Sleep Deprivation is dangerous to mental health

Nearly everybody has experienced the results of a sleepless night or two. Perhaps worries about bills, mortgages, and other money problems weigh heavily on the mind. For other people it is the worry about the future. Their job may be ending unexpectedly, or maybe they live in a neighborhood with terrible neighbors.

In college, many students party all night on weekends. Or they might stay up all night the night before final tests. Stress keeps people awake.

And then there are people like me who may have sleep disorders like sleep apnea and not even know it. All these causes can lead to sleep deprivation.

It is really stupid for college students to stay up the entire night before the exam, because the ability of the brain to actually take the exam can be diminished. Research has shown that following sleep loss, some parts of the brain may be more adversely affected than others. The surprising thing is that sometimes, various parts of the brain might try to compensate for the sleep loss.

There was a study done through the UCSD School of Medicine combines with the Veterans Affairs Healthcare System in San Diego found that when they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the brains of people who were deliberately sleep deprived.
These sleep deprived patients were asked to perform simple learning tasks with words.

The big surprise was the more tired the persons were, the more active became the prefontal cortex. Another surprising result of this sleep deprivation was that the temporal lobe which normally was very active during verbal learning in rested subjects, did not become active in sleepy ones.

The researchers discovered all kinds of interesting things. The conclusion is this: The sleepy brain doesn't function as well as the rested brain. There is a huge degradation of performance. I know I can't remember things when I am super tired. And my inhibitions just die, so my creative imagination has no limits. You might think this is good, but the ideas I come up with are just not practical--in fact, many of them are worse than useless. So the bottom line is: get enough sleep.

David