Neurons also claims that napping
Sleep is important because the brain must rest and if you do enough, is altered. Now, new research is to put the machine without water or washing without soap may be that our neurons, when tired, come in short dormant states individually. The recent finding goes against the idea that the sleeping brain as a whole.
The authors of the study, published in the journal Nature, reported that previous work had shown that people stay awake for a long time, there are lapses of attention, bad decisions and judgments common in cognitive tests, even when feel particularly sleepy. This is because, given the lack of sleep, there are changes in brain physiology, as is reflected in the EEG and imaging tests.
But “the changes in neuronal activity are poorly known,” they said. That’s why to investigate, implanted electrodes in the motor cortex in the frontal and parietal cortex of 11 rats. Well monitored the activity of several neuronal groups.
After depriving the rats of sleep, the scientists observed that, although they were visibly awake, some of the neurons of these rats showed similar patterns of electrical activity to sleep. Even some of the cells “slept” for a while.
“This happened in a few neurons,” says Chiara Cirelli, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). “For example, 20 cells monitored in an experiment, 18 remained awake. The other two showed signs of being asleep,” she said.
Small frequent naps were more selective as time went on the rodent awake and were associated with an increase in errors made by animals in a simple test: get a lump of sugar. This finding dig a little deeper into the mysteries of sleep.
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