If you don't sleep well, you can probably bid goodbye to your memory vault. Scientists point out how the lack of sleep could change the connectivity in your brain.
The connective strength between neurons is vital for memory and learning. Hence, by sleeping soundly, you could make that connectivity stronger.
The effect of sleep on the brain, as well as the influence of lack of sleep were both assessed by scientists from the University Medical Centre Freiburg, Germany.
"Sleep is essential, and one main reason is that it allows the brain to learn new things every day while preserving and consolidating the old memories. Learning and memory require synaptic activity, which is very energetically expensive and prone to saturation. Sleep allows the brain to renormalize this synaptic activity after it increases in the waking day," professor of sleep medicine, Giulio Tononi said.
About 20 participants were compared and judged with each other, after half of them went through one night of sleep, and the other half was deprived of it.
Scientists applied magnetic pulses to the motor cortex of the brain. This is the brain's region that controls movement. After a night of sleep deprivation, lead researcher Christoph Nissen discovered more brain excitability. Experts feel that due to the study, they can get better insightsinto the "mechanisms through which loss of sleep leads to poor memory performance."
Hence, those who had minimal sleep underwent lower pulse strength that could trigger off a muscle response in the left hand. Those who were sleep-deprived also scored poorly in word-pair memory tasks.
The blood samples also showed reduced levels of BDNF, which is a protein that regulates how effectively neurons can communicate. The researchers also found that sleep-deprived brains had poor rewiring capabilities, which leads to picking up new skills and retaining memories.
The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.
