident enough that even a six-year old child could understand this concept entirely well. They might not know all of the science or the details behind exactly how the synaptic nerves in the brain communicate, but the fact that a lack of sleep impairs mental function is something that anyone is going to be able to easily witness, and experience firsthand for themselves, enabling them to know it as well as they ever really need to.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You left out:
* Amphetamines
* Hallucinogens
* Cocaine
* An infinite series of read-headed sex partners, arranged in sequence of increasingly exquisite physical beauty.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I frequently send my guys home during stressful times with instructions to go to bed early.
This was pretty much the opposite of a place I used to work. When I started there we rotated a pager among 6 people. By the time I left it was just me and one other person and the CEO who came on board during my time there demanded to see people at their desks. Telecommuting became frowned upon.
It didn't matter that right when I went to bed I got a call and spent the next 6 hours debugging some horrible code that didn't even have error checking.
And there were nights where the problems were easy, but they wouldn't let me sleep more than an hour at a time.
You're probably thinking we must have had some pretty horrible code to wake me up so often and you'd be right, but they were very reluctant to let us fix it.
The best people quit for better opportunities. Many of the average people got "laid off" or were just fired after they got completely burned out.
So I left the H1B guy as the only person responsible for the pager and last I heard he was hating life there too.
It just might be a bad sign if the first thing you do when you get home from work is to login to your work laptop.
That's why they do these studies, so when people say "oh I only need 5 hours" instead of "I have a sleep disorder, I wonder how much smarter I'd be if I managed to find a way to sleep more" they can read the study and realize how much "I'm different" hogwash people spout on the issue.
The study doesn't say "maybe 5 hours is the same as 8." Do a study and try to prove that; lots of researchers have done studies starting from that idea. Did the results support it?
And yet those children grow up and walk around saying, "oh, everybody is different, so when I undersleep I'm not any stoopidr. This is about those Other People who weren't born like me with bonus hours."
It apparently isn't as easy to understand as you think!
my point was that I it is evident enough that even a six-year old child could understand this concept entirely well.
Water is wet. Now go about the process of explaining exactly why that is, without going through the fact that it is while doing so. In order to understand something one must first characterise it in detail.
So tell me, how does your six year old self characterise the theta waves that represent wakefulness? Tell me how your six year old self showed that the effect has a universal form on memory, categorisation, as well as fine motor skills. Tell me about how your six year old self understood the concept that the selective spiking responses of individual neurons are not only attenuated, and delayed, but also lengthened.
Your six year old self knew jack shit, and unfortunately carried that through to his adult self as evident by attempting to blindly shit on other people's hard work as "mind-numbingly obvious". Get a job.
Sure... except that this study didn't actually discover exactly *why* the physiological changes cause impairment, it only discovered exactly what those physiological changes are, and rightly concluded that they are responsible for the impairment that one experiences due to lack of sleep. That's isomorphically identical to the plainly obvious fact that people don't think as well when they are tired, and people get tired from a lack of sleep in the first place.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That's why they do these studies, so when people say "oh I only need 5 hours" instead of "I have a sleep disorder, I wonder how much smarter I'd be if I managed to find a way to sleep more" they can read the study and realize how much "I'm different" hogwash people spout on the issue.
The study doesn't say "maybe 5 hours is the same as 8." Do a study and try to prove that; lots of researchers have done studies starting from that idea. Did the results support it?
A person needs what they need. Tell me though, how is the fact that I've only slept 5 hours a night since I was a teenager indicate that I have a sleep disorder?
If I get less than 5, I feel like crap. And aren't sleep disorders supposed to have symptoms? When I get tired, I go to bed, I wake up feeling good. I certanly have none of the problems that are classified as sleep disorder. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Most people need more sleep than I do. Some a lot more. Demanding that if a person doesn't act or do like the majority is indicative of a lack of understanding. And as for studies, I don't really care. I'm an outlier. I do what I do, it causes me no harm, certainly less than if I was drugged to get the dictated and no exceptions amount of sleep and be "normal". I'm happy the way I am. if you want, you can be annoyed. Just don't lose sleep over it.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Not at all... which is kind of my point.
Anyone can observe the effects of being tired from lack of sleep upon their thought processes *FIRST HAND* by, you know, not sleeping.
That we can now apparently scientifically confirm as a fact something that human beings have known about themselves since probably about as long as humans have been around is not something I'd expect to be particularly revolutionary.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'