Without a restful sleep the neurons are disconnected

• April 25, 2024

How many times have you been missing hours of sleep ? When you do not get enough sleep, a considerable number of neurons of the cerebral cortex reach take a "nap" (to exemplify it in some way), while the person remains awake.

This decrease in neuronal activity may be responsible for lapsus lack of attention, low cognitive performance, being scattered, impaired judgment or irritability, most of these behaviors appear after staying many hours awake, even if you do not feel sleep, clarified Giulio Tononi , researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) and co-author of the study that revealed these characteristics.

The most curious thing, according to researcher Tononi and pointed out in the page Muyinteresante.es, is that in the brain, deprived of sleep, some groups of neurons located in the cerebral cortex are disconnected, while the rest remain awake.

Tononi and his colleagues came to this conclusion after forcing a group of rats to stay awake for several hours, and then recorded their electrical activity in the cerebral cortex. During this experiment they observed that, although electroencephalograms they indicated that they were awake, there were intervals in which some parts of the brain disconnected . What altered the cognitive performance of animals. The periods in which the neurons are deactivated increased as the time of forced vigil lengthened.

Video Medicine: Retinopathy Nerve Regeneration Treatment with Brain Wave Therapy Binaural Beats and Isochronic Tones (April 2024).