What Sleep Deprivation Does to Your Brain
Sleep deprivation doesn’t just mean missing out on sleep’s benefits—it leads to profound changes in the brain. This review explores how lack of sleep impacts attention, memory, emotions, and learning, with insights from neuroimaging studies. The findings highlight the critical role of sleep in cognitive and emotional health and its relevance to clinical conditions.
What Sleep Deprivation Does to Your Brain
How does a lack of sleep affect our brains? In contrast to the benefits of sleep, frameworks exploring the impact of sleep loss are relatively lacking. Importantly, the effects of sleep deprivation (SD) do not simply reflect the absence of sleep and the benefits attributed to it; rather, they reflect the consequences of several additional factors, including extended wakefulness. With a focus on neuroimaging studies, we review the consequences of SD on attention and working memory, positive and negative emotion, and hippocampal learning. We explore how this evidence informs our mechanistic understanding of the known changes in cognition and emotion associated with SD, and the insights it provides regarding clinical conditions associated with sleep disruption.
Krause, A. J., et al. (2017). The sleep-deprived human brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 18(7), 404-418.