Brain Facts:
Sleep

Brain Sleep

The brain does not appear to be asleep at all. Rather, it is almost unbelievable active during ‘rest’ with legions of neurons cracking electrical commands to one another in constant shifting patterns—displaying greater rhythmical activity during sleep, actually than when it is wide awake. The only time you can observe a real resting period for the brain (when the amount of energy consumed is less than during a similar awake period) is in the deepest parts of what is called non-REM sleep. But that takes up only about 20 percent of the total sleep cycle, which is why researchers early on began to disabuse themselves of the notion that the reason we rest is so that we can rest. When the brain is asleep it is not resting at all.

Circadian Arousal System

The Circadian Arousal System (often referred to simply as “process C”) is composed to neurons hormones, and various other chemicals that do everything in their power to keep you awake.

Circadian Rhythms

Your circadian rhythms regulate a host of activities, including when you need to sleep, your body temperature, and when you get hungry.

Circadian Rhythms
—Light

Light acts on circadian rhythms by driving cycles of activity in a tiny region at the bottom of your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which acts as the master clock.

Homeostatic Sleep Drive

The Homeostatic Sleep Drive (often referred to as “Process S”) is made up of brain cells, hormones and various chemicals. These combatants do everything in their power to put you to sleep…if they had their way, you would go to sleep and never wake up.

How Much Sleep

How much sleep does a person need? We don’t know. When you dig into the data on humans, what you find is not remarkable uniformity, but remarkable individuality. To make matters worse, sleep schedules are unbelievable dynamic. They change with age. They change with gender. They change depending upon whether or not you are pregnant, and whether or not you are going through puberty.

Human Sleep Cycle

Sleeping brains, like soldiers on a battlefield, are actually locked in vicious, biological combat. The conflict involves a pitched battle between two powerful and opposing drives, each made of legions of brain cells and biochemicals with different agenda. Through localized in the head, the theater of operations for those armies engulfs every corner of the body. This fight is sometime referred to as the “opponent process” model.

Nap

One NASA study showed that a 26-minute nap improved a pilot’s performance by more than 34 percent. Another study showed that a 45-minute nap produces a similar boost in cognitive performance, lasting more than six hours.

Narcolepsy

Narcolepsy is a disorder in which sufferers inexplicably fall asleep at all times of the day. Both human and nonhuman sufferers of narcolepsy lack a particular type of the neurotransmitter peptide orexin. Orexins acts on receptors in the hypothalamus, a command center for the regulation of sleep, aggression, sexual behaviors and other core activities.

Pineal Gland

Light triggers the production of the hormone melatonin, which is made by the pineal gland, an organ the size of a large pea that hangs at the bottom of your brain near the hypothalamus. Melatonin levels start rising in the evening, peak around the onset of sleep, and go down again the early morning before you wake up

Process S and Process C

Process S maintains the duration and intensity of sleep, while process C determines the tendency and time of the need to go to sleep

Research Father of Sleep

William Dement is often called the father of sleep research…He says pithy things about our slumbering habits, such as “Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives.”

Sleep

Sleep has been shown to enhance tasks that involve visual texture discrimination, motor adaptations, and motor sequencing. The type of learning that appears to be most sensitive to sleep improvement is that which involves learning a procedure.

Sleep Deprived
—Aging Process

When people become sleep-deprived… and they keep up the behavior, you appear to accelerate parts of the aging process. For example, if healthy 30-year-olds are sleep-deprived for six days (averaging, in the study, about four hours of sleep per night), parts of their body chemistry soon revert to that of a 60-year old. And if they are allowed to recover, it will take them almost a week to get back to their 30-year-old system.

Sleep Deprived
—Fatal Familial Insomnia

Fatal Familial Insomnia is one of the rarest human genetic disorders that exist, affecting only about 20 families worldwide. In middle to late adulthood, the person begins to experience fevers, tremors, and profuse sweating. As the insomnia becomes permanent, these symptoms are accompanied by increasingly uncontrollable muscular jerks and tics. The person soon experiences crushing feelings of depression and anxiety. He or she becomes psychotic. Finally, mercifully, the patient slips into a coma and dies.

Sleep Deprived
—Food Consumption

When people become sleep-deprived the ability to utilize the food they are consuming falls by about one-third.

Sleep Deprived
—Guinness Book of World Records

In 1965, 17-year-old Randy Garner decided that his science-fair project would involve not sleeping for 11 straight days and observing what happened.

What happened to Randy’s mind was extraordinary. To put it charitably, it started to malfunction. In short order, he became irritable, forgetful, nauseous, and, to no one’s surprise, unbelievably tired. Five days into his experiment, Randy began to suffer from what could pass for Alzheimer’s disease. He was actively hallucinating, severely disoriented, and paranoid…In the last four days of his experiment, he lost motor function, his fingers trembling and his speech slurred.

Sleep Deprived
—Insulin Production

When people become sleep-deprived the ability to make insulin and to extract energy from the brain’s favorite dessert, glucose, begins to fail miserably. At the same time, you find a marked need to have more of it, because the body’s stress hormone levels begin to rise in an increasingly deregulated fashion.

Sleep Deprived
—Loss of Abilities/Functions

Sleep loss cripples thinking, in just about every way you can measure thinking. Sleep loss hurts attention, executive function, immediate memory, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning abilities, general math knowledge. Eventually, sleep loss affects manual dexterity, including fine motor control and even gross motor movements, such as the ability to walk on a treadmill.

Study Soldiers

Another study followed soldiers responsible for operating complex military hardware. One night’s loss of sleep resulted in about 30 percent loss of overall cognitive skill, with a subsequent drop in performance. Bump that to two nights’ loss and the figure becomes 60 percent.

Study Students

Students were given a series of math problems and prepped with a method to solve them. The students weren’t told there was also an easier “shortcut” way to solve the problems, potentially discoverable while doing the exercise. The question was: Is there a way to jumpstart, even speed up, their insight? …If you let 12 hours pass after the initial training and ask the student to do more problems, about 20 percent will have discovered the short cut. But, if in that 12 hours you also allow eight or so hours of regular sleep, that figure triples to about 60 percent. No matter how many times the experiment is run, the sleep group consistently outperforms the non-sleep group about 3 to 1.

Sunlight

Sunlight triggers an increase in serotonin, the feel-good brain chemical that controls sleep patterns and body temperature.

Suprachiasmatic Nucleus

Light acts on circadian rhythms by driving cycles of activity in a tiny region at the bottom of your brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, which acts as the master clock.