What happens to your Brain when you have Trouble Sleeping

Have you ever noticed how when you've had trouble sleeping, that you just seem to forget the most obvious things sometimes? You forget to turn the stove off until you come back late in the evening and the house seems surprisingly warm, you walk into the men’s bathroom at the office and wonder why on earth there are urinals on the wall and you can't imagine why you would have so much trouble keying your credit card number into the Amazon website. How does all of this happen when you can swear that you're wide awake? Apparently, being awake isn't really a black or white thing. It isn't like a switch which is either on or off. The brain can schedule unscheduled rest time for different parts of the brain off and on.  Parts of your brain that really need rest can just go out from time to time, while the rest of the brain works reasonably well to all appearances.

That's what they found, testing the brains of sleep deprived rats. Scientists feel these results may well apply to humans as well. There isn't a great deal of difference between rats and humans when it comes to how the brain functions when it has trouble sleeping. So how exactly do they test when a rat has a rolling blackout of the brain? They plugged in electrodes into parts of the sleep deprived brains of rats to find out what parts shut down from time to time and came back on again. They couldn't possibly do this kind of thing with people.

How do you keep a rat from sleeping then? You do it is by really making life a lot of fun for them. You think hard for all kinds tempting toys and foods that the rats would wish to stay up past their bed times for. After the rats were sleep deprived for a while playing with their toys, something funny showed up on the machines that were monitoring their brains. To all appearances, the rats would be playing just fine. But then, the monitoring machines would suddenly fall silent, turn by turn - and in a very regular way, too. It looked like someone was in charge of the brains of these rats and they were switching off parts so that they could get some kind of rest.

The sleep deprived rats would appear to do fine when they just had to play with toys. When they had to do something somewhat skilled to get at a sweet or something, they would repeatedly make mistakes. And these were things they were used to doing when they were well-rested.

That's what happens when we have trouble sleeping. If we are called upon to do something like driving or remembering to get everything on our way to the office, sometimes, our brains just shut down. And we make mistakes. A good reason to get enough shuteye if ever there was one.