Most of us know that a good night's sleep is key to happiness and productivity, and conversely, poor quality sleep can have negative effects throughout the day. But a new study shows the brain area responsible for learning new skills and how this area can be affected by poor sleep quality.
[woman sleeping]
From the University of Zurich and the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland ( ETH) researchers set out to study the effect of a disturbed deep sleep phase on the brain's ability to learn new things.
More specifically, the new study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that the brain's motor cortex receives information from the environment. It examines the brain's ability to change-adapt in response to stimuli and how it is affected by deep sleep.
The motor cortex is the area of the brain responsible for developing and controlling motor skills and is the deep sleep phase (also called slow wave sleep). is key to memory formation and processing, and also helps the brain restore itself after a day's work.
Manipulating the motor cortex during deep sleep performing
The study consisted of six women and seven men who were asked to perform motor tasks in the day following a night of disturbed sleep and after a night of disturbed deep sleep.
Tasks It involved learning a series of finger movements, and the researchers were able to pinpoint the brain area responsible for learning the movement.
Using an electroencephalograph, the researchers monitored the participants' brain activity while they slept.
On the first day of the trial, the participants were able to sleep without discomfort.
But on the second night, the researchers changed the participants' sleep quality. They were able to focus on the motor cortex and disrupt their deep sleep, thus investigating the impact of poor quality sleep on the neuroplasticity of executing new movements.
The participants did not know that their deep sleep phase was being interfered with. According to them, the quality of their sleep was roughly the same in both cases.
Weak sleep stimulated synapses, blocking the brain's ability to learn. Then the researchers They evaluated the participants' ability to learn new movements. In the morning, the subjects' learning performance was highest, as expected.
However, they continued to make more and more errors as the day progressed. Again, this was expected.
After another round of quality sleep, the participants' learning efficiency increased again. However, after days of manipulated sleep, learning activities were not significantly improved. In fact, the morning after quality sleep, participants' performance was lower until the evening of the previous day.
According to the researchers, this is because during deep sleep the synapses of neurons manipulated the synapses that normally occur during restorative sleep. Like "not resting".
During the day, our synapses receive stimulation in response to the stimuli that surround us. However, during sleep, these synapses cease on their own and their activity “normalizes.” Without this restorative period, synapses remain stimulated for long periods of time. Such a state inhibits neuroplasticity, which means that learning new things is no longer possible.
We reduce the depth of sleep in a certain part of the brain, thus allowing deep sleep and learning. A method has been developed that allows us to prove the causal link between Many diseases, such as epilepsy, also occur during sleep. With the new method, we hope to be able to manipulate these specific brain regions that are directly linked to the disease.
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