How does deprived Sleep disturbes the ability to learn ?

khatisam4 (54)in #science • 7 years ago

Most people believe and know that the key for happiness and some productivity is a good night's sleep. When one sleeps with some poor sleep then he/she will have some negativity effect on the daily performance during that particular day that he/she felt.

Sleep Deprivation (source)

Now, there are some study that manages and finds the particular area in the brain that are affected by some poor sleep. These area are the one that are responsible in learning new skills and objectives in life.

There are some team of researchers from the part of University of Zurich (UZH) located in the Switzerland. These teams are starting to study by setting out an examination to know the effect of disturbed deep sleep phase occurring in the brain and cortex of brain which has the ability to learn and capture things.

In brain, there are motor cortex which are responsible in developing and controlling some of the motor or desired skills. The deep sleep is also known as the Slow-wave sleep cycle. This Slow-wave sleep cycle is responsible for the formation of memory and processing of certain desirable things before we come in action. This part also helps in restoring the brain after some of the activity of the day.

Disturbing the Motor Cortex of Brain during the deep sleep

In the study, there is involvement of about six women and around seven men . These people were asked to perform some certain motor actions and task. These people performed these actions in the day who hadn't got enough sleep or disturbed sleep in the following day. The sleep was unperturbed sleep or deep sleep being disturbed.

The relation between EEG prefrontal asymmetry and subjective feelings of mood following 24 hours of sleep deprivation (source)

The task was simple as usual. Learning a series of movement of fingers. These movements requires certain part of brains work. So, the researchers were able to find and read the signals generated in these areas helping in learning finger movement.

Device called as Electroencephalogram, the researchers were able to find the areas regulating these movement during learning session and brain activity while they were sleeping.

At the first day of experiment, after the day of learning these motor activity, the people were made to sleep without disturbance. While on the second night, the people sleep quality was seen and recorded. It was manipulated by the researchers. The researchers mainly focused on the investigation of the motor cortex of the brain, disturbed their deep sleep. They were able to investigate the impaction of the poor sleep in the learned or newly practiced neurons in brain. During this study, the patients were not known that their deep sleep cycles were disturbed or tampered with. for them, the quality of sleep they got were just roughly same on both of the occasions.

Synaps action during deprived Sleep, brains learning Capacity

After some time, the researched made the people to learn and practice some new movements. During the morning when one awakes, the activity of brain and power of learning is active and highly grasping. As the day passed on , at the afternoon and the evening, the people tend to mistake the movements and learned practice more and more. This was just as expected.

When people went to sleep, during the night, the learning activity and grasping activity hiked again and spiked to higher level. Learning efficiency was good as normal. But, when the sleep was disturbed and manipulated, their power of learning and its efficiency was not improved significantly. While in the morning, after the nights of manipulated and disturbed sleep, the people performance was very low. The level of performance was much low in the morning compared to the evening performance the day before.

The researchers were much keen to know what was the cause. After some study and research, they told that when deep sleep is manipulated, the synapse of the neurons did not "rest". When in normal, there would be a kind of restorative sleep.

Brain severely Sleep deprived (source)

In the day, when we are surrounded by our daily activities, our synapses gets excited by these things. When we sleep, these activities of neurons and synapse gets into restore phase and their activity Normalize. When this activity is not brought into normal, synapse are stayed into the maximally excited condition for too long time. This happens while not sleeping. When these erupts, it makes the body into state which inhibits neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a condition where new things and new activities are no longer brought possible.

Nicole Wenderoth, the professor in the department of Health Sciences and technology , said that " In the learning of some motor skills which gets inhibited are also caused when a part of brain is strongly stimulated and the learning efficiency is not changed in that part. "

Just to make sure that the regions of storing activities is right or not , the experiment with various parts of brain in both right and left of brain. During this experiment, the people and patients was not harmed or any disturb in the performance.

This is the first and foremost study the researchers has done until now to prove the causal connection between learning efficiency and deep sleep.

Certain conditions disturb sleep like Epilepsy. There are some methods to reduce the sleep deprived learning defect. So, cure are coming and is helpful for disease connected with this condition.

So, this is all for today in the health blog. Hope to see you on other blog.

Thanks for giving a read.